FROM HOLLYWOOD TO HIGH DESERT WITH JUSTIN CHATWIN
Words by Jon Beck | Photography by John Hebert
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Santa Rosalia, Baja California Sur, Mexico. We’re sitting on a low wall, and a pigeon has just exploded on us. As the ambulance which hit the unfortunate bird rolled to a stop a few feet away, our thoughts are both with tending to our friend being loaded for transport to a medevac flight from La Paz, and how to clean all this blood off our clothes.
Searching out new trails in Mexico, without maps, might sound sketchy. For Justin Chatwin, sketchy can become sanctuary. This isn’t a question of reckless versus responsible – it’s one of resignation versus revelation. Resigning oneself to a stifling suburban existence, where boundaries are clearly defined, and your path is one of simply following signs that others have already planted, or … revelation in finding a new line. A new way of existing. It could be on the trail as a rider, or on the screen as an actor.
It all begins with a willingness to explore a simple question: Where does that path lead?
In a world of paved-over urban centers, you can look down a road and know exactly where it leads. Information signals follow predefined invisible routes through the air, directing us through screens that have become human appendages. We move and communicate within a set of physical and cultural boundaries. In the name of progress, we’ve built ourselves a prison that offers the illusion of freedom.
Chatwin walked out of this prison at an early age, and into the wild. Uncharted environments were a playground for both mind and body. Where suburbia offered a form of creativity equivalent to a paint-by-numbers book, the mountains around his home on Vancouver Island offered uncarved marble that Justin would frequently engrave both on foot and with a snowboard.
Getting off a chairlift and heading into the backcountry became both studio and sanctuary for Chatwin. A creative place where he could be with his thoughts and discover the unknown places both in the environment and in himself. His time exploring also resulted in a snowboarding sponsorship by the eleventh grade.
High school held another discovery for Chatwin, after he signed up for a drama class. It was a good way to meet girls, but he saw something else as well. In a mostly empty and dimly lit room, Justin saw paths. With a minimal script, he could map uncharted territory into the backcountry of himself. He became a blank canvas. Another uncarved marble which could be shaped in nearly endless ways.
Vancouver Island can be a beautiful place to grow up, but the confinement of suburbia has a similar quality wherever it exists. He needed to get off the island, and acting became his ticket out of a stifling and unfulfilling environment, toward a new form of exploration. Acting became another mountain to climb, another series of unknown paths he was curious to follow. But this ticket wasn’t handed to him. Getting himself to auditions at age 16 required four-hour boat rides across the Salish Sea.
By 2005, Justin already had a long list of film and TV credits to his name. Landing the role as Tom Cruise’s rebellious son in War of the Worlds is perhaps the theatrical equivalent of an experienced motorcycle racer deciding to enter the Dakar Rally – it takes a familiar environment to a whole new level. The climb into the upper echelons of Hollywood was full of unknowns, and potentially sketchy as hell, but he now had Steven Spielberg as a guide.
Working with producer John Wells over four seasons on Showtime’s Shameless was another exploration of new paths, both on- and off-set. While costarring as Jimmy Lishman alongside William H. Macy, the Triumph Bonneville that Macy rode to set each day caught Justin’s eye. As a kid, Justin had a 1991 Honda XR that he would ride around on Vancouver Island, but he’d stopped riding it around age 15. Now, at age 28, motorcycles began to make their way back into his life.
After picking up a Harley Night Train, Justin grabbed a 35mm rangefinder camera and did a motorcycle trip with Macy. Crafting a story about the trip for The New York Times was a perfect blend of Justin’s two seemingly unrelated identities: adventure-seeking backcountry snowboarder and storytelling Hollywood actor. In motorcycling, he’d found a new mountain, filled with literal paths to explore.
His new backcountry became any place his tires could reach. Following that initial trip with Macy, Justin later rode across America five times. A new fire had been lit. Travel became a beneficial fever that killed urban social ills. Seeking new stories, and new borders to cross, he spent a few weeks building a Harley Sportster, then pointed it south and rode from the U.S. to Patagonia.
Along with its benefits, exploration has its sacrifices. In the case of riding half the Western Hemisphere, one of the sacrifices was the motorcycle itself. The punishing roads of Central and South America slowly destroyed the Harley, so when the trip concluded, Justin donated what was left to an Argentinian resident, adopted a dog, and returned north to continue exploring America in a camper.
This form of roving seems in keeping with Justin Chatwin’s ancestry. Largely a collection of Eastern European Gypsies and French-Canadian runaways, his people were perhaps seen as nonconformist misfits, but may in fact have been in tune with more ancient and natural ways of being. When comparing the concepts of sitting in a structure made of paints and plastics while clothed in synthetic fabrics and communicating in a binary language using buttons attached to printed circuit boards – versus bathing in a river – the question of which is more natural seems inherently obvious. The question of which is more necessary is a deeper discussion.
It comes as no surprise that another Chatwin, Justin’s great-uncle Bruce, wrote books as a traveler exploring these very questions of existence, and the urge to travel. In “The Songlines”, Bruce Chatwin explored the Australian Outback, and specifically the Aboriginal “dreaming tracks” which were believed to be invisible pathways used by their ancestors to sing the world into existence. Considering this philosophy at its most basic, one is creating paths which in turn create their future. As Bruce Chatwin wrote, “To some, the Songlines were like the Art of Memory in reverse.”
Justin Chatwin’s travels allowed him to consider new paths. To ask questions that sometimes come only with time on the road.
Like Bruce, Justin had found “The road allowed me to be with my thoughts. Like a monastery, but at a higher speed.” He’d found his Dreaming Tracks, they just happened to have tread patterns on them. After leaving the Harley in South America, those tread patterns later went from street bias to knobbies.
Between acting jobs, “how much nature can I touch in a day” became the goal. A peripatetic urge in action. Seeing a trail and wondering where it went was just the beginning. Justin’s monastery moves quickly, and dirt bikes became the perfect tool to explore more. He discovered a world of new paths, and farther became an artist-explorer. A wandering writer. A gypsy, riding hard enduro.
As the years passed, and experience in both film and travel grew, Justin gained new insights into both himself and the industry he had been part of for so long. Exploration of roads and roles seemed nearly identical. Finding direction in a character would connect points in a story, just as finding routes in the wilderness would connect communities.
Travel began providing Justin with an even greater form of exploration than working at the highest levels in Hollywood. On the road, there was no script to serve as a guide. Each new place held people and experiences that were completely unknown just a day before. He tells me “The characters I met in bars became better than any acting class I could sit in, and the stories I came across and lived were better than any story I could find in a book or on TV.”
With time and experience, Justin’s views on the exploration of acting have evolved. He found the art and wonder of an unscripted journey to be pure creativity. Acting became a tool which could be used to tell the story.
“Actors are primarily craftsmen who serve another artist’s vision. I enjoy it, but you’re telling someone else’s story – it’s very charted territory for me. My new uncharted wilderness is in writing and directing, to share some of these stories from the road.”
One of the TV pilots Justin is currently working on, Wonder Valley, has grown out of his high-desert collective, the Wonder Valley High Tea Society. Similar to Taoist tea houses of the early 1900s, the Wonder Valley High Tea Society is a creative community of curious minds, free to pursue ideas in a place void of stigma stemming from class or money. But, unlike centuries-old Taoist tea houses, these guys also build dirt bike trails.
Seeking new experiences can be sketchy. While things like push-starting a dead Honda in Baja is fairly standard stuff, grabbing an Africa Twin and going for your first ride on a heavyweight adventure bike around Kelso Dunes in the Mojave Desert is less standard. On one of my first dirt bike rides with Justin, our small group took a break where the trail ended at a small cliff made by a now-dry waterfall. The reaction to being told “this section can’t be ridden” was riding it.
Passing motorcycles down a waterfall by hand is sketchy, but we were better for it. Struggle, and unusual levels of effort, are instructive. Similar to trying new things during the journey of becoming a character for a role, the trail can make you try things you haven’t before, testing your limits, and making you push beyond physical and mental barriers. Great failure sometimes runs on a parallel track with great success. Uncharted terrain is sometimes bloody. A pigeon’s heart might get squeezed out of a bird like a shooter marble and land at your feet while you’re arranging medevac flights from a Southern Baja hospital, but you’re still learning. It’s still part of the adventure.
Justin’s life on the road plays out better than most screenplays one could imagine. Bathing in rivers. Drinking tea on top of a mountain. Outdoor sex. Eating at local farms. He once ended up working as a pearl diver in Tahiti based on a conversation with a stranger at a bar. His is a life without maps. It’s a life of being willing to explore firsthand where the path leads.