Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with a little chat I had with Emile Hirsch when he came through Austin a few days ago to show INTO THE WILD. The film is based on a true life story about a young man who is burned out on what society has to offer and wants to experience life with a true freedom, one he can only achieve by being penniless while exploring the world. A little like Kane from Kung Fu. I’ve liked Hirsch’s work in the past, including ALPHA DOG, a film I don’t think was the best indie ever, but was more deserving of praise than many gave it, especially when it came to performances. I found Hirsch to be very grounded and gracious. We go off on a few tangents, but it’s all good. We cover tons of stuff… from INTO THE WILD to some nice SPEED RACER tidbits… enjoy!!!
Quint: You’ve gotten to work with some of the most amazing people. Just looking over your filmography, it’s like you have worked with Kevin Kline, Catherine Hardwicke, Nick Cassavettes, Jodie Foster... all of these great directors and actors. Do you take that into consideration, who you’re going to be working with?
Emile Hirsch: Yeah, absolutely. I am always trying to learn more about acting and movies, so whenever I get a chance to work with someone who is so experienced and talented, I just jump. When Sean [Penn] called, I was so gung-ho about it and same thing on SPEED RACER and the Wachowski brothers. I was like “Gosh, I’ve got a chance to work with the Wachowski brothers, I’m taking it!”
Quint: Of course. It’s like if Spielberg calls or James Cameron calls… at some point it’s just a knee jerk “Yes.”
Emile Hirsch: (Makes orgasmic “Ugggyeahaaaaahhh” sound, then laughs) Hey, want some water?
Quint: No, I’m good, but thanks.
Emile Hirsch: It’s sparkling.
Quint: I never got into the sparkling water.
Emile Hirsch: Really? I don’t know why I did. I wasn’t for the longest time, but I think I was in Berlin this summer and I got the affection for the spark.
Quint: They love that shit in Europe. I had never been to Europe until last year, then I ended up going three times in one month…
Emile Hirsch: That’s pretty cool. Were you working or…?
Quint: Yeah, all work.
Emile Hirsch: Isn’t it great, though, when you get to travel for work? It’s like “I’ve got purpose” travel… “I belong here…”
Quint: It’s great except it really wore me out, because I had three separate trips all within two weeks and they all came back to the US, so it’s like…
Emile Hirsch: Oh… Dude!
Quint: I racked up some miles, but it was really wearing when you do six twelve hour flights in two weeks, but yeah when you go over there it’s like everybody loves sparking water and you have to say “Still” water…
Emile Hirsch: “Gas? Gas?”
Quint: Ha! Yeah. “No gas!” (laughs) Well were you offered the movie or did you have to audition for this one?
Emile Hirsch: Well, Sean actually had a really interesting process, he called me one night and he had just seen LORDS OF DOGTOWN for the first time and he like the performance and he was very, very flattering and then that was all I heard and then I was really surprised to hear from Sean and the call was over and I was like “Wow, I got a nice congrats,” but a week and a half later he called me and he wanted to get together and I go “well, OK I’ll get together,” and he told me to read the book when we go together. He said he was interested in making it into a film, but he also mentioned a few other projects… kind of giving him some outs in case he didn’t want to cast me I think. Then after the next four and a half months every couple of weeks he would just call me up when he flew into LA and we’d get together and go drinking or go out to a restaurant with his family and hang out or we would just go hang out.
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That was really the whole process. I think he was just wanting to see if I was going to become annoying after a long time or he wanted to see how deep my commitment to the project was in the sense that he really felt like who ever played this part, in a sense, needed to have the right stuff, like IN THE SHADOW OF THE MOON. Did you see that, when they’re talking about the astronauts? It’s like you have got to have the right stuff, you gotta have the right qualities for that particular job. He felt like whoever was going to do this just had to have the right particular qualities for it.
Quint: When you make a movie it’s such a family atmosphere, at least it can be, and I guess that was his way to hedge his bets and see if the family would be dysfunctional, you know?
Emile Hirsch: (laughs) I know, right. Yeah “do we get along…?” He said something like “I had to make sure, because I was going to spend two years of my life watching you and editing you and directing you in the middle of nowhere and if I didn’t like you, it would make it really hard on me and I wouldn’t do that to myself…”
Quint: How was he to work with? I would imagine, because he is such a great actor himself, that that would give him an insight as a director…
Emile Hirsch: Well, we would be doing these really challenging scenes in the wilderness… really testing endurance and the body and just putting yourself through the ringer, but I would always know that he has been through that ringer before, because he’s an actor, so I would never question him in the sense of “Well, you haven’t done this.” Because I’d be like, “You’ve done this better than anyone.” That was a really big leg up for me in terms of the participation factor from him and also you always feel like, as the great actor that he is, you always feel like he just knows what his actors are going through, so I didn’t feel like “You don’t understand,” it’d be more like “Of course he understands, man, he’s the best…”
Quint: And he wouldn’t ask you to do it if he didn’t really think you could do it.
Emile Hirsch: Anything he asked me to do, he would do himself if I needed him to or if he thought that it would help me, like the rapids on the Colorado River that we did on the Grand Canyon… I was staring at those rapids and they looked pretty gnarly, I’m not going to lie, and he came up to me and he goes “Will you do it if I do it first?” I went “…yeah…” and he did those rapids first and he wiped out and ate shit, but he did it.
Quint: That’s because you really weren’t wearing a helmet or anything either, were you?
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Emile Hirsch: No and later on, once I did the rapids a few times and made it afterwards, then comes the time of course where you fall and I ate such shit and I sucked in so much water, but what I didn’t realize at the time before I fell was that my life jacket that they had put on didn’t fit at all, so it didn’t work. I was under getting thrashed and sucking water. It was freaky! You think, when the wave train hits you, you think you get hit by a wave and then you come up and can take a breath, but it goes so fast that as soon as it hits you, another one hits you, so it will hit you and you go *grasps for air* and you just suck in the whole wave. It was just “fuck…”
Quint: And once you do that… I’ve never done the rapid stuff, but I went to Maui with my parents as a kid. I grew up in the Bay area, so I was familiar with the ocean, but its not the same when you’re on the crashing waves.
Emile Hirsch: You’re just like, “Is this it?”
Quint: It’s that thing where you just get hit and all of a sudden you don’t know where the bottom is and you don’t know where the top is and…
Emile Hirsch: And then you go “Oh, my life jacket doesn’t work… great!”
Quint: Maybe it looks good on camera.
Emile Hirsch: KODAK confidence…
Quint: Like the stunt men always say, “If I’m going to go out, make sure you keep recording.”
Emile Hirsh: (laughs) No, absolutely… “did we get it?”
Quint: I’m always fascinated by projects like this that are based on real events. I talked to Jeremy Davies about RESCUE DAWN…
Emile Hirsch: I love that film.
Quint: … and he’s so good in it.
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Emile Hirsch: He’s so good and you know which scene I liked? When he goes like this “I’m going to eat my rice… I’m going to eat my rice…” and Dieter goes, Christian Bale goes, “No, you are not going to eat that rice” as he’s eating the worms he goes “I’ve got the keys to the cuffs and you know what? I’m not going to uncuff you tonight…” Jeremy Davies… It’s great. It was a great movie.
Quint: I would assume that there would be a lot of research going into it and a lot of meeting with the people involved, but his stance was that he didn’t want to know anybody that knew his character. He had an idea of what it was and he had read a lot, but he didn’t want to meet anybody associated with him.
Emile Hirsch: Wow. That’s interesting.
Quint: This movie seems to be a little bit different, because the families seemed to be more involved.
Emile Hirsch: Yeah, and I did meet with the family. I met with Walter and Billie, the parents, and Chris’s sister and I found it to be really helpful for this specific character, such an enigmatic character. It was just hard to understand… he’s got a lot of contradictions being so social, but so alienated and having escapism, but at the same time embracing humanity in general. Carine, she was wonderful to talk to. She’s a really smart woman and really cares about her brother… she wanted his story to be told truthfully and just wanted it to be honest. That’s what she wanted and the parents… I really give Walt and Billie a lot of credit for letting the film be made. It takes a lot of courage and they’re putting their whole private life up on screen for the whole world to judge, I mean, that’s hard, you know?
Quint: I’d like to talk a little bit about some of the other actors that you worked with, specifically I loved the stuff that you did with Hal Holbrook… I’m such a John Carpenter nut, so I love THE FOG and I love what he does in that movie and so it was just so good to see him back and just kicking so much ass…
Emile Hirsch: He was really just so good in it.
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He gives a performance of such depth and wisdom that in my opinion you only get the right to give that kind of knowledge if you’re 82 years old, you know? You earn that wisdom. That’s not something you can act. As far as I’m concerned, he was not acting. He was living and he’s just a master. He’s been doing THE MARK TWAIN TONIGHT SHOW for 56 years. I think, according to the playlist that I read when I went and saw THE MARK TWAIN SHOW after the shoot, I think it might be the longest running one man show in world history, which is damn long… 56. We’re talking like in the ancient days actors lived to 20.
Quint: That moment that he has at the end, when he says goodbye to your character, it’s just that great close up of his reaction, because he’s kind of rejected, but not really. That’s what I love about film, it’s something that’s unique to film and you don’t get on stage, when you get that real close up look and you see the eyes and you see everything working or there’s just absolutely nothing set and it’s all just still and he’s still, but his eyes just tell you everything.
Emile Hirsch: That’s what you earn. He’s something else.
Quint: What about working with Catherine Keener?
Emile Hirsch: She’s so much fun. She’s got such an infectious wonderful laugh about her and you just get caught up with her.
Quint: That whole segment of the movie, to me, that’s when they really got the heart of the film, seeing her and Rainey and that little community. I guess that’s the closest that he comes to getting the family that he wants…
Emile Hirsch: Yeah, the family that he needs and working with Brian Dierker and Catherine Keener and Kristen Stewarts, who’s a wonderfully beautiful young actress, that to me… I loved it, because here I would be facing off with a grizzly bear or risking life and limb climbing off the edge of some rock cliff for Sean, but then I got a couple of weeks to just spend with these wonderful people in this great town and everyone knew what a great time I was having… Sean would look at me and be like “God, you are just having so much fun here” and I’d be like “Yup! This is great! I love the people, no bears… it’s all good…”
Quint: “No risk of broken necks…” Kristen’s really good in the film, too.
Emile Hirsch: She’s wonderful; I really loved working with her. She’s a great person. I think she was just so natural with her performance and she’s so beautiful too. Just her beauty is the kind of beauty where you look at her and you know she’s just as beautiful on the inside as she is on the out. You can just tell.
Quint: She works very well in the movie and it’s the closest you get to a romance, but I like the fact that it was kept very brother and sister type.
Emile Hirsch: Yeah!
Quint: The AICN will kill me if I don’t talk at least a little bit more about SPEED RACER…
Emile Hirsch: That’s fine.
Quint: Nobody really knows what to expect from this, since this is their first movie after the MATRIX stuff, where it’s completely on their own.
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Emile Hirsch: I’ll be the first to state it big on Ain’t It Cool News that SPEED RACER is totally out of the box, off the charts, absolutely not what anyone’s going to expect from them. I’m talking tonally, visually, aesthetically… the choices of the actors is very striking and surprising. You know, there’s John Goodman, Susan Sarandon, Christina Ricci, Kick Gurry, Richard Roundtree…
Quint: Matthew Fox.
Emile Hirsch: Mathew Fox and a live chimpanzee in half of the scenes. It’s colorful. It’s comedic. It’s crazy and very, very close to the spirit of the cartoon, but people inevitably are going to expect something like THE MATRIX, because that’s really what they know the Wachowskis for, other than BOUND, but they’re going to be so shocked when they just see this totally, totally different world and the cars are dope, dude. I mean, the cars are crazy and they’re all different, like different designs and different art on them. There’s one car that’s got a Japanese, like, Yakuza tattoo across the car. It’s crazy.
Quint: That sounds really awesome.
Emile Hirsch: It’s really, I think, it’s got a chance at being legendary kickass.
Quint: I’m a big super John Goodman fan, like he can do no wrong in my book, so…
Emile Hirsch: He does no wrong in this movie and him and Susan Sarandon and Christina Ricci… The thing about SPEED RACER, that’s cool about it, is it’s not just the “oh wow…” that kind of vibe or the campy comedy vibe, but also the Wachowskis really laced it with this really great dramatic theme to it, so there’s heart to all of the characters the whole way through which is something that you’ve got to have. You’ve got to be able to connect with the actors on a human level in a film that’s going to be such a different version of reality. The entire film is green screen.
Quint: That’s nuts, but yeah if you don’t have that personal connection then it’s just spectacle.
Emile Hirsch: Yeah, so that was something that we all worked on… People are going to be surprised that there’s some darker moments to it that maybe they wouldn’t expect from them.
Quint: Really cool, so what do you have coming up after that?
Emile Hirsch: Nothing right now.
Quint: Taking some time off to just chill out?
Emile Hirsch: Yeah, some R & R.
There you have it. I love how he really pumps you up for SPEED RACER, but I still don’t know much about it. But live chimp makes me very happy, I must say. Hope you guys dug it. I conducted 5 different interviews that day, so you’ll see a bunch of stuff hitting this week. Keep an eye out! -Quint quint@aintitcool.com
