ON THE PATH TO TRUTH IN REEL LIFE.Byline: GLENN WHIPP WHIPP WhiteWater Head Impact Protection Project 'If you're going to make a movie from this book, a book that chronicled a young man's search for truth, a truth that he found lacking in his own life, you've got to be as authentic as possible." Sean Penn's words were his mission statement for making "Into the Wild," the story of Chris McCandless' skin-shedding, two years of adventure on the road, which culminated in his death by starvation in the Alaskan wilderness. A few of the ways the scrupulous scru·pu·lous adj. 1. Conscientious and exact; painstaking. See Synonyms at meticulous. 2. Having scruples; principled. Penn made "Wild" ring true: Star Emile Hirsch did his own stunts, including kayaking Kayaking is the use of a kayak for moving across water. Kayaking is differentiated from canoeing by the fact that a kayak has a closed cockpit and a canoe has an open cockpit. They also use a two bladed paddle. Another major difference is in the way the paddler sits in the boat. down the Colorado River Colorado River River, south-central Argentina. Its major headstreams, the Grande and Barrancas rivers, flow southward from the Andes Mountains and meet to form the Colorado near the Chilean border. It flows southeastward across northern Patagonia and the southern Pampas. . "There was absolutely no focus on acting," Hirsch says. "I just wanted to stay afloat and not suck water. The rapids look big, don't they? When I watched the movie, I go, 'Wow. That was kind of dangerous.' " "You see that look on his face when he's standing on the shore, just before he goes in?" Penn asks. "That's Emile, contemplating something he was about to have to do." Hirsch also climbed mountains, skinned a moose carcass carcass, carcase 1. the body of an animal killed for meat. The head, the legs below the knees and hocks, the tail, the skin and most of the viscera are removed. The kidneys are left in and in most instances the body is split down the middle through the sternum and the vertebral and lost 41 pounds, putting his weight down to 115. "Diet and exercise," Hirsch says. "Then I had to gain it back." His method? "Take 5, chocolate Hershey's kisses Hershey's Kisses are a type of chocolate candy manufactured by The Hershey Company. The bite-sized pieces of chocolate have a distinctive shape: people normally describe them as flat-bottomed teardrops. ," Hirsch says. The movie's first scene mirrors that of the book -- McCandless being dropped off on Alaska's Stampede Trail The Stampede Trail in Alaska was a mining trail blazed in the 1930s by a legendary Alaska miner named Earl Pilgrim, to access his antimony claims on Stampede Creek, above the Clearwater Fork of the Toklat River. . The Fairbanks man who gave McCandless his last ride, Jim Gallien, plays himself in the movie. And you can see Hirsch wearing the gold watch that McCandless gave Gallien as a measure of thanks. "I don't want to know what time it is," McCandless told Gallien. Penn filmed extensively in the places McCandless tramped, including the wheat fields of Carthage, S.D.; the Alaskan woods; the Colorado River; and the California desert. (For practical purposes, the movie re-created the International Harvester International Harvester Company (IHC or IH; now Navistar International Corporation) was an agricultural machinery, construction equipment, vehicle, commercial truck, and household and commercial products manufacturer. bus that became McCandless's surrogate Alaskan home.) "When I took the research trip to all these places, I tried to meet as many people as I could who had met Chris," Penn says. "What you read in the book is the real thing. He touched these people. He was still very present in their consciousness." CAPTION(S): photo Photo: - Sean Penn, right, with Emile Hirsch, who portrays Chris McCandless in 'into the wild' |
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