Political activist, actor, director, Sean Penn may be many things but nobody is likely to confuse him with a ray of sunshine. True enough, he’s in fine form today on a promotional tour of duty for Into The Wild, his fourth and best film as director. Relaxed – or as relaxed as one suspects he ever gets – and dressed way, way down in dirty boots and plaid shirt, he intones every word in a classically Californian dirge that reminds you of his surfer boy origins. (Later on, he admits that he still “only finds true peace out on the waves”.)

Still, you’d be hard pressed to describe him as a dude. Smaller than one might expect, at a neat 5’8” his earnestness blazes fiercely around the room. Everything he says is as serious as a heart attack. The most frivolous warm-up questions can prompt weighty responses.
“Science and religion can only agree that we’re all going to die,” he says, when, momentarily, the conservation had threatened something like levity. “Then there is this dumb notion of what’s worth dying for and then there is all this poisonous stuff that is religion. This is not a very deep thought thing. I’m not a very analytical person. But it just seems common sense to ask yourself what makes my death mean something. I like working back from that, evaluating the meaning of death. I’m not interested in the meaning of life. I have the Sean Penn meaning of death philosophy.”
If you didn’t know that you’re not supposed to ask about the recent death of his brother Chris or his time as Mr. Madonna, a stormy union that reportedly ended in violence and sexual assault, his pressure-cooker demeanour would soon take such personal enquiries off the agenda.
And yet, for all the no-fly zones, he’s still capable of laughter and outbreaks of disarming candour, sometimes simultaneously.
“In a general sense I would admit that I have been always fuelled by rage,” he smiles. “It is some kind of rage that is entirely unearned, except in abstract ways. I would not recommend rage to anybody but it always worked for me.”
Born in 1960 to actor-turned-director Leo Penn and actress Eileen Ryan, Sean Penn first stumbled into our consciousness as part of Hollywood’s 80s brat pack. By his second big screen appearance in Fast Times At Ridgemont High, he was already outshining his better known classmates from Santa Monica College including Emilio Estevez, Charlie Sheen and Rob Lowe. The Amy Heckerling film is, however, something of an anomaly. Few of the 40-odd films he has made since might be described as comedy. Mr. Penn has, instead, focused on meatier, darker material, specialising in psychopaths (The Assassination Of Richard Nixon, Casualties Of War, Dead Man Walking), sociopaths (Carlito’s Way, Loved) and the tragically bereaved (21 Grams, Mystic River). The intensity of his onscreen performances has assured him a spot alongside Brando, De Niro and Pacino as one of the giants of the medium. And yet, he seems bored with acting, stopping just short of denouncing it altogether.
“Acting doesn’t rate on the chart for me,” he shrugs. “It is a lucky occupation and I’m lucky to be able to make a living at and I do love the craft of it. But I have long since fallen out of love with practising it. I have 20 or 30 things that I would put on a list above it. But, just shy of raising my kids, directing is now the number one or number two.”
For a certain sector of the press, he will always be Wildman Sean Penn. True, he hasn’t bitch-slapped the paparazzi lately and his relationship with Robin Wright-Penn, the mother of his two children, is, after 20 years, one of the most stable relationships in Hollywood. But there is something primal about him, a simmering energy beneath the Santa Monica drawl. Emile Hirsch, the young star of Into The Wild later tells me “when Sean needs the crew to dig a hole, he picks up a shovel and starts digging furiously. Then everybody gets in line to help.”
In the same spirit, you may recall how Penn travelled to New Orleans during the Katrina crisis and staged his own, very successful, one-man rescue mission.
It is easy to see why Penn was attracted to the story of Christopher McCandless as soon as he read Jon Krakauer’s best-selling account.
In 1990, after graduating from college the 22 year-old McCandless elected to abandon his car, donate his $24,000 in savings to Oxfam and cease communication with his wealthy, though dysfunctional family. In 1992, his adventures ended in Alaska where, ill prepared for the austerity of winter, the 24 year-old died after approximately 112 days. The story first appeared in the survivor magazine Outside as a 9,000-word feature article by writer Jon Krakauer. When the author expanded the work to book length in 1996, the cult of McCandless came into its own.
“Having read the book and run into many people over the years that had read it, I noticed that something quite similar that had happened to all of us that had read it,” explains Penn. “I boiled it down to a shared wanderlust… that fork in the road of life where you know what part of you is and what part of you isn’t and what part of you you just can’t shed. So this very attractive idea of disappearing into the natural world and volunteering your life to be outnumbered by the relentless authenticity of that place is an incredibly alluring thing. For me, quality of life can be measured in volume. When things are too loud I don’t like it. Ugliness is loud; violence is loud; bad movies are really loud. To have pushed yourself away from the noise, especially as a youth, into the wilderness and to have found it, not just as a purifying thing, but as a real rite of passage and testing of oneself in an increasingly comfort addicted and numbingly comfortable Western country culture. It becomes really necessary to pursue those nerve-wracking personal challenges.”
12 years ago, having made his directorial mark with dreamy post-Malick dramas like The Indian Runner and The Crossing Guard, Penn approached the McCandless family with a view to dramatising their son’s tragic expedition. The film was set to star Leonardo DiCaprio and Marlon Brando (in a role now occupied by Hal Holbrook). The family, however, weren’t ready. But Penn has stayed in contact with them since. Finally, two years ago his tenacity and burning interest paid off.
“I never asked what changed,” he says. “I just took yes for an answer. They called me out of the blue. I just accepted that they said they were ready to do it. I have an idea that I benefited from being incapable of offering them the kind of money that the other competitors were offering. They had a vulgar reliance on finances moving them. I never had that to offer, nor would I ever have considered that would have been the deciding factor for them. They are quite well off without it and it is the story of their lost son. It’s a very difficult situation personally for them. I can only say that I was able to express to them a pretty ballpark version of the film that you saw. So that somehow won them over.”
Though his loyalties clearly lie with the younger, free-spirited Christopher, Penn remains fiercely protective of the adventurer’s surviving family.
“I made a gentleman’s agreement with them,” he says. “I was going to do what I was going to do and it would not be subject to their approval. But I would give them the opportunity to respond and tell me if they thought there was something dishonest in it. A lot of times I get asked how they respond to the screenings. I have found myself struggling to answer this question because, of course, I understand the interest in it. But I realise now that it would be like sharing with people an observation of people at their child’s wedding or funeral. It is for me to respect as a private moment that I witnessed, and I witnessed it a few times because they saw it a few times. I will say they have been consistently supportive, and you can imagine that it is not an easy watch for them.”
It is, of course, tempting to draw analogies between the director and his subject. Both are outsiders who hail from privileged backgrounds. Both have ascetic tendencies. Far from being offended, Penn embraces the notion of their shared ideals.
“I feel the need to run away every day,” he admits. “I have always felt it every day. There were times in my own ways I did versions of it, but never to the degree Chris did. I think that a lot of my feelings about that are now reinvigorated. It is a very tempting thing. But I also think that something that Chris McCandless’ own lesson was that there are times when we need to rally together on something as a community of human beings. Where I would literally encourage something like this – not to the point of reckless danger, hopefully – is in young people, so that they never lose the value of their true selves. I don’t mean you can ride on it; you have got to keep doing it. And you do it in different ways through your life. But once you have experienced feeling your own life in a very complete way then that is the healthiest addiction of all.”
Onscreen, Penn’s fired up notions about authenticity have enlivened some of the glum, unsympathetic characters he has sought to portray or create. In real life, his instincts are channelled into strident political activism. His efforts in this arena have been parodied by Team America; World Police where Penn’s marionette equivalent can be heard reporting on Iraq – “Before Team America showed up it was a happy place. They had flowing meadows, and rainbow skies, and rivers made of chocolate where the children danced and laughed and played with gumdrop smiles.”
Rather more damning criticism has emerged from the American right. Sean Hannity, one of Fox News’ nosiest neo-liberals, called Penn the first ‘Enemy Of The State’ and a ‘bad actor’ following the publication of a three-quarters page open letter in the Washington Post in which Penn called for the impeachment of key members in the Bush administration. He has further enraged Hannity and friends with a visit to Venezuela where he met with president Hugo Chavez and praised him for his opposition to the Bush regime.
“I’ve never had an ambivalent feeling about my country,” he tells me. “I am a little bit upset with the enemies of state who have taken over the White House and the kind of acceptance of that and lack of indignation toward it and demand for accountability toward it. But that is a completely different subject. The country is going to be great and the people are going to be great – no matter what anybody does. The landscape is going to be great as long as we don’t kill it all. I was born in love with that country and I will die in love with it.”
And he smiles one of his rare smiles.
“And if people think that a few insults will make me less involved rather than more involved then they just don’t know me.”