Chris McCandless was born into American suburban comfort, growing up in Northern Virginia and graduating with honors from a prestigious university. He is supposed to go on to law school, but abruptly decides to reject what he considers the materialism of his parents' dreams for him.

Emile Hirsch in scene from Into The Wild

With no survival equipment, no camping gear and not even a compass, McCandless treks off the beaten path near Denali National Park. He happens upon the hulk of an abandoned school bus and that makeshift shelter becomes his solitary home for almost four months - the last four months of his life.

Scene from Into The Wild

"The movie does not present him as a flawless hero and I think one of the keys to McCandless is that he is not a perfect person," he adds. "This is not a glorification of Chris, in my opinion. This is a story about a real, complicated person who had virtues and he also had problems."

"The point of this thing is the heroism of his will and the courage that this young man had. All the rest of it is somebody else's folly for me," director Sean Penn says.

Penn took a quest of his own: a 10-year journey from when he first read the book that took him to meet the McCandless family in Virginia and then retrace the path Chris took on his travels, meeting the friends the young man made along the way. Penn angrily dismisses critics who say Chris made fatal mistakes that could have - should have - been avoided, such as not taking a map with him on his final trek into the Alaskan wilderness.

Scene from Into The Wild

William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden in scene from Into The Wild