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Sean Penn and Eddie Vedder Press Conference

Sean, how did you discover this boy's story and why did you want to make it into a movie?

Sean Penn: “I read the book when it came out. I read it twice in a row. I started to get the rights to it the next day. The impression that Jon Krakauer's book made on me and Chris McCandless' story made on me was the movie that I made. That's what I read. I then embellished [with] my collaborators later.

But the structure, the skeleton of this thing, was... Jon had me 75% of the movie that you saw already, and I had 25% of making cinematic in what he'd made in literature, to do that with my partners.

I could answer the question in boring length, but the movie should answer it for me. This is what I intended to make. This is the movie. It would be very fair for somebody to criticize something they don't like in the movie or that they felt more intelligent than, or heartfelt than about something, or whatever they felt about it. It would be factually wrong for them to say that I hadn't told the story as I intended. I feel complete in that it answers it for me.”

Have either of you felt a call to the wild?

Sean Penn: “ can say yes, and I think he'd tell you the same to varying degrees, in different ways. But I also feel that one of the things that made me so interested in this story, and I've been wrong about these perceptions before, but I feel the way I made this movie is that it's true of everybody in this room and everybody outside this room, that this is a very universal thing, this wanderlust.”

Eddie Vedder: “And for me, if I'm not on tour or in the studio, I'm in nature somewhere, usually some kind of ocean. Playing music has afforded me that. It's not lost on me that it's a tremendous opportunity to be able to spend your life being surrounded by nature. I have a three-year-old daughter now. I'm glad I did things in my 20s that were more reckless because at some point you realize you have a responsibility beyond yourself and your need for adrenaline. I'm still looking for bigger waves and I could jump up a few more feet before I go back to the longboard. I'm glad I did that stuff at the time. For people who see this movie, if they haven't done that in their life, I think it's going to hit them pretty hard.”

What were the physical challenges you faced directing the movie?

Sean Penn: “The physical challenges were production physical. The older and older I was getting, I was so exhilarated making this movie. We ran this movie in a way where if we were on the day searching out a location, because something shifted in the weather from what I planned, we got pretty quickly to the point where my crew, with my in the front of a boat, going down the Grand Canyon - my crew behind me would start to giggle as soon as we saw the most impossible cliff side to climb because they knew that we have to go up there and shoot from there. I was going to trust that what energized me was not just going to be an indulgence, but it was going to be what this journey should be for us making it and that would fall onto the film. And so I pursued those things. If we got a giggly shoulder looking at something, and now we had 572 pounds at least of equipment to get up there, well that's what we were going to do. But that was exhilarating. So the physical challenge was not - it's like if you woke me at 7 o'clock this morning and I woke up on a football field and they said, 'Hike, go,' that would be a problem. But we were pretty much warmed up before we went to start.”

Why did you choose to have such a bond between the sister and brother and have her narrate the story when he never contacted her during his trip?

Sean Penn: “Because I knew it to be so from the letters that he had written her previously, from memory. Letters that are not copied in either the movie or the book, things that remain private. But it's not an idle claim that it, in my view, represents what the relationship was. I think that the answer is in the film. I think that she in the narration answers it. But it seems to me that that was the closest I could get to the truth of what that relationship was.”

What do you think Chris got from his experience and can you talk about casting Hal Holbrook?

Sean Penn: “Hal Holbrook was in one of my first television movies when I was about 18 or 19. He'd made such a strong impression on me and a lasting one in terms of what being an actor was. One of the things, despite the fact that there's not a better actor than Hal, there's something inherently moving about the integrity of a man. I had wanted to work with Hal on all kinds of things and I snuck his name into the ears of directors all the years that I was working. When this fit, it just fit, so I called him up and my direction was pretty much action and cut with him. Hal Holbrook made that performance and he did it and he's great.

The first part of the question, Eddie said last night, we just talking to some journalists last night, and he talked about ‘a healthy rebellion’. The way Walt McCann described his son to me was that Chris didn't want to burn down buildings, he just dismissed it. I don't think he wanted to burn down Chris McCandless in terms of where he started, and the fraudulence he thought he was carrying around on his back. I think he wanted to dismiss it. In most ways Chris was a young man who, way ahead of his time knew who he was, and had to find a place that would accept him. Once he did that, he'd have the muscles to offer something back to a community, a family or a woman, to whomever. It was always on that basis that I approached him.”

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