Hirsch Finds a Role in Solitude

It’s the first Tuesday of the Toronto Film Festival, and Emile Hirsch seems ready for a well-earned vacation. Having recently wrapped the shoot for next summer’s live-action “Speed Racer” blockbuster, for which he worked hand-in-hand with the Wachowski brothers, it’s his previous project, “Into the Wild,” that this week has earned him some of the brightest accolades of his young career — notices that Mr. Hirsch, swamped with press interviews after seeing the film with an audience for the first time, has yet to even read.In one Toronto dispatch, a critic called Mr. Hirsch’s performance a “career-making” turn. In another, he is singled out for an “entrancing” performance that shows a young actor confidently coming into his own. And this is still before the majority of the critical establishment — not to mention audiences — will weigh in on the film upon its American premiere next Friday. The film was adapted for the screen and directed by Sean Penn, who has said that he was disappointed by numerous auditions before being blown away by Mr. Hirsch’s exuberance and authenticity. The 22-year-old star of such hits as “Lords of Dogtown” and “The Girl Next Door” takes a more personal turn in “Into The Wild,” the true story of Christopher McCandless, which was first adapted by Jon Krakauer into a novel of the same name.McCandless was an adventurer who celebrated his college graduation by destroying his driver’s license and his social security card. Hitting the open road, and intending to turn his back on his family, he later abandoned his car, burned all his money, and set out on foot to traverse the continent. He kayaked down the Colorado River to Mexico, hopped trains and hitchhiked back north up the coast, then trudged beyond the outer limits of civilization to spend more than 100 days in the rural northern territory of Alaska. His body was discovered in the Alaskan wilderness by two buffalo hunters in 1992, some weeks after he had apparently died. McCandless had turned his back on the world, a sentiment to which Mr. Hirsch, who prepared for the role by pursuing his own form of solitude, tried mightily to relate.“When you start spending a lot of time alone, you discover this new sense of morality within yourself, a morality you would never find when you are constantly comparing your morals to people around you,” Mr. Hirsch said. “You start to make your own choices, you decide where it is that you want to go, and certain things finally come into perspective. What you care about starts to become really apparent, and it’s really kind of exhilarating to be set free of expectations.”In the case of McCandless, as is obvious from his journal entries and from the commentary of his sister, which Mr. Penn inserts into the film almost as a counter-narration, his sense of morality involved a closeness with nature, a rejection of society’s superficiality, and a freedom from all things monetary. Some early audiences were divided in their reactions to McCandless’s character, disputing his choices and motivations despite the fact that the film is based on real events and McCandless’s actual writings. Mr. Hirsch said he’s not surprised by this polarization, since McCandless’s story rebuffs many of today’s conventional attitudes.“There’s this sense for adventure that we all crave, but we live in a culture today where these rites of passage are hard to come by,” Mr. Hirsch said. “It doesn’t surprise me that, in this world of technology and rules, people are really intrigued and divided by something so deeply rooted in nature — something so different from how they live. Our survival instincts aren’t being put to use enough, and that’s what I’ve felt in my life, this wanderlust to challenge myself, which Chris must have felt too.”By all accounts, Mr. Hirsch found the challenge he was looking for during the film’s arduous, lengthy shoot, which whisked him across the continent and tethered him to a supportive but fiercely demanding director in Mr. Penn. With a shooting schedule of more than 100 days, including four trips to Alaska, kayaking in the Grand Canyon, and an intimidating scene involving a grizzly bear, Mr. Hirsch said there was an informality to the cast and crew, as they journeyed together between the Alaskan snow and the 120-degree desert heat of Nevada, that he found refreshing. He also said the grueling trek — following the same route that McCandless took during his journey — helped him connect to the character in ways that working on a set would not have allowed.“It’s kind of like Marlon Brando, who famously said during ‘On the Waterfront’ that, in a freezing Hoboken, New Jersey, it was ‘too cold to overact,'” he said. “Nature is so authentic that you can’t help but be a little more authentic when you’re in it.”Yet despite the intensity of the shoot and the accolades showering down on the young actor, Mr. Hirsch seems more intent on pointing to the McCandless family, whom he met before filming, and to the heart of the young man that he felt beating beneath this larger story of living, and dying, one’s dream.“I met with Chris’s brothers and sisters and his parents, and it just sunk in that this really was their son, and their brother, and that Chris was a real person and I better not forget that,” Mr. Hirsch said. “So I look at all this attention, and I’m happy about it, but I’m more grateful that we were able to make a film about Chris McCandless, for him and for his family, and for the people who are going to see this film and start to understand what he was doing.”

Hirsch Finds a Role in Solitude

Hirsch Finds a Role in Solitude

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