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http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070930/ENT01/709300568/1036
TORONTO -- Sean Penn was, he says, standing on a hillside somewhere in remote Alaska, about halfway through shooting "Into the Wild," when he asked himself a "pretty primal question": Would an audience be able to relate to this story of a young man who prefers being alone in the wilderness to a triple-shot venti latte?
"Later, after we had finished shooting, I remembered this conversation I had with Charles Bukowski," says Penn, leaning forward in an overstuffed chair in the upscale Toronto hotel room where he stayed during the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month.
Bukowski, who died in 1994 and whose hardscrabble life was the inspiration for many of his poems and much of his fiction, was one of Penn's favorite writers. Penn had wanted to bring an adaptation of Bukowski's deeply sexual novel "Women" to the screen in the early 1990s.
"Charles said that if we made the movie it would have to open with a white screen with nothing but two black capital letters on it: 'BA,' for 'Before AIDS,' so people could put it in perspective. When I finished 'Into the Wild,' I toyed with the idea of opening it the same way, but with the letters 'BB' --'Before Bling.' "
TORONTO -- Sean Penn was, he says, standing on a hillside somewhere in remote Alaska, about halfway through shooting "Into the Wild," when he asked himself a "pretty primal question": Would an audience be able to relate to this story of a young man who prefers being alone in the wilderness to a triple-shot venti latte?
"Later, after we had finished shooting, I remembered this conversation I had with Charles Bukowski," says Penn, leaning forward in an overstuffed chair in the upscale Toronto hotel room where he stayed during the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month.
Bukowski, who died in 1994 and whose hardscrabble life was the inspiration for many of his poems and much of his fiction, was one of Penn's favorite writers. Penn had wanted to bring an adaptation of Bukowski's deeply sexual novel "Women" to the screen in the early 1990s.
"Charles said that if we made the movie it would have to open with a white screen with nothing but two black capital letters on it: 'BA,' for 'Before AIDS,' so people could put it in perspective. When I finished 'Into the Wild,' I toyed with the idea of opening it the same way, but with the letters 'BB' --'Before Bling.' "
