Just give me the simple, angry life

Sean Penn fires up an American Spirit cigarette as he sits down in a grand Beverly Hills hotel ballroom. Staff at the nonsmoking Four Seasons hotel exchange nervous glances but, aware of Penn’s fiery reputation, nobody dares say a word and the actor – who once reputedly smoked four packs a day – puffs on undeterred.

“I’m actually angrier and more radical than I was at 20,” says the 47-year-old, who in 2002 placed a $56,000 advertisement in The Washington Post condemning President George W Bush’s plans to invade Iraq. “The thing to do is to figure out how to channel that anger in ways that are productive.”

Famed as much for his angry outbursts (in 1987 he served 32 days of a 60-day prison sentence for attacking a film extra) and high-profile relationships – including that messy marriage to Madonna – as he is for his film career, it is with a rare softness that Penn discusses his new film, Into the Wild, which he directs and which opens in British cinemas on Friday. Based on Jon Krakauer’s 1996 bestselling book of the same name, it tells the true story of Chris McCandless, a disaffected college graduate, who sets out on a road trip across Mexico and the US, before arriving at his final destination in the vast majestic wilderness of Alaska.

“Chris took self-portraits throughout his trip,” he explains, “so we were able to take his pictures and find the very same mountains, find the summit lines, and get to the same place with exactly the same perspective.”

It’s clear Penn, always something of an outsider, feels some kind of kinship with the subject of the lonely, searching traveller. “I’ve always loved the experience of travel and the lessons learnt along the way,” he admits. “When I travel, it’s not like I’m searching for anything in particular. I find that out when I find it, best I can. Different things at different times. I like to get excited or nervous by doing something that I’ve not done. In this way, I feel alive.”

At the end of a difficult movie, Penn, who drives a limited-edition Buick Grand National muscle car as well as a more prosaic Audi RS4, has been known to head off on mind-clearing road trips, even driving around Tehran 18 months ago on a writing assignment for his local paper, the San Francisco Chronicle. “Give me a car and a country I can zigzag through . . . and I’m a bird,” he has said.

Raised in Malibu by Eileen Ryan, an actress, and Leo Penn, a director, by his own admission Penn could easily have ended up as some sort of slacker surfer dude. Instead he’s considered one of the film world’s most talented and controversial stars, who has recently outraged conservative America by befriending Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s outspokenly antiAmerican president. In 2005 he travelled to New Orleans to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina, then last year found himself mourning his brother Chris Penn, who died of heart disease, although drugs were also found in his body.

Today Penn prefers to live well away from Los Angeles, its trappings and its temptations. After his wife Robin Wright Penn and their two children were carjacked outside their home in Santa Monica in 1996, the family relocated to northern California’s Marin County, a 75-minute flight from Hollywood.

Fire had destroyed a previous family home in Malibu in 1993 and since then Penn had kept a trailer alongside. But a few days ago, this too went up in flames as brush fires swept across much of southern California. Penn was in Italy promoting his film when he learnt he had little furniture left, apart from a charred beach umbrella. Fortunately, he claims to prefer the simple life: “My tastes haven’t really changed much over the years. My favourite kind of hotel living is where you can park your car 8ft from the bed and with a little Formica table in between.

“But there is something nice about five-star hotels and dry cleaning too,” he adds with a smile and a nod to our opulent surroundings.

For most of the filming of Into the Wild, the cast and crew never saw the inside of a five-star hotel: “We were in tents, lodges, temporary shelters, a couple of casino hotels that would depress the s*** out of you. We even slept in cars sometimes, and rarely ate anything other than fried food.”

There is a certain intensity to all Penn’s projects but his latest venture was not without its light-hearted moments. According to Thure Lindhardt, a Danish actor cast as a backpacker McCandless meets on the Colorado river, the crew regularly teased Penn by singing old Madonna songs around the camp fire, in reference to the actor’s short-lived marriage to the Material Girl.

The usually cool Penn almost blushes at the mention of the ill-fated union. “Really! Did they?” he grins. “I’ve gotten so used to people doing that that it was the least memorable thing.”

My stuff... On my CD player

Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, who recorded the soundtrack to Into the Wild. Eddie and I go back a ways, back to Dead Man Walking in 1995 when he worked on the soundtrack. I’m 47 so there’s not too much music that comes after 1968 that doesn’t feel like it’s been done before. But Eddie’s voice is something else

On my DVD player Easy Rider and Raging Bull, starring Robert De Niro, right

In my parking space A black 1987 Buick Grand National, stolen a few years ago and then recovered by the police, and a grey Audi RS4

I will never throw away Nothing is as important as the people you love

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