'Hot Mess'

"This film for me was just a tremendous adventure," said Hirsch. "The opportunity to go on the road trip of a lifetime with [director] Sean Penn which I'm so grateful to have the opportunity to work with him. He made everything so authentic and so real. We shot in all the real locations, went to all these different places. Saw these beautiful slices of America and these wonderful portraits of nature burned into my memory thankfully.

Days where we were camped out on the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River. We shot there for about a week or two. Just looking at the side of these cliffs and it's like, 'That rock there is three billion years old. Wow.' It's really an incredible, a very humbling experience."While he appreciates the privilege of such an experience, Hirsch is careful not to get too pretentious about it. "I was just getting to experience so many different places and meet so many different people, was forced to be very responsible. Sean demanded me to really step up and give him everything I had to give. So I'm not going to wax on about how I'm mature now. If you're trying to get that out of me, I'm a little nervous about the presumptuousness of that. Maybe I'm a little bit more capable.""We didn't think that we were making Chris McCandless into a martyr. We didn't think we were putting any makeup on any blemishes he had. We were trying to present him as we thought he was, which is a complicated, flawed, courageous, loving person. This is a guy who cared about people. When he was in high school, he would get cheeseburgers and drive down to downtown LA and hand them out to homeless people, on a Friday night when most kids are going out and doing whatever they do these days or back then. So there's that aspect of him where he's a real humanitarian. He cares about people, cares about humanity but then he doesn't contact his family for two years, and his sister who he loves more than anybody.

Ellen Page mentions the hero:

EP: But it’s funny that I play these roles that, to me, just feel like well-written young women are called strong and feminist roles. If I was a young male actor, you wouldn’t ask me that question. If I was Emile Hirsch… Like, does anyone go, “Oh, Emile Hirsch! Why do you play such strong male roles?” No one’s going to say that to him.

Well, I probably wouldn’t go “Oh, Emile Hirsch!” for one thing.

EP: But yeah, no one’s going to say that to Emile Hirsch or Ben Foster or…

Or Michael Cera?

EP: Or Michael Cera! Thank you.