Sept. 14, 2007

Scenes in the new adventure-drama "Into the Wild" will make moviegoers wonder, "Did he really do that?" Take, for instance, leading man Emile Hirsch eating a fire-cooked squirrel. That couldn't have been real, could it?

"Hell, yeah," Hirsch replies during our recent interview at the Toronto International Film Festival.

"Wild" finds Hirsch playing Christopher McCandless, a recent Emory University graduate who spends two years distancing himself from his past as he travels across America on his way to Alaska. A true story chronicled in a found diary and later a novel by Jon Krakauer, the final part of McCandless' adventure found him living almost completely off the land in the Alaska wilderness. To convey how dramatic a change that is from civilized life, director Sean Penn not only had Hirsch eat squirrel but also cut up a dead moose just as McCandless had done many years before.

"It was roadkill," Hirsch clarifies. "It was pretty gross, considering it had been rotting in a freezer for a month. When I was cutting it up, it was totally smelly too. I was gagging, about to vomit. So, at that point, I tied my shirt around my face."

An epic production for an independent movie, "Wild" took 105 days to shoot in 30 different locations and 10 different states, according to Hirsch. Besides ripping up dead animals, the picture also found the actor duplicating many of McCandless' stops along his journey. The 22-year-old found himself hiking through Alaska's mountains, kayaking through the Colorado River and crossing freezing rivers.

To truly convey what happened to McCandless (who renamed himself Alexander Supertramp), the normally 156-pound Hirsch lost 20 pounds before shooting began and then production ceased for a few weeks while he dropped down to an unhealthy 115 pounds. He recalls, "I'd be running and exercising and eating very, very little. You actually lose more weight if you eat a little bit."

And after the shoot was over?

"Then I had, like, 40 candy bars," Hirsch says. "I'm serious."

Hirsch didn't get much of a break after "Wild" because he almost immediately stepped into the lead role in the Wachowski brothers' "Speed Racer." The film is almost the complete opposite of "Wild," because it was shot mostly on soundstages and against green screen.

Hirsch says, "There was a moment when I was talking to one of my buddies on the phone, one of my harder moments, when I go, 'I really don't make it easy, do I, with my choice of films.' 'Into the Wild' was hard to make and 'Speed Racer' was really hard to make."

Having seen some of the "Racer" footage, Hirsch describes it as, "Flabbergasting, gooberstopperingly, everlastingly awesome." Yet, after promoting "Wild," he thinks he's going to take a bit of a break.

"Although I hate when actors say, 'Oh, I am going to take a break.' All my buddies have to work all year round," Hirsch says. "You always want to slap an actor [when he says that]."

Considering that's the sort of attitude you'd expect from Penn, it's no wonder the director and his star got along so well.

"Into the Wild" opens nationwide Sept. 21.

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