Summary
Far removed from the harsh realities of the natural world depicted in Into the Wild, [Emile Hirsch] sits at a table in his suite, eating cereal and sipping coffee as we talk about his experiences on the set I ask him why Krakauer's book appealed to him. "The wanderlust," he says simply. "The adventure. The same thing that kind of I infected people when they read On the Road... If it had been a story about flight or fleeing from a family, or if he just went a block away and worked on a train set, no one would have cared."
Despite such limited experience Hirsch was game to take on a lot of potentially dangerous stunts during filming, but it was the sequence in which he was supposed to kayak down a frothing Colorado River that weighed heavily on his mind before shooting. "People get weird about water," he says. "They get panicky and fidgety, and I'm one of those people a lot of times."Despite his fears, Hirsch pulls off a very impressive paddle through raging whitewater in the film. The young actor admits it was because he was tricked that he didn't have time to get worried in advance. "I was kind of blindsided by the size of the rapid," he says. "I thought it was going to be this really small one, and then we passed it in the boat. I go to Scan: 'Isn't that the rapid?' He says: 'That's not a rapid.' We finally hit this other rapid-which was slammin' big. Luckily, I didn't have too much time to dwell on it."See the full content of this document
Extract
Natural Actor
The 1996 non-fiction bestseller Into the Wild chronicled the final two years of Christopher McCandless, an idealistic college graduate who gave his savings to charity and then set off for America's wildest regions. Hi...
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