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Wild Ride

Sep 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman

On the road with Sean Penn and his team.

Editing on the road

In any case, the built-in delays in the lengthy schedule helped the project editorially, according to Penn and editor Jay Cassidy. Those delays gave the filmmakers time to craft earlier sections of the movie while waiting to film later sections, which was crucial — especially because the viewing of dailies was a sporadic affair when the production headed into particularly remote locations.

“With all my films, I like to have my editor on location as much as possible,” Penn says. “In Alaska, it was simply not practical, but we did have a couple of weeks of down time spread throughout that section of the shoot where I was able to regroup with [Cassidy] in Los Angeles and begin to assemble some sequences. That was extremely valuable. For the rest of the locations, Jay was generally with us, and I was able to end my shooting days in an editing room and begin to experiment with the footage. Another thing we could do once or twice a month was put together a show reel between 10 to 15 minutes long, catching up the crew on what they were spending so much time involved in and, in general, boost morale after hours — buy a couple of cases of beer, turn off the lights, and watch some of your work in front of you. There is added value doing this sort of thing to begin experiencing the audience relationship to the film from the get-go.”

Large sections of the movie take place in locations other than Alaska — particularly South Dakota, Mexico, the Mojave Desert, and other portions of Southern California. Most of the time when the production was based in Alaska, Cassidy remained ensconced either in Los Angeles or at Penn's editorial offices in Marin County, Calif., but he traveled with the company during visits to most of the other locations.

That meant, as Cassidy puts it, “taking editorial on the road,” by cutting on a Macintosh PowerBook G4 running Avid Media Composer software with 1TB of FireWire drive storage, while relying on dailies sent on FireWire drives from Company 3, Santa Monica, Calif., the company that handled both the dailies process and the final DI. Cassidy played those dailies for Penn and key members of the crew in various hotel rooms around the country through a Microtech CX6 DLP projector onto a traveling Da-Lite Screen Company 60in.-wide portable film screen.

“I went with the company to Arizona twice, South Dakota, Oregon twice, the California desert, and other places,” Cassidy says. “In particular, I went with them when the trips were substantial and they were expecting to be in one location for more than a week. I would set up editorial in our hotel, and work that way with Sean. The whole editorial thing is more portable than it was a few years ago. It's shrunk down amazingly, actually. My assistant, Dana Mulligan, who lives in Marin County where we were headquartered [for editorial], would prepare material [after it was telecined at Company 3] and send media back and forth to me on [30GB G-Technology FireWire drives] on location. We would run dailies from the Avid to the DLP projector, which was small enough to travel everywhere with me. The screen was the clumsiest thing, but it just traveled around with us on a truck.”

Regardless of his location, Cassidy insists that the film's final story, which incorporates flashbacks and nonlinear developments, as well as graphic elements showing entries from McCandless' diary, sort of cut itself together. By that, he means that filmmakers first built what was essentially a linear story out of Penn's original screenplay, and then they sought opportunities to move elements around when those opportunities presented themselves.

“The film was shot as a linear story, and that is how the first assembly was put together,” the editor says. “But we always talked about the fact that there were opportunities for intercutting the Alaska story with Chris' story of leaving [Emory University] and traveling through the western United States. So the structure that exists in the final version of the film came from an editorial rethinking. I think the idea of telling the story in two timeframes allowed each to inform the other. Something that would happen in Alaska was cut against something else that Chris went through in his trip across the West. We found relationships between those two stories by putting them together. You have a big challenge in any editorial process, on any movie, to listen to what the material is telling you as the filmmaker, and then hone things so that the viewer can respond to that. For us, the discovery of the film's structure was the result of that listening.”

Filming

The final product relies extensively on cinematographer Eric Gautier's sweeping outdoor photography, designed as a crucial narrative element to illustrate in detail the environment in which McCandless placed himself. Penn says Gautier's work first struck him when he saw The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) — a film that Penn feels visually evoked “the spirit” of what he was seeking for Into the Wild.

“The relationship between a director and cinematographer is a complicated one, more often than not,” Penn says. “In Eric Gautier, I found someone with whom it was quite simple. When he read my script, he understood very clearly what movie I was trying to make. It was almost immediately a seamless partnership of shared thought, composition, color, storytelling — and, not least importantly, a shared will to shoot from the hip; to shoot in existing light, with multiple cameras; and to shoot everything all the time. The value of having a cinematographer like that is immeasurable.”

Gautier used three cameras throughout the production — an Aaton 35-III, an Arricam Lite, and an Arriflex 435ES — shooting onto a trio of Fujifilm Super 35 (2:35 aspect ratio, 3-perf) stocks (Eterna 250D, Eterna 400T, and Eterna 500T). He says his choices of Carl Zeiss Ultra Prime lenses, Angenieux Optimo zooms (17mm-80mm and 24mm-290mm), and a Century Canon zoom (150mm-600mm) were made out of his need for extraordinary contrast. “I was able to shoot in very complicated light situations, where I couldn't add any fill light,” he says.

The DP says he found certain similarities between production on Into the Wild and The Motorcycle Diaries, which was also a “road picture” of sorts.

“We were shooting on the roads and in the cities [for The Motorcycle Diaries],” Gautier says. “The big difference on Sean Penn's movie is that it takes place in the wild — in locations that are very hard to reach, off the road, and [far from] civilization. We shot four times in Alaska to capture different seasons, on the Colorado River, in all kinds of deserts in Nevada, Arizona, California, and Mexico. So the most complicated part of my work was organization and logistics — lighting, camera, grips, crews, equipment, and the schedule generally. Sometimes, I felt more like a building site foreman than an artist.”

But, Gautier adds, those logistical complexities were necessary in order to allow him to creatively “translate the sensations of heat, humidity, tiredness, weakness, strength, cold — all those feelings of different seasons” onto film.

“Nature had to be nice and beautiful sometimes in this picture, and tough and hostile at other times,” Gautier says. “It's the fight of the lead character — to find his place out of civilization, in the wilderness. One challenge Sean and I had was to shoot huge and wide shots of nature, where Chris McCandless is nothing but a speck, and at the same time, get close to him, as intimate as possible, [close enough to] feel his breath, almost reading his mind. So, it was two different scales.

“We tried shooting in a coherent style, but a documentary style. The rule was, no rehearsing, lots of improvisation [within the confines of scenarios designed by Penn at the start of each shooting day], a few takes — and sometimes only one take. Most of the time, with two cameras always running, we were able to catch anything that might happen almost by accident.”

Despite the logistics involved with moving equipment in and out, Gautier was able to make liberal use of slow-motion rigs, cranes, long lenses, and other tools that were part of a strategy to give the film a “fictional palette” within the context of this documentary approach.

“We tried to be as realistic as we could, and yet, Sean wanted the film to be fiction, and definitely not an actual documentary,” Gautier says. “For that reason, we tried using these [cranes, lenses, and rigs] to make this mixing as coherent as possible. My main choice was to use as few lights as possible, [relying largely] on natural lighting. I did have to use, from time to time, larger amounts of light for particular scenes, such as the scene where [McCandless] realizes he has been poisoned. That was shot with a big artificial sun to provide an important flare in the lens. The image has a violent, nightmare look. Actually, we shot that scene in the rain [at the location in the Alaska bush], so you can imagine how complicated it was to get lights and generators on set. But, generally, my idea was to shoot interiors, as much as I could, in the same conditions as outdoors, which made me dependent on outside weather. Key light is always coming from outside, through windows, [during interior scenes] throughout this movie.”

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.