Entertainment Weekly scored a little chat with Eddie Vedder about being bff with Sean Penn and scoring the actor/director’s new film, “Into The Wild.” (news that we broke first, if we can remind you for the 4 millionth time).
How did their collaboration come about? Well, their bosom buddies and Vedder was game as soon as Penn called. “I might have thought about [signing on to score the soundtrack] differently if it [wasn’t Penn],” he told EW. Here’s some interview highlights.
You’ve got to be a little wary with Sean Penn too, cause he’s a little bit like Kramer from Seinfeld. “Sean very casually showed up at the house a couple days later — at my door, as if he lived down the street and just walked down — and we watched it together.”
Eddie cried. They both enjoy cigarettes.
“It was beautiful, and I wept, and it was tremendous. I didn’t know what he needed me for, cause it was great. I remember watching it the first time — it was just me and Sean sitting on the floor watching, you know, with a pack of smokes — and I just wanted to say, like, How’d you get that shot? Wait, did that really happen? Were those wild horses? That grizzly bear, how’d you do that? So it was really difficult to not say a word. The whole thing to me was incredibly moving.”
The subjective of the book would have haaaaaaated a movie about himself.
it’s very blatant that this is the last kid that would ever want a movie made about him, and how dangerous that would be to who he was and how he led his life, to be commercialized or trivialized. Thank God it was Sean who did this.
Sean Penn’s creative direction: “Eddie, do whatever the fuck you want.”
Sean just said, ”Whatever you wanna do. Maybe it’s music, maybe it’s a song.” So I spent three days giving him colors that I could paint with. Different sounds. It would be pump organ and vocal, or it would be an uptempo song. I just gave him 25 minutes of music, stuff I felt that were colors on the palette. And I really didn’t think anything was gonna come out of it. Maybe a little piece or something. As much as I wanted to serve Sean and the project, I just had really low expectations. But instead of saying, ”Okay, cool, I might use one thing, thanks for trying,” Sean called and was like, ”I’ve already put two pieces in, if you can give me like five or six more, it could be the interior voice of the character.” I said, ”Let’s do it.”
The rest of the interview talks about Vedder’s collaboration with Phil Donahue for the documentary, “Body of War.” Vedder’s not the only one who thinks Penn is a little eccentric. Time Out New York talked to “Wild’ lead Emile Hirsch and he echoed similar sentiments (incidentally they said the film was fantastic and all but called Hirsch’s performance a tour de force – under medical supervision, Hirsch dropped from 156 pounds to a mere 115).
Emile Hirsch: Yes, Sean Penn is kinda crazy.
“So I get this hilarious message on my cell: ‘Hey, kid…I can call you kid, because I’m turning forty-fucking-five next week!’ When we met up in Malibu, he started telling me about this project. I figured, Okay, this is probably four years down the road. We talked regularly over the next few months and not a peep about it. Then, suddenly: The script is done, the part is mine, can I fly up to San Francisco to read? Apparently, he’d been writing this for me the entire time.”
Incidentally, Penn tried to quit smoking cigarettes during the recent Toronto International Film Festival and the entire media there wished he hadn’t.
“Into The Wild” opens in theaters on September 21. The soundtrack comes out next Tuesday (Sept. 18), but you can listen to the whole thing right here. It uses a lot of ukuleles, banjos, acoustic guitars and is very Vedder-ish for lack of anything better to say about it.
Download: Eddie Vedder – “Hard Sun” (featuring Corrin Tucker)
Download: Eddie Vedder & Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan – “The Face of Love”
Download: Eddie Vedder & Susan Sarandon – “Croon Spoon” (“Cradle Will Rock” Soundtrack)
Download: Eddie Vedder – “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away” (“I Am Sam” Soundtrack)
Watch: “Into The Wild” trailer