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Reese Witherspoon Stars In WILD Clips
Oscar winner Reese Witherspoon gives an amazing performance in these new clips from director Jean-Marc Vallée’s WILD, in theaters December 5.
The film brings bestselling author Cheryl Strayed’s extraordinary adventure to the screen. Thinking she’d lost everything, Strayed walked out of her broken-down life and into the deep wilderness on a 1,100-mile solo hike that would take her to the edge.
One of Strayed’s most surreal encounters disrupts her travels with comic relief when she is “interviewed” by a man named Jimmy Carter, wanting to profile her as a “lady hobo.”
While Cheryl is the core of Fox Searchlight Pictures’ WILD, the film is populated by a diverse group of characters, both from the life Cheryl has just left behind and those she meets on the path forward.
Among them, the one person who has impacted Cheryl in the most shattering and enlivening ways is her mother, Bobbi (Laura Dern), whose brief, sudden battle with cancer sends Cheryl’s existence into a steep nosedive.
Strayed’s experiences became the beating heart of an inspirational, best-selling memoir that was about more than just an inexperienced hiker’s crazy, grueling experience walking from the Mojave Desert to the Pacific Northwest via the rugged Pacific Crest Trail (PCT).
With its mix of punk spirit and vibrant honesty, it also became something rarely seen: a portrait of a modern, messed-up woman coming-of-age by embracing the call of the wild in her own way. On the trail, Strayed faced down thirst, heat, cold, feral animals and all of her worst fears, but even more so, she faced up to change: pushing through to carve her own path out of grief and a haunted past.
“WILD’s story was told through the point of view of a strong female character on a solitary journey, no way was I going to make it different,” says Vallée (DALLAS BUYERS CLUB). “Cheryl Strayed’s story humbly reminds us, despite how tough
and cruel life can be, we can always put ourselves in the way of the beauty.”
The film was adapted by best-selling author and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Nick Hornby (AN EDUCATION).
As he dove in, Hornby hoped to distill Strayed’s mix of heartache and irrepressible bravery. “I think the big thing was the rawness — of the pain, the loss and of the journey itself, the loneliness of it, as well as Cheryl’s unshakeable sense that this insane project will somehow pay off. There’s a kind of magic in the book, too,” he points out. “The bad stuff is buried in the past, but the trail itself is peculiarly beneficent, despite all the physical pain and the relentlessness of the difficulty. And there’s redemption, of course. We’re all looking for that.”
Recalls Strayed: “It was a huge physical undertaking for me to hike the PCT for 94 days, but it was also very much a spiritual journey. I turned to the trail as many people turn to the wilderness — at a time when I felt lost and desperate, when I was in a place where I didn’t know how to move forward. In many ways the trail taught me to literally just put one foot in front of the other again.”
“There is something about being in the wilderness,” sums up Jean-Marc Vallée, “becoming part of nature, learning to see it not as an enemy but as a friend, experiencing the beauty and the quality of the air that can be life-changing. Cheryl went into that and kind of lost herself for nearly 100 days. She was alone with her demons, her dreams and her past and it led her to ask: ‘What do I really want to do with my life?’”
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