At anchor off Point Dume, we sit, Sean Penn and I. The two big hearted Chevy engines are quiet at last, their silence a rumble in the belly, a hum in the throat, a burr in the head, the body echo of their full-throttled roar. It is a proud thing, this boat - his first, purchased secondhand for a good price. He has taken a safety course - he has two young children - and before goosing its thirty-four feet out of the slip this morning, he pointed out the cabinet where the life jackets are stored, just in case.
..."I'm not going to argue with you", Penn says when I suggest that maybe he's too damned good an actor to give it up. Palms up, end of response. Emotional translucen-ce? "You get that from kids all the time ", he says dismissively. "It's like surfing: Your work is in paddling. After that it ought to be harmony. Once you're in the wave - and the homework you do as an actor is like paddling to that wave - you can't anticipate what that wave's going to do. You just try to make your life as comfortable as you can within it"..."The priority's so damned clear", Sean says. "Living your art doesn't mean putting your career first. Living your art is being true to growth and love".
...How, I ask Penn, do you come to terms with the rage, the guilt, the flame of need and fear, all the stuff of the screenplays you've written?
"I think you replace it", he says softly. "You try to replace it" - he winces, and his eyes appear to moisten - "with love. You surrender to the design going wrong, the way you had it in your head. It's a daily effort. Time will do it, too," he says after a long silence. "I count on time for most things.  If you just survive through it, time itself is going to give you a gift. We're told from the first time we hit a story-writing course, 'You want a beginning, a middle and an end'. The end stuff is pretty dangerous if you're not dead. The two movies I wrote, I meant to leave them as question marks - the morality, the hope. You change every day. You've got to give yourself time to breathe. I've been in that place where I could not move. Motivation for anything was way out of reach. Losing track of time, all of that. That's scary. A doctor had a pen on paper to give me a Prozac prescription at one point, and I just wasn't going to take it. I was worried about the diminishment of highs and lows. I guess I didn't feel I was on the verge of killing myself".
He does not seem like an asshole, and I tell him so. "I don't need to speak to that stuff. How it impacts what I do now is zero".
He still takes comfort in alcohol, but all I see him drink is water, ice tea and Orangina. He has a temper, but he has learned to cloak it. "Provoked into something physical?" he says. "It was there. It happened a lot. I'm extremely careful about that. The jail thing - I've done that, and it's terrible bore. On a general principle, I would always like to move toward nonviolence". He laughs softly. "But most important, I don't want to go away from my kids".
... The work he does speaks for him. His best stuff has never been about folks with more money, less pain and better looks than you or me. It's about the terror and the pity of human connection at its deepest level: love...The soul of human existence resides in love, however torn and incomplete. "That's what the movies are", he tells me. "God knows if they have any value at all, but somewhere inside anybody that's doing it, they've got to believe that there's some love to be given, and they have to have a need to give it. I've never felt like I wanted to say, 'Look at me', but I have wanted to say, 'Look at us'. My eyes are your eyes - if I'm right. If I'm wrong, it's because I wasn't looking through my eyes clearly. If you're doing it right, then it's all of us".
...I ask whether the Oscar nomination for Dead Man Walking changed the way he relates to Hollywood and vice versa.
"Money went up", he says.
That's it?
"Money goes way up".
How much up?
"It goes WAY up".
As a director, Penn works cheap; the budget on each film he has directed was around $10 million, a shard of the industry average.
Did they break even?
"Not a clue. MGM would know about The Indian Runner, but they'd misreport it, I'm sure. Nobody was looking out for it. It was pretty well dumped".
When I tell him that it's hard to imagine him pitching, sucking up to the suits, he nods. "I have a certain sense of justice that gets riled up - where the big money's going, where the backing is. So I have a partner who does that. I take it to a certain point; if I start to turn red, I go home to see the kids or I go out on the boat".
In Hollywood his sense of justice means that Sean Penn will always be an angry man. Because he can't love the movies, can't sit up nights at the typewriter trying to make a scene work, can't ask his film family to bleed emotion for him without hating the business and the bile it retches up for mass consumption. "You watch trailers for these movies, and you say, 'How can they be selling this again? The same old FUCKING thing?' Most of the dogs that are led to the water and drinking it - their pools are heated. This is not some guy who needs the job. Do the Toyota commercial if you need the dough, buddy".
He pauses, shakes his head once, twice, until the words pour out again. "I think they're bunch of fucking whores. I don't think you can get away with putting your talents into a toilet bowl and not having them flushed away. Forever. There is a level of murder of one's own soul and of the culture that they're supposed to be feeding vitamins to - or at least a good hamburger. It's not just studios making these movies. They're getting major directors. Most actors. These people have the most fantastically charming rationales for it all, this way of discrediting the kinds of things I'm saying, all that sleight of hand. But then, at a certain point, you say no. 'No. I don't believe you; you're a fucking liar; you don't respect me; you don't respect mankind; you don't respect yourself. And you're coming out here, and this is the way you share your heart? GO FUCK YOURSELF!".
It's good that Sean Penn has perhaps mellowed, yes? Good, too, that he is married and a father, that he can act when he wants to act, and that he also seeks to share his heart by making films of his own. But this outburst, delivered straight, is telling. He seems weary, fragile. Hard work, toting so heavy a sense of justice for so long. Exhausting. Only the very vulnerable and wounded can do it. Or need to.
"I have a little marble in my head" says Penn, "and I'm moving it around, looking for which hole it's supposed to go in" I think he's talking about the movies again - his and theirs, and the dark veil of lies we grope through, seeking some truth, some love, some justice. Maybe not;  maybe he just has a marble in his head. "You put the marble in your head believing, hoping you're going to relate to what's being said, what's being supposedly shared and expressed".
Eyes closed, he claps his hands behind his head. "They give you a marble, but there is no home for it".
Penn blinks open his eyes, staring blankly. "Anybody can make a marble", he says. "Making a home's another thing".

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