Jason Clarke as Rob Hall in the 2015 Movie Everest. Photo / Supplied
Jason Clarke as Rob Hall in the 2015 Movie Everest. Photo / Supplied
The film Everest, about the alpine tragedy that claimed the lives of New Zealanders Rob Hall and Andy Harris and six others, is poised to take the world by storm. Des Sampson and Russell Baillie went behind the scenes.
Tonight, it would appear everyone is feeling on top of the world. Inside the Adventure Consultants company mess tent at Mt Everest's Base Camp, 5365m up, guides and clients are playing cards and swapping yarns. There's an eeriness to the evening, too. The group's conversation is punctuated by sounds of rumbling, cracking ice from higher up.
Tomorrow, those in the tent will climb to the three camps above, then push to the summit at 8848m. And some will never return.
Right now though, the scene is jovial, the air is surprisingly warm and oxygenated. That's because the tent isn't at cruising altitude but within London's Pinewood studios. It's day 39 of Everest, a film about how and why New Zealand guides Rob Hall and Andy Harris, American guide Scott Fischer and others perished on that overcrowded storm-lashed mountain on May 11, 1996.
Hall, played by Australian actor Jason Clarke, is holding court in the tent scene, which also includes Beck Weathers (Josh Brolin), Harris (Martin Henderson), Krakauer (Michael Kelly) and John Hawkes (Doug Hansen).
Amid the banter, Kelly's Krakauer - the man who wrote Into Thin Air, the definitive account of the tragedy - feels the need to play journalist. He asks the whole group why they need to climb the world's tallest peak.
There's a pause. A grinning Hall and the rest shout: "Because it's there!" The famous line belongs to climber George Mallory, whose frozen body has lain on the mountain for 90 years.
Today's shoot might look a little too comfortable to be true. But the cast and crew have already been to Nepal, where altitude sickness was a problem and the camera gear came in by yak. In the Italian alps the production was buffeted by storms and had to deal with minus-30C temperatures and the risk of avalanche.
"Because they had been through those two things before we got anywhere near a sound stage, they knew what it felt like," New Zealand-born, English producer Tim Bevan tells the Herald later. "It was their research."
"In some ways, that also made the acting easier," says Clarke on set. "Because when you walk on set and it's a mountain 5500m up, you're battling the elements and you're physically stuffed. There's not really a whole lot of acting required at that point."
The film has endured some other storms itself since Bevan, one of the founders of British film giant, Working Title Pictures, initiated the project having finished reading Into Thin Air in a weekend in the early noughties.
Since then, Everest has gone through false starts, ditched scripts and financial backing falling through for the eventual US$65 million ($99 million) budget.
But based on its selection as the opening night screening for the influential Venice Film Festival and a Herald viewing of the finished film, it looks like Everest has "major hit" written all over it.
Though it traverses much of the same territory, Everest isn't an adaptation of Into Thin Air. Krakauer's book was made into a quickly forgotten television movie in 1997.
Instead, the script is based, in part, on Left For Dead by one of Hall's clients, Beck Weathers, which Universal Studios had purchased. The studio - which owns Working Title - also grabbed the rights to transcripts of the radio traffic on that day, which included the satellite-phone-to-radio conversation between Hall and his wife, Jan Arnold, at home in Christchurch as he lay dying near the summit.
Keira Knightley plays Rob Hall's wife, Jan Arnold. Photo / Supplied
The then-pregnant Arnold is played by English star Keira Knightley. The heavyweight cast also includes Robin Wright as Beck Weathers' wife, Peach, Sam Worthington as Kiwi climber Guy Cotter and Jake Gyllenhaal as celebrated American mountaineer Fischer. While it's disarming to hear Knightley's borrowed accent, the best Kiwi vowels belong to veteran English actress Emily Watson, who plays Helen Wilton, the base camp manager for Hall's guiding company.
If it's got an ensemble of stars that might remind of an old fashioned disaster movie, Bevan says making a drama out of the complex events was a matter of finding an emotional core to the story.
He credits screenwriter Bill Nicholson, who came up with the idea of making the film focus on Hall, the experienced mountaineer who perished, and Weathers, the rich American client climber who should have died but somehow survived.
"And you knew you always had the end to the movie because [of] the phone call and the helicopter rescue and the rest of it. But if you try to follow too many stories, you will trip yourself up."
Clarke got the role of Hall after Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman bowed out. The tall Australian actor, who has starred in Zero Dark Thirty and the latest Terminator movie, looks more like Hall than the other contenders. He also comes with less film star baggage.
"That's the whole thing. He is Rob Hall within two minutes of the film starting, rather than a movie star going up Everest." says Bevan. "So we were very lucky in that respect, because it gives it a veracity it wouldn't otherwise have.
Rob Hall
Clarke came to New Zealand to meet Arnold and Hall's family after he was cast.
"I was very conscious of respecting his legacy, both as a father and as the man he is to New Zealand," says Clarke, "but at the same time you have to be responsible to the story and to what happened - the real events and the mistakes that were made. That's why I met with his wife Jan and his daughter Sarah, read a couple of his diaries, listened to the phone calls he made to Jan from Everest, and talked to some of his fellow climbers. That let me get a real sense of who he was. He was more than just a climber or thrill-seeker. He was a pioneer."
Clarke went climbing in the Southern Alps with co-star Henderson and the real Cotter, who acted as an adviser on the film.
"It got a bit hairy at times. We went up a peak in the Tasman Glacier and there were 60km/h winds swirling around, so that really put us to the test. At one point I got stuck on an ice-ridge - I had one foot on the ledge and the other dangling down. Then I slipped and I was literally hanging over the edge, staring down at an 11,000ft sheer drop below. When you're in a situation like that, you think: 'What the hell am I doing here? I'm just an actor.'"
Equally terrifying, jests Clarke, is the reaction New Zealand audiences will likely have to his dialogue.
"I think I'll probably get a lot of ribbing from them, because Rob had a particularly strong accent. I'm sure some Kiwis will come up afterwards and say; 'Where's your f***ing Kiwi accent, mate?'
Bevan considered shooting the film in New Zealand. But he says it's a long way from Working Title's English headquarters and British tax credits. He'd heard about the difficulties that beset mountaineering film The Vertical Limit in 2000, which was filmed in the Southern Alps.
Everest is directed by Icelander Baltasar Kormakur, who, before he headed to Hollywood, made The Deep, the story of about a fisherman trying to survive in the freezing Atlantic Ocean.
"We knew he could operate at low temperatures," laughs Bevan of the director. "We knew he had a big beard, he looked like a guy who could climb a mountain. So he's the right sort of person to do it and he wanted to do it in a visceral way. He would lead from the front."
"Man versus nature is something that's always fascinated me," says Kormakur during a break at Pinewood, "probably because I come from Iceland, a country that is quite extreme. So, it's very natural for me that my stories carry that message. It's not a macho thing.
"Also, hardship, or extreme and scary situations, pull out the real person's character because it's mental strength, not physical strength, that's more important in these situations."
Though it's sure to revive arguments among many in the climbing community, the film steers away from pinning responsibility for the tragedy on anyone.
"There are a lot of conflicting stories about this event but I wasn't interested in trying to find fault or apportion blame," says Kormakur. "That's not me shying away from the conflict, it's just me trying to tell our version of the story and leaving it up to the audience to make up their own minds, because that's all you can do in this situation, where no one knows the truth."
A month before Everest is due to open the 2015 Venice Film Festival, Bevan sits in an Auckland hotel room, having made a whistlestop tour to the country of his birth - his English father was the local GP in Queenstown in the 1950s and 1960s before heading back to Britain with his young family. He still carries a New Zealand passport.
He founded Working Title, which has become the hit factory of the British movie industry, with Eric Fellner in the mid-80s.
Everest will be his 70th or so producer credit. He's been nominated for four Best Picture Oscars. "It's sweet of you to say so," he smiles when it's suggested Everest might well be a fifth.
The previous day Bevan had been in Christchurch showing the film to Arnold, Hall and Harris' family and some of the others depicted in the film.
"When you are making a film about real people and real things - and I was the person who went out and got their approval - you kind of have to go full circle."
He says they were comfortable with the finished product. Because now the story of the deaths of Hall and Harris and many others is very much a product - one heading into the global marketplace a few weeks after its Venice bow on September 2.
The movie's mid-September release timing has worked before for Working Title, ever since they unleashed the hit Four Weddings and a Funeral in 1994.
Bevan says it's a good time to release non-American English language movies, after the blockbuster season of the northern summer and the films vying for Oscars at the end of the year.
"It's not quite full-on Hollywood commercial. But it's got that potential. We felt, 'let's be the first grown-up film of the [northern] autumn. What will sell Everest, which has been shot in 3D, to the rest of the world is spectacle.
"It's a disaster movie. It's spectacular and guess what? - it has got amazing emotion in it, too. And the emotional thing will hook a whole lot of people who weren't expecting that to be there."
Bevan concedes that Everest doesn't address some things about Hall, Harris and their high alpine-climbing ilk. Not the question of why they died, but the question of why they knew they might, every time they ventured into Everest's death-zone.
"What we don't deal with in the film - and rightly so - is that there is an odd relationship with death with these people. They know the stakes of what they are doing very clearly. And still they go."
