text Matt Hurwitz  photograph Patrick Hoelck

Other than The Girl Next Door, you’ve stuck with dramas like The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, Imaginary Heroes, Alpha Dog and now Into the Wild, written and directed by Sean Penn. Do you find yourself drawn to more serious subject matter? Well, I’d be a hypocrite to say that, because I’m making a very, very wild, fantastical, goofy movie right now. You don’t get much zanier than Speed Racer – especially the way we’re making it! I like both types of films. I love really big, smart, popcorn summer movies, and I also love very serious films. I’ve done a teen comedy before, and I’ve done more of a young action-teen movie. There’s been a bit of variety to the work I’ve tried to do.
What kind of research did you do to prepare for your role in Into the Wild? I got my hands on all the videos of Chris [McCandless] that I could. It turned out he had made this extensive college video, which I found pretty invaluable. There’s a weird quality to those tapes that really told me a lot of things. I also read through a lot of documents that I was allowed to look at that Chris had written – including the diary he wrote during his adventure that you see in the film. But there were also things he wrote when he was in high school that helped me understand the psychology behind what motivated him and who he was, what kind of person he was. Most importantly, though, I talked to the family: his sister Carine, his mother Billie and his father Walt. I really walked away feeling like I knew him. Another important thing I did to prepare was doing hard activities and setting tasks for myself, which was an integral process; setting difficult goals for myself, whether it was through running or organization. I’d set mini mental challenges a lot – which is something Chris did. Really pushing myself to do things that were hard for me to do became a really important part for me of understanding McCandless.
You had to lose a great deal of weight for this role, much the same way Christian Bale lost sixty-two pounds for his role in The Machinist. How did you go about losing the weight, and what was it like going through that process? I met with a bunch of doctors, we had a nutritionist and I read a few books on fasting and weight loss. When I got the part, I was 156 pounds, and I’m five-foot-six, so I had a couple of pounds on me that I definitely didn’t need. I started swimming, and then I hurt my rotator cuff, so I had to start running six miles a couple times a week. Right away, I just whipped twenty-five pounds off me. And that was what I stayed at for the bulk of the movie.
To lose the rest of the weight, for the latter part of the movie, I was already really skinny; I didn’t have a whole lot of weight to lose. I eventually got down to 115 pounds. I had to run, and then I started cycling classes because I was too tired to run, and I was on this really strict [diet] the whole time. I just thought about food all day, all night, in my dreams. I was always getting dizzy when I stood up, and all my vision would go blurry and orange, so I had to take little salt supplements to correct that. Being that hungry really changes a person. It’s weird – all you think about is how hungry you are. You’re not thinking about all the normal bullshit that you do in a day when you’re not hungry. When you’re not hungry, your subconscious can afford to think, “Oh, well, this guy said this to me, and he was mean,” or “Oh, man, I really want to get that video-game system,” or “God, I hope the fuckin’ Knicks win.” When you’re really hungry, you’re just like, “Damn, I am hungry! How am I gonna get some food? How am I gonna steal some food? How am I gonna con someone into looking away so I can steal something off their plate?” I’d be in a room with people, and there’d be a slice of pizza. I just had no interest in the people around me at all. All I cared about was the pizza. I had a silent relationship with the pizza – almost like a beautiful girl across the room that you keep locking eyes with.
Much of the film is about your character’s desire to live free from the binds of society. What was it like for you to immerse yourself in that world and experience it as McCandless did? It was the greatest experience of my life. It was just moments of such beauty and clarity and a sense of well-being. It was a new adventure every day. I went on the road for such a long while, and met so many different people. It’s funny. I understood what people meant when they would say things like, “Oh, those are just wussy Hollywood stupid L.A. people.” ’Cause after I came back from being in Alaska climbing mountains, I went to some Hollywood bar and it seemed so goofy to me. Everyone was just so ridiculous. I just had this whole different perspective on it.
Describe Sean’s direction style. The reality of the way Sean works is that it was him behind me, kicking me in the ass forward, on my own, the whole time. We both have similar sensibilities when it comes to what we like in acting and the way we like to work. We had a great dialogue together, and were able to create things on the spot.
[For example], there’s a sequence in the film where I’m eating an apple. It just started with Sean telling me, “All right, we’re going to shoot this scene where you’re eating an apple.” And I said, “OK, so I’m eating this apple. Well, hold on – let me talk to this apple. I want to talk to this apple.” He was like, “What?” He looked at me funny, made some kind of mean joke and walked off. I said, “Hey! No, I want to talk to the apple.” He gave me a double look, but saw that I was serious, and told the camera guy to get back down, and he rolled camera. I was a little frustrated [with] him, that he had questioned my dialogue with the apple, so I ended up sort of talking about Sean to the apple! The apple understood me. So it evolved, because he saw that there was something that could happen, and he went with it. But at the same time, he questioned me, which gave me a reason to think of why it would be even necessary. It was just me and the apple, at that point.
You’ve gone from filming in a real environment in Alaska for Into the Wild to filming almost entirely on green screen for Speed Racer. What are some of the challenges you’ve encountered? The biggest challenge is keeping your imagination going [and] not having anything to really react off of – plus claustrophobia and boredom. You constantly have to motivate yourself, and do things to keep that going. I really have a big appreciation now for the people who work on green screen, and who do it well. The main thing I do is I look at the storyboards and pre-visualization, and those can inspire me. But I just have to keep them in my mind, and then bring them to the green when I do the scenes. I’ll absorb the images and then try to keep them there, and try to keep aware of that.
Are you signed on for any sequels? I am. But there’s no guarantee that the sequels will be made.
When you were offered Speed Racer did you consider that sometimes playing the lead in a franchise can brand you as an actor and make it more difficult to get other roles? Not really. I like to do different kinds of films, and if you’re making films that people respond to, that’s what’s important. I can’t worry about [whether] people will go, “Oh, well, you know, you’re so-and-so.” I’m not going to cater what I do to what people think. I don’t have time for that.