It’s say to safe that, after almost 30 years in the business, Emile Hirsch has been around the block. After a string of solid films early on in his career — like The Emperor’s Club, the somewhat-forgotten-about-but-still-good teen comedy The Girl Next Door, and Lords of Dogtown — Hirsch found critical acclaim in Sean Penn’s Into the Wild.
Based on the eponymous non-fiction book by Jon Krakauer, Hirsch played Christopher McCandless who, disenchanted with the modern world around him, hiked across North America and into Alaskan wilderness in the early-90s, and set up camp in an abandoned city bus, which he dubbed “The Magic Bus.” It’s a role that placed then-22-year-old Hirsch in major awards contention. In addition to being nominated for a string of critics awards and a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance By a Male Actor in a Leading Role, Hirsch received the National Board of Review Award for Breakthrough Male Performance.
Indeed, it was a breakthrough; Into the Wild put Hirsch on the map and landed him a role in his first studio film, The Wachowskis’ Speed Racer. With a budget of $120 million and a cast that included the likes of Susan Sarandon, Christina Ricci, Hiroyuki Sanada, and John Goodman, it was effectively the biggest film Hirsch had ever worked on. Though it was considered a commercial failure, Hirsch, speaking to Indiewire, saw Speed Racer‘s failure as the liberation of his career: “[It] gave me the opportunity to do films that, if that movie had been a huge hit, I might not have done. I might not have been able to have done Killer Joe or The Motel Life or Prince Avalanche.”
Since Speed Racer, Hirsch’s filmography has been a steady stream of indie hits like Killer Joe, the great Oliver Stone’s Savages, Freaks, and Son, to name a few, with a few bigger productions like Lone Survivor, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and the Western-thriller Never Grow Old peppered in. His latest film Pursuit is an indie action-thriller that, in fact, reunites him with Never Grow Old co-star John Cusack.
In the movie, Hirsch plays Rick Calloway, a ruthless hacker searching desperately for his wife, while Cusack plays his father John Calloway, a crime boss who may or may not have had something to do with Rick’s wife’s disappearance. “Originally, when I read [the script], the part of Rick Calloway almost seemed like they were going for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo-kind of character — this very tattooed, super smart, but very off, hacker,” Hirsch says in our interview. “I liked that he was trying to find his wife and reunite with his son [and] I proposed the idea [of my son in real life, Valor] playing the part. I mean, it was a really small part, and he had fun, and it definitely helped ground the character for me in that way.”
On Reuniting with John Cusack for Pursuit
“I really like working with John Cusack,” Hirsch says on the Say Anything actor being one of the biggest draws of working on Pursuit. “He’s a really smart and intelligent man and a really good actor. The idea of doing [another] film with him was just exciting. He’s someone that I like to work with.”
In Never Grow Old, Hirsch’s Patrick Tate was the undertaker of a small town who buried the bodies of Cusack’s outlaw Dutch Albert. It’s a completely different dynamic to the father-son relationship the actors’ characters have in Pursuit. “You can’t help but draw on that experience before you shoot,” Hirsch says, referencing how his long-standing acquaintance with Cusack since Never Grow Old ultimately informed Rick and John Calloway’s familial dynamic. “The scene where [our characters finally] see each other, we [meaning John and I] hadn’t seen each other in a long time as well, so it was kind of perfect the way [our characters similarly] had this past together and finally reunite.”
On Using Elon Musk as Inspiration for His Off-Beat Hacker Role
From losing weight for Into the Wild to enduring grueling physical training for Lone Survivor, Hirsch is known for the research and dedication with which he approaches each of his roles. For Pursuit, Hirsch turned to Elon Musk for inspiration. “When I was starting to think about how the role should go, I saw an interview [that Musk did] and I liked the deadpan way that he talked. I’d seen a lot of pictures of him in the past, I don’t think I’d really seen an interview until that one. I sort of loosely inspired a lot of Rick’s quirks and the particular way he speaks on Musk because I thought: who’s a really smart guy capable of organizing [intricate plans].”
Once Hirsch started shooting, of course, the prep work more or less went out the window. “Brian Skiba, the director, was constantly wanting to give me more freedom and more ability to improvise the scenes while I was in them. Not even writing lines before [shooting] or anything. In the middle of a take, he’d say, ‘Just go for it. Say what you think. You can comment on the scene as you’re in it, in character.”
The result is a character who, at first, seems weirdly out of place. While the police force is focused on taking down a drug cartel, and while the drug cartel, in turn, is trying to tie up loose ends, Hirsch’s Rick Calloway has his sights solely on finding his wife and getting back to his son, seemingly unfeeling towards the chaos that trails him. However, at a critical point in the movie, you ultimately see that Rick, despite the weird vibes he gives off, is actually one step ahead of everyone.
On the State of Independent Cinema in the Face of Franchise Filmmaking
“I think that, to a certain degree, there’s always threats from bigger films that could destroy the little guy,” Hirsch says when asked about his thoughts on current notions that franchise culture is killing independent cinema. “But I do think that the audience like myself — because I am the audience, because I watch a lot of stuff — I think that there isn’t a consistent monolith of taste, of what we like to watch.”
“I think the market is there. I think the appetite is there. One of the really cool things about independent cinema now is that there’s so many different outlets to release a film. Not only is there the theatrical experience, but there are a million apps and streaming services. So I think it’s actually a richer time [for indie films] than it’s ever been.”
At this point, Hirsch lists films, like Sean Baker’s Tangerine (which was notably shot on an iPhone), that have gone against the bigger films. “I think that I feel optimistic. [With all of these distribution outlets], they’re going to need to make more art, more movies and TV, as opposed to less.”
Pursuit is available in select theaters and VOD on February 18, 2022.
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