Emile Hirsch's wild ride in Into The Wild By Vicky Roach
In career terms, the distance he has covered is even greater - from fresh-faced teenager to serious Oscar contender.
This might explain why Hirsch, who spent several months on the Gold Coast as a 12-year-old filming the TV creature feature Gargantua, appears to be channelling Into The Wild director Sean Penn over the phone from Los Angeles.
Interviewing Penn is supposed to be a bit like pulling teeth.
Hirsch probably doesn't even have his third molars yet, but he's certainly giving his mentor a run for his money. In terms of acting chops as well as monosyllables.
For the role of Christopher McCandless, a college graduate who donated all his savings to charity before heading into the great unknown in search of adventure, Hirsch has summoned the burning intensity of a bona fide risk-taker.
On screen, he has enough charisma to carry a whole cinema audience along for the ride. But over the phone line, Hirsch is strangely flat. Not impolite, exactly, but not particularly forthcoming either.
One subject he is particularly loathe to discuss is weight loss - Hirsch shed a quarter of his body weight (approximately 15kg) during filming. Towards the end of his Alaskan adventure, McCandless, out of supplies, and sick from bad berries, was little more than a skeleton.
While Hirsch says it was "definitely disturbing" to see his gaunt face in the mirror each morning, he then adds: "I don't want to talk about that too much. I feel like it takes away from certain other elements of the role. I've seen it happen with other actors in other movies, and I just don't want that to happen to me."
Unlike Matt Damon, who is still taking medication to correct the stress he inflicted on his adrenal gland by losing weight too quickly for his role in 1996's Courage Under Fire, Hirsch reckons he has never been healthier.
"I think it was pretty good for me.
I wasn't in good shape when I got the part," Hirsch says. "When I gained the weight back, I was still working out, so my body got a lot stronger."
During the "starvation" period, Hirsch says he had very little energy, and that it took a lot of willpower to work out when he was tired. This obviously gave Hirsch, who says he has little in common with McCandless, some insight into the driven nature of the man he plays.
Penn, who bought the rights to Jon Krakauer's book almost a decade ago, is probably a much closer fit to his complex, uncompromising protagonist. The director worked his leading man pretty hard during the eight-month shoot, which followed McCandless's footsteps from the wheat fields of South Dakota to the white-water rapids of the Colorado River and the remote Alaskan wilderness.
Hirsch, who is in almost every scene, did all the stunts himself - at Penn's behest - and had to lug a 13kg pack on his back similar to the one his character owned.
"I loved being that physical. I was always walking or running or climbing or doing something. I was constantly in motion," he says. "I'm not a huge believer in giant moments of change or catharsis, but it certainly made me a lot stronger in terms of what I'm able to go through."
Hirsch might be cut from a different cloth to the man he plays, but he has huge respect for him.
"I tried to learn as much as I could about him before we even started shooting, by talking to friends and family, studying his journals, photographs, videos. All of that was really helpful. It was like being a detective, trying to piece together the clues that were left behind for me.
"I felt a big responsibility to his family. Chris was so uncompromising in his pursuit of honesty, those were the qualities that seemed to be the most necessary for the portrayal."
Hirsch says his next film, Speed Racer, the Wachowski brothers' version of the 1960s Japanese animated series, was a welcome change of pace.
"The entire movie was shot on green screen. There wasn't one scene outdoors.
I went from one extreme to another, which was fun. I certainly couldn't have done another outdoors film right away."
" source: news.com
