RECREATING THE VOID: An interview with Touching The Void director Kevin Macdonald. By Warren Curry 1/25/04

On Location: Director Kevin Macdonald.

True stories don't get any more amazing than the real-life tale of British mountain climbers Joe Simpson and Simon Yates' attempted 1985 conquest of the previously unconquered Siula Grande -- a mountain in the Peruvian Andes that claims a 21,000 feet peak. While the two climbers were able to amazingly scale the mountain in three and a half days, their descent proved to be disastrous when Simpson broke his right leg. With treacherously inhospitable conditions facing them, Simpson's chances for survival appeared grim. This is where the real adventure begins.

British director Kevin Macdonald's (One Day in September) documentary Touching The Void blends both a dramatic recreation of the events with a traditional documentary approach to the story, which was first told in Simpson's best-selling book. In examining the human capacity to overcome the most insurmountable of odds, the film also looks at the slippery slope of morality and the always-fascinating relationship between man and nature. MacDonald, who shot the re-enactment footage on location at Siula Grande and also the Alps, wraps these elements inside a nail-biting movie bursting with tension at every turn

I recently sat down with Kevin Macdonald at the Los Angeles press day for Touching The Void, which IFC Films released in New York on January 23. The film is slated to open in Los Angeles on February 6, and will hit more cities in the weeks to follow.

(Note: This interview was conducted as part of a press roundtable, therefore not all questions were asked by CinemaSpeak.)

(Read the review of Touching The Void)


Do you climb?

No, I don't climb. I didn't know anything about climbing at all when I started doing this.

But now you can climb?

I wouldn't go that far. I know roughly what to do. I learned the basics in order to get in and out of the crevasse. It's too much hard work.

Did you enjoy shooting in the snow and all of the other difficult elements you faced?

It was an amazing experience going into a totally different world -- it is like going to a different planet. You feel like an infant to begin with -- you learn how to walk again, somebody has to dress you the first few times you go, you have all this strange gear. You have all of these ropes around you, knots tied in certain ways. It's an adventure…it was hard work, it was really physically very arduous, and I often wondered why I was doing this.

Why did you choose to tell the story using a re-enactment of the events?

That was the biggest challenge in making the film. I come from very much a purist documentary background and don't really like the whole notion of reconstruction. I think often it's very cheesy, and the reason it's cheesy is because the drama can never live up to the truth and the integrity of the real experience and the real people. So when you go from the real people to the drama, the drama is weak -- it has no weight to it. It took me a long time to make the decision to whether or not I could get away with this. It was always a big risk. I didn't know whether it would work until we started putting the film together, and I felt it did. What we tried to do is just make the drama feel voyeuristic, as though you were really there on the mountain following them. It's not too mannered; not shot in the way a big movie would be shot. It's a lot of wobbly camera -- not deliberately done like that, it's just what we could get.

Another thing is just filming everything for real. A lot of mountain films are done in a studio. Vertical Limit had the crevasse scene -- it didn't look anything like a crevasse. You could feel that; you know that even if you don't know what a real crevasse is like. Just coming from a documentary background, I brought that kind of perspective. All of the night sequences on the mountain are all filmed on a mountain at night with them hanging off a cliff, all of the storm stuff is filmed in real storms, very bad conditions. The actors aren't having to pretend that they're cold, they really are.

How did you cast the actors for the re-enactment?

It took quite a long time to find the right people. I didn't want anyone who was at all known and any sort of recognizable face, because I think that would've broken the spell. Also, I wanted to get people who looked at least vaguely like the real people and what they could've looked like back then. I wanted to get people who were prepared to do anything. They were young guys, who'd done very little prior to this. They were young, keen, hungry. They would do anything; things that a star would not have put up with. They were willing to sleep in a dormitory in a hut up in the mountains or sleep in a tent or go out in the cold and have icicles grow on their face. Not many people would be willing to do that.

Did you consider trying to tell the story without revealing Joe's fate?

One of the great contradictions of the film is that you have the two people there, and you know that (Joe) survives because he's there and he's alive. I kind of felt that if you were going to do it as a documentary then you know (his fate), because you have to have the real person. People had tried to do it as a drama beforehand -- there had been a lot of scripts written but nobody had been able to successfully translate the story into a drama, because it's all about what's going on inside your head. I think I'm not being arrogant when I say this is the only way you could do justice to the story.

But that was a problem -- I was trying to create a story that was tense, that was gripping and which you want to know the outcome, yet the outcome is always sitting there in front of your nose. My feeling is that in a Tom Cruise movie you know Tom Cruise is going to survive in the end. That's the genre; you know the big star is not going to die. Yet you suspend disbelief and invest emotional time and effort in the movie. I think the same thing applies in this case. When we go into a movie theater, all of us sort of suspend a certain rational thought process. Interestingly, I haven't heard that many people say to me that they didn't buy the story because they knew (Joe) survived. A couple of people have, but not that many. (laughs)

Was it a challenge not to sensationalize the material? You're making a very exciting, thrilling film, but you also have to be very sensitive to the real people involved.

That's always what the case is in a documentary, especially the kind of documentaries I've been trying to do for cinema. You're dramatizing the material to an extent, but you have to remain truthful and honest at the same time because you're dealing with real people's emotions and the reality of what happened to them. I'm very pleased that Joe feels the film is an accurate representation of what he went through. That's not the same for Simon -- Simon doesn't like the film. He actually hasn't spoken to me since we filmed in Peru. He found it such an upsetting experience. That's always a difficult thing as a documentary filmmaker, but that's also what makes documentaries wonderful and different than drama and exciting. This story, if it were made into a drama, wouldn't seem as incredible.

This film plays upon universal themes so much that it fascinates people who've never been in that sort of environment or, for that matter, even seen snow fall.

There is kind of a mythological level and a deep thematic level to it that's really powerful -- kind of a spiritual element. It's about living in a universe without a God. How you find the resolve and determination within yourself instead of looking to a spiritual thing; to find it within yourself to carry on. That's something that can speak to anybody -- maybe not so strongly to people who are religious, but those who are religious could have a different interpretation of the film; they could see it as a story of miracles.

Talk a bit more about the physical challenges of the location shooting.

All of the time when you're shooting in this real location, particularly on a mountain, where the weather is severe and is not forecast very well, you are always having to respect the location in a way. Often with movies, what it's about is controlling everything -- with your rain machine you make the rain, you build the street and you decide when the sun's going to go down. In this case, you had to respect the mountain, so I had to be much more flexible. You'd hear the night before that the weather was going to be good, and then you'd wake up and it'd be snowing. Then you'd have to say, "Okay, we can shoot this here if we're in the right location, but we can't travel very far because it's a storm." Other days you'd want to get two shots for a storm sequence and it'd be sunny. It all became a big jigsaw puzzle.

What sort of reaction has this film received from the climbing community?

From the climbing community, it's been extremely positive. It's played at various festivals -- Toronto, Telluride -- and it's also played at 3 mountain festivals, which are festivals of mountain climbing films and nature (films), and at each of those festivals it won the main prize. They feel it's quite authentic.

And you've mentioned Simon's reaction hasn't been so positive.

For Simon it's very difficult, because Joe's the hero and Simon's not so much the hero -- he's the guy who got blamed when he got back. They're both quite famous in the climbing world because of this story. Simon has had to live with everyone knowing him as the man who cut the rope, and I think that's quite difficult to live with. But he's also used it to publicize his own career -- he does guiding; he takes groups up the Himalayas. The reason people go with him is because he's kind of this famous person. It was hard for him.

But I'm pleased with the way both of them in the film are very frank and very honest. I think there's this real frankness that is very rare. I think that's part of the climbing ethos -- they tell you what they think. That also means they'll tell you what most people would censor. That was a great blessing as a filmmaker.

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