ERIC GAUTIER, AFC SHOOTS OFF THE BEATEN PATH FOR INTO THE WILD

By David Geffner
Photos by Chuck Zlotnick

Jon Krakaeur’s best-selling book, Into the Wild, tried to decipher why Chris McCandless, a 23-year-old college graduate from an affluent East Coast family, spent two years road-tripping across the nation to Alaska, where he walked off the paved road into the bush, only to be found dead by moose hunters four months later. The book obsessively retraced his odyssey away from civilization (McCandless abandoned and stripped his car of its license plates, burned his cash and social security card, and put a hold on forwarding mail so his parents couldn’t find him), and into the natural world. Although he never lingered too long, McCandless touched many lives along the way: an aging widower in the California desert, a rowdy wheat harvester in South Dakota, a hippie couple in the redwoods, among others. By the time a Fairbanks electrician dropped Chris (calling himself “Alex”) off at the Stampede Trailhead, outside Healy, Alaska, with not much more than a .22 caliber rifle and a ten-pound sack of rice, he’d amassed a resume of near-death experiences: kayaking down the Colorado River into Mexico, hopping freight trains in the Southwest and being homeless on the streets of downtown L.A. But as he entered Denali National Park with no compass, ax, or weatherproof gear, his chances for survival were slim. As Krakaeur’s gripping read makes clear, all McCandless (who worshipped the writings of Tolstoy, Thoreau, and Jack London) had about him when he walked into the wild was a burning desire to test his basic instincts in a place where character is revealed (or more likely shattered) by nature’s lack of mercy.

Into the Wild, the new film based on Krakaeur’s book, from writer/director/producer Sean Penn, takes an equally quixotic journey. Working with cinematographer Eric Gautier, AFC, Penn spent days humping through terrain so formidable, the cameras, lenses, and batteries had to be brought in via backpacks. Penn’s crew, ranging in size from a small handful to dozens of technicians, went everywhere McCandless had gone, encountering conditions that ranged from freezing Artic snow, to wind-blasted, sun-drenched desert. They shot for more than six months in eight states, and visited Alaska four separate times (to capture every season). Gautier, who is based in France, logged forty-six separate airline flights during production! The results are breathtaking and as far off the creative roadmap as its subject matter. The story begins with McCandless (played by Emile Hirsch) walking into the bush, and spins backward through the long, strange trajectory of his road trip, before culminating with his death in an abandoned school bus deep in the bush. Shot in 3-perf, Super 35mm (the longer 3-perf magazines helped avoid reloading in the extreme locations), with three different camera systems (the primary system being the super-portable Aaton 35-III), Into the Wild takes bold, even reckless chances. Like McCandless, the filmmakers adopted the credo: if the outcome is pre-determined, the journey presents no true challenge.

“Sean picked me to do this film after having seen my work in The Motorcycle Diaries,” notes Gautier, on vacation in the Normandy countryside. “That was also a road movie. But where The Motorcycle Diaries was about two young men going out to meet and embrace civilization, Into the Wild is the opposite. Chris’ goal was to leave civilization behind and embrace the kind of nature that is beautiful on the surface, but deadly in its belly. And, in fact, that visual contradiction was the key to our movie. We were always juxtaposing panoramas of Alaska, or South Dakota, or the Colorado River, with intimate close-ups of Chris and the journey in his mind. We really wanted the viewer to feel what he was feeling, right up until the very end of his life.”

Gautier, who had success using Fuji’s new line of Eterna stocks (500 Tungsten and 250 Daylight) on last year’s Paris-based love story, Coeurs, wanted a tough and gritty, yet colorful look for Into the Wild, that was also filled with the kind of texture only a high-speed film stock can supply. Most of all he wanted to avoid a glossy sheen that would look too much like a magazine cover’s version of the backcountry. “People associate Fuji stocks with a pastel look that doesn’t have much saturation,” Gautier explains. “But I found the newer film to have plenty of contrast and color range. I forced the development to help increase the contrast, and used Zeiss Ultra Primes, which are very contrasty lenses. With all the available lighting, and handheld work, there is a sense of discovery, like an on-the-road documentary. But at the same time, there is also some very sophisticated dolly, Steadicam, and helicopter work that helped us achieve this macro/micro theme.”

restaurant throughout the day, with small tungsten practical lights on each table. The camera is on a circular track, panning and spinning among the family (Jena Malone plays Chris’ sister, Carine, Marcia Gay Harden plays his mother, Billie). Wherever the camera’s axis was pointed determined the ratio of tungsten to daylight in the scene; and no two shots were ever repeated. “Most people would have made it match in the DI,” Gautier notes. “Jay made it all cut together without matching any of the light sources, which is how I always envisioned maintaining this tension that underlies the scene.”

Into the Wild, as the title suggests, is about one man’s journey into the physical and psychological places humans rarely venture. Not only did that mean capturing remote locations, far off the paved road, but also the wildlife McCandless encountered. Gautier, who is more at home shooting in the cafes of Paris, had never shot wild animals before. “Patience is the most important thing,” he recounts. “Sometimes we’d hike all day just to shoot a single eagle in flight.” The animals proved to be another reason why a fast film stock was needed—with a 150-600mm Canon zoom, and an extender that turned it into a 300-1200 lens, Gautier was still able to get decent depth of field even on a dark and cloudy day. “The ultimate challenge on this film, aside from the sheer logistics of moving the production unit so often to so many different types of locations,” he concludes, “was portraying the places Chris experienced as they really were. We didn’t want to show nature as being pretty or abstract. We wanted each place Chris visited to feel very tough and real. To do that we had to get out of our professional comfort zone and really be surprised every time we turned on the camera.”

ICG @ IBC


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