Sean Penn has had to endure a degree of criticism because of his political idealism. But if he can help make things happen, he will grasp any opportunity, the actor-director tells Donald Clarkeas they discuss his latest creative project - and how he'd like to see George Bush sent to prison.
Sean Penn is 47. Why does that seem so unlikely? It was, after all, as long ago as 1982 that he first moped on to our cinema screens, in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. In the quarter century that followed, he gave journalists a great deal to write about. He married Madonna. He spent a few weeks in jail after allowing a heated exchange of views with an extra to escalate into fisticuffs. He has been nominated for four Oscars and, in 2003, won the award for his performance in Mystic River. And let's not forget his adventures in practical politics: that visit to Iraq, the angry letter to the South Park team, his hobnobbing with Hugo Chavez, the conspicuous trip to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Of course he's 47. Most actors would require three or four lifetimes to generate that much copy.
Yet he still seems like a boy in so many ways. Not weighed down by an excess of humour, he has a habit of launching into undisciplined tirades at the slightest provocation and rarely feels the need to mind his manners. He might just be the oldest teenager in Christendom. It is, therefore, distinctly odd to watch him slipping into young-people-today mode.
"I think they are spending too much of their time on Facebook and MySpace," he grumbles. "And there is a rite of passage that is being missed. You are not presented with anything like that in western culture. Now, I am not suggesting that they should actively seek out danger. But maybe they should do something a little like that." Oh, it's not like it was in our day, eh, Sean? "No, that's not what I am saying," he counters. "Quite the contrary. This has been happening for decades. I mean, I didn't have to hunt for food when I was young. It is a long time since there have been rites of passage. We have lost touch with our emotions. With all this technology we barely have to move, never mind risk our lives."
Consideration of Into the Wild, Penn's fourth film as director, has directed us up this unlikely thoroughfare. A moving, thoughtful piece of work, the movie details an eccentric odyssey taken by one Christopher McCandless in 1992. After finishing college, the young man gave his savings to charity, ditched his car in the desert and abandoned himself to poverty and the dangers of the open road. He eventually ended up in Alaska, where he attempted to survive in a disused bus with just a rifle and a stack of paperback novels for company. Featuring a fine performance by Emile Hirsch and dreamy photography from Eric Gautier, Into the Wild has already gathered ecstatic notices and looks destined to become required viewing for Kerouac cadets everywhere.
"I made it mainly for younger people," he says. "I don't mean for a younger demographic in the marketing sense. I mean that they are the people I most want to share this with. There is a cartoon I cut out that has a man in a suit waiting for the lights to change. A little street urchin says to him: 'Don't mature. Mature people do shit work.' If you have that innocence when young, you can, hopefully, hold on to it and let it develop. This kid, Chris, really knew that. I am now trying to figure out how a weather-beaten 47-year-old movie actor can get kids to believe in me the same way. Will they listen to what I have to say?"
Penn does, indeed, look a tad battered by the elements. His hair dishevelled, his fingers constantly either lighting up or stubbing out another cigarette, he slumps in his chair like an ageing prize fighter who has just gone one round too many. It's probably only jet lag.
"My children are always on my case about this," he says, pulling on the latest fag. "They wish I would stop. 'Fuck you. Those things are going to kill you,' they say. Every morning I wake up and wonder why I am doing this."
Ah, fatherhood. The relationship between men and their children - sons, in particular - has become the one unavoidable theme in American cinema. It's there again in Into the Wild. McCandless's wide-eyed idealism is presented as, at least in part, a reaction against his father's materialism.
Penn, by way of contrast, seems to have had a reasonably comfortable relationship with his own dad. Leo Penn, originally an actor, was blacklisted during the McCarthy era, but he came back to carve out a very healthy career directing television in the 1960s and 1970s.
Considering Penn snr's political engagement and his choice of career, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that his example inspired his son to become the man he is today. "I can only assume the answer is, yes," Penn says. "I was not conscious of it at the time. I had enormous admiration for my father, but I was not aware of actually following the trail he laid out. He had a way of getting right at the heart of things. Yeah, I am lucky to be from the club that had good fathers."
Leo Penn, who died in 1998 of lung cancer, lived long enough to see his son become a bigger star than he ever was. Sean was barely 20 when he landed a role in Taps, a drama set in a military academy. He followed that modest success a year later with his performance as Jeff Spicoli, the spaced surf bum, in Amy Heckerling's Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Since then, forswearing comedy, he has played psychotics, depressives, pessimists, misanthropes and losers. If ever a director wants a man to scrunch his face up in existential despair and tear tufts of hair from his scalp, Penn's name is sure to be bandied around. When asked to explain his success, he, somewhat characteristically, namechecks every gloomy teenage boy's favourite tortured writer. "Years later, Charles Bukowski was able to articulate how this worked," he says. "I asked him why he writes. He said: 'It is not because I am so good. It is because most of the others are so bad.' When I started I had to work a loading job. I worked in a restaurant. I had catering jobs. I even barked at a carnival. But whenever I'd despair I'd see some guy in a play and think: I could do better than that. I knew I would be a success, but I didn't think it would happen until I was 40."
This does make a kind of sense. In the 1970s real movie stars tended to be men in early middle age, such as Burt Reynolds, Jack Nicholson and Robert Redford. It was not until the Reagan era that properly youthful actors - remember the Brat Pack? - began securing mighty salaries and fashioning careers with solid legs. "Yeah. I was remembering Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces and so on," he says. "So I was surprised to make it quite so young."
He has frequently threatened to quit acting and devote himself to direction. Is it really such an awful life? "Well, there is an enormous amount of disappointment," he says. "There is a lot of waiting round, hoping you can pay your bills. It's like the hope for a perfect marriage. Then the film can turn into a fight, like a terrible divorce. There was also the disappointment of coming into a business that was changing. Before I came in, people like Paddy Chayefsky and Tennessee Williams were writing for movies, and then it became something very different. Plus, you want to make a film about what you're concerned with right now. That doesn't always happen."
Something about Penn's coiled attitude suggests it would be unwise to inquire too closely about the personal and romantic traumas of his early years. Following a few very public bust-ups - the police were called in after one fight - Penn's marriage to Madonna was dissolved in 1989. He then embarked on a relationship with Robin Wright, an actress who laughs as rarely as Penn. Following their marriage, in 1996, they retired to the outskirts of San Francisco and set about raising two children. We should, moreover, probably not press him about the mysterious death - "enlarged heart", apparently - last year of his brother Chris, the actor.
He must, however, be keen to talk about politics. After all, you can't turn on a television without hearing him call for the disembowelling of George Bush or the elevation to sainthood of Hugo Chavez. "I've got to go back on you there," he says. "I don't love talking about politics. I have to talk about politics. I love my children too much not to. There is a trade-off I don't regret. I am aware of the costs. I don't mean costs that are political. I mean costs that are creative."
One of the costs that Penn has had to endure is a degree of ridicule. Nobody much minds when George Clooney or Robert Redford speaks up against the war in Iraq, but there is something about Penn - his naive earnestness? his self-importance? - that really gets to right-wing commentators.
When some neocon blogger wants to complain about "Hollyweird phoneys" and their inability to keep their political views to themselves, Penn will, inevitably, be the first one to get it in the neck.
"It is odd when you talk to somebody one-on-one in Council Bluffs, Iowa, or wherever and they seem to have accepted all this stuff about Hollywood people inflicting their views on everybody," he says. "And I don't even live in Hollywood. But if you are a snobby little white guy who had $1 million from the day he was born, then you should not just talk politics; you should actually become president. What's that about? Everybody should be political, and that's part of what Into the Wild is about."
Fair enough. But you can see why some satirists pick on him for failing to see the funny side. Consider his long-running dispute with the makers of South Park. Some years ago, when Trey Parker and Matt Stone made a few sarcastic remarks about the Vote or Die!, a celebrity-driven campaign to get young people to the polling booths, Penn wrote them an absurd, spittle-flecked e-mail of complaint. "I do mind when anybody who doesn't have a child, doesn't have a child at war, or isn't or won't be in harm's way themselves, is encouraging that there's 'no shame in not voting'," he ranted. Parker and Stone brought the e-mail up repeatedly while promoting Team America: World Police.
"That was, by the way, nothing to do with this movie, and they then used it to promote the film. That was to do with this Rolling Stone interview they did where they said: 'If you don't know anything, then don't vote.' Hey, if you don't know anything, why not learn something and then vote?"
He's right, of course. But his response will do nothing to deflect suggestions he has undergone a humourectomy. Still, Penn's wilful refusal to moderate his behaviour to the whims of cynical columnists and hypocritical gossip rags distinguishes him from 100 other blander, more complacent movie stars. Which other actor, after viewing the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, would have hopped on a flight to New Orleans and set about lugging sandbags and handing out food?
"I wasn't thinking about publicity, either positive of negative," he says. "I was thinking: my friend's house is on fire down the street, and the fire trucks have not come for three days in a row. I was hopeful that I would be one among many down there. I am down there with a buddy, dragging out bodies from the river. Who wouldn't do that?" Plenty of people, you imagine.
Penn has now properly woken up and has begun waving his cigarette at me - and, by implication, at a world of unworried slugabeds beyond the walls of this cosy hotel room.
"I have things I'd like to see happen creatively or politically in the world or in the cinema. If I can be of use in making those things happen I will grasp that opportunity." What sort of things? "I'd like to see my president go to jail," he nearly bellows. "It would be one of the great advertisements for democracy. All around the world they would say: oh, look, there are things you can't get away with. If this was a movie we'd know who the bad guy is, but, because it's reality, we bow the knee and call that bowing down courage. He is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanours."
He looks like a 47-year-old. But he certainly doesn't sound like one.
Into the Wild is on general release
FIVE GREAT SEAN PENN PERFORMANCES
Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) Sean Penn and Jennifer Jason Leigh can do comedy. Who knew? Penn is wonderfully funny as a gormless surfer in this near-classic examination of high-school angst. The script by Cameron Crowe may still be his best.
At Close Range (1986) Christopher Walken plays Penn's father - what a combination - in a crime drama that should have garnered a more substantial reputation. Penn's tearful courtroom denunciation of his dad, a gangster, justifies the ticket price alone.
Carlito's Way (1993) Demonstrating admirable lack of vanity, Penn pulls on a corkscrew wig and a terrible 1970s suit to play the corrupt lawyer who ruins hoodlum Al Pacino's attempts at rehabilitation. One of the last great Brian De Palma films.
Sweet and Lowdown (1999) Woody Allen makes good use of Penn's pout in this witty, often grim drama following the romance between a selfish jazz guitarist and Samantha Morton's mute enigma.
Mystic River (2003) Penn is way over the top in his Oscar-winning performance, but there is no questioning the commitment he brings to the role of furious, bereaved father.