“The first priority for me [in casting] is affection. I have to care about them from the time I hire them to the time I finish editing their performance,” Sean Penn told Charlie Rose about bringing in equally-minded people to bring a piece of film work together. “Nobody ever stopped their devotion to this story.”
A.O Scott’s New York Times review is favorable to the film, but he doesn’t particularly like Vedder’s songs. “There are some awkward moments and infelicitous touches — a few too many Eddie Vedder songs on the soundtrack, for example, when Woody Guthrie, Aaron Copland or dead silence might have been more welcome,” he wrote rather amusingly.
Eddie Vedder for one basically called “Into The Wild” a dealbreaker film which he’s obviously he’s going to say with Penn right there, but man, that’s really throwing down the gauntlet. “I think of films like “Harold and Maude,”he said comparatively.[“That’s one of those films] that if you were going to have a relationship with someone, that they’re going to have to love that movie for you to decide that you’re going to spend the rest of your life with them; you’re going to have to agree on this art cause it’s going to say a lot about you as a human. And I think [‘Into The Wild’] is that kind of film,” he said.