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MillimeterWild Ride
Sep 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
On the road with Sean Penn and his team.
Because Into the Wild Director Sean Penn opted to film in the actual places where the true story of the film took place, the crew was faced with the challenge of getting to the remote sites. Penn estimates the team traveled thousands of miles by air, road, and train, and hundreds of miles by foot. Pictured: Camera operator Jacques Jouffret leads crewmates to an Alaskan location.
Photo: Francois Duhamel. All photos © 2007 by PARAMOUNT VANTAGE, a Division of PARAMOUNT PICTURES. All Rights Reserved.
When Sean Penn's long-held desire to make a movie of Jon Krakauer's novel about iconoclastic adventurer Chris McCandless finally came true, the question became, “How, exactly?” The true story, after all, revolves around a solitary figure tramping through the remotest hinterlands in three countries and dozens of states, eventually disappearing, living off the land, and dying in Alaska. McCandless, played by Emile Hirsch, ages and loses massive amounts of weight in the course of the story — transforming physically and spiritually during his journey.
With a modest budget, Penn faced two basic choices. He could film Into the Wild in a couple of financing-friendly locations, such as Utah or Vancouver, British Columbia, that could be dressed up to resemble many of the places McCandless visited and rely heavily on visual effects and other cinematic tricks, or he could actually go to most of those places, film in rugged countryside under less-than-pristine conditions, and push his schedule to accommodate Hirsch's radical weight loss and weather changes in those locations. He chose the latter approach, even though it meant spreading his shooting schedule out over more than 140 days during the course of eight months and returning four times to the same location in Alaska — highly unusual and logistically complicated choices.
“I was not interested in photographing beard growth applied with glue, snow applied with computers, weight gain and loss achieved with body replacement, or Utah for Alaska,” Penn recently told millimeter. “From the beginning, it felt essential that the schedule for the film be lengthy enough to shoot real places and real things in as close to realtime and in chronological order as possible. There's simply no other way to stumble on new ideas and make a movie without coloring by numbers quite as well as having the real thing in front of you. So we shot over a period of eight months to achieve the feeling of a story that takes place over a two-year period. It was extremely complicated and equally exhilarating.
“The burden of achieving this was firmly on the shoulders of [executive producer] John Kelly and [first AD] David Webb. Even at eight months, it was really a miracle the way they structured the schedule. We shot in no less than 36 distinctly separate locations, most of which were far from support and creature comforts. In practical terms, this meant full crew moves approximately every two weeks; thousands of miles traveled by air, road, and train; and hundreds [of miles] traveled by foot. I had never been involved in anything quite like it, nor had most of the crew.”
Kelly was responsibile for the logistical aspects of such an unusual production schedule, and he says it was a visit to the actual location of McCandless' final base camp in the Alaskan bush that inspired Penn to commit to this taxing production approach.
The team shot on three cameras—an Aaton 35-III, an Arricam Lite, and an Arriflex 435ES (pictured, top)—and a trio of Fujifilm Super 35 stocks.
Logistics
“Sean insisted on keeping it as authentic as possible,” Kelly says. “We had to schedule the entire movie around [Hirsch's] weight loss and facial-hair growth, and also changing weather conditions in Alaska and wheat growth in South Dakota. But we were [still] considering shooting in Vancouver or Salt Lake City when we scouted the location [in Alaska] of the real bus [the actual rusted-out, vintage Fairbanks, Alaska, transit bus in which McCandless took refuge while in the wilderness], mainly for research and inspiration. While there, we found a location nearby where Sean decided to shoot, and at that point, I knew Sean was wholeheartedly committed to going to as many of the real locations as he could. That changed the whole project because we had to rebudget and reschedule the whole thing, including figuring out how to make it work to return to Alaska multiple times as the weather changed and Emile changed.”
Penn's team chose to essentially stash gear in what Kelly calls “the middle of nowhere” for months at a time, in order to return there periodically to use it for a couple of weeks here and there. “We had rental gear in the lower 48 [states], and then a second set of rental gear — grip and electric and some generators and things — sent up to near where the location was where we recreated [the bus and McCandless' camp], about 4 hours north of Anchorage and 2 hours south of Fairbanks in a little village called Cantwell,” Kelly says. “Our equipment would sit there for one or two months, then we would use it for one or two weeks on our scheduled dates, and then we would disappear, and the equipment would stay there until we returned again.”
The company's method of accessing the site also changed each time it visited the location. At the end of April 2006, the entire crew — close to 100 people, according to Kelly — rode in on snowmobiles. A few months later, as the snow pack melted, they relied on all-terrain vehicles called Unimogs, high-profile 4×4 trucks, and track-propelled vehicles. During the summer, they largely hiked in and out. They also faced the same logistical problem that McCandless faced in his real adventure — they had to cross a quiet brook to access their site, only to find it transformed into a raging river a few months later, leaving Penn's team to seek permission from Alaskan state officials about building a method for crossing the water safely.
“When we found the location, we were told we would have a river about 2ft. to 3ft. wide and 1ft. deep, but between that first week of shooting and the end of May, locals start telling us this little river will shortly become close to 40ft. wide and 4ft. deep,” Kelly says. “That put us in panic mode about how to get there, because there was no other way to get to the site other than crossing the river, and we had to move both people and equipment.
“We discussed building a temporary bridge, but that was far too expensive and would take far longer than the time we had. We talked about using flatbed trucks, but ice flow from the mountains meant that wouldn't work, and then we asked if we could build a culvert bridge, where we could divert water under a mound of dirt, but the state refused that request. Finally, they gave us a bridge permit to actually drag a rail car from one side to the other over the river using a large bulldozer. It was amazing seeing things like that done by the local construction crew in Alaska. We were very fortunate to find a plan for getting stuff across a 40ft. to 50ft. wide river like that. Otherwise, we never would have been able to cross it in the summer.”
