Sean Penn and Eddie Vedder Tag-Team Continues For 'Into The Wild'

The names Sean Penn and Eddie Vedder represent some of the greatest artistic achievements of the past few decades. Now, with the release of "Into the Wild," the film's director and soundtrack creator have teamed up again to become the two great tastes that taste great together.

"We go back quite a ways, back to 'Dead Man Walking,'" Penn remembered of the 1995 film that earned him an Oscar nomination.

"Our friendship is incredibly important to me," added Vedder, who has provided music not only for "Walking" and "Wild," but also "I Am Sam." "We've had some really memorable times, whether it's running rapids or having coffee - and it's amazing how those two things with Sean can be really similar."

"I'm 47, so there's not too much music that comes after 1968 that doesn't feel like it's been done before...and then came [Vedder's] voice," Penn recalled of his first exposure to Pearl Jam in the early Nineties. "I was predisposed to want him to like me when we met, and it didn't work out too well the first time. But as it went along, I felt a kind of creative connection."

Laughing, Penn intriguingly revealed: "I asked him to play the lead in a movie that I'd written at one point."

Although Vedder wouldn't cough up any details on that long-abandoned project, he said he preferred to work with Penn in a recording studio. "People call him back immediately, because of the amount of respect he's gained and earned over the years," he grinned. "I was just another one of those calls. Immediately, I responded for ['Wild'], and said goodbye to what I thought was going to be a vacation after doing a long stretch with the band."

"I'd written the script to be, in part, told by song," Penn said of the flick, which stars Emile Hirsch in the true story of a college grad rejecting society for the dangerous embrace of the wilderness. "I'd left out narrative in those transitional sequences, knowing just the seed of what I needed from the songs to close those gaps. It was about halfway through shooting, through Emile's performance, that I started feeling that this is Eddie's voice, [his work] is the musical soul of what Emile was bringing."

"[Our friendship] just gets deeper," Vedder agreed. "The work is really where it gets exciting."