Movies make for the mountains

By Russell Baillie

Holy crampons Batman! It's remarkable how full the Southern Alps are getting with international film crews.

Yes, yet another Mainland mountain movie production is taking to the slopes, this one starring Chris O'Donnell - the young American actor who played the boy wonder in blockbuster Batman and Robin.

O'Donnell will be donning snow goggles rather than Robin's mask for The Vertical Limit, a rescue drama set on the Himalayan peak K2 , the world's second highest mountain.

The Queenstown and Mt Cook regions will double for Nepal.

The director is expatriate New Zealander Martin Campbell, who has had international successes with prod-uctions including the Bond film GoldenEye and The Mask of Zorro.

The producer is Lloyd Phillips, another Kiwi exile in Hollywood.

In the past month Queenstown has hosted another expatriate director, Roger Donaldson, who was filming a tele-feature titled Fearless in its environs with a 100-strong crew.

In The Vertical Limit, O'Donnell plays a young mountain climber who retires from the sport and becomes estranged from his sister after the death while mountain-climbing of their father.

Years later, his sister and her team are trapped on K2 - and he is the only man who can rescue them.

The film is already in preproduction and the cameras are scheduled to roll from August to January, aiming at an American release date in the middle of next year.

As well as using locations in the Southern Alps, some scenes will be shot in a temporary refrigerated studio being built near Queenstown.

The Vertical Limit is being produced by New Zealand company Mountain High Productions for Hollywood studio Columbia Pictures.

The movie will employ an international and local crew of about 250, including mountaineers and mountain safety experts.