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The cast and director talk about their decision to be a part of the film in part one of our two-part interview.

In May 1996, a group of mountaineers found themselves trapped on Mount Everest after being caught in a blizzard. By the time the storm passed, eight people would have lost their lives. This Friday, Everest hits theaters telling the tale of that tragic event. We sat down with director Baltasar Kormáku and actors Jake Gyllenhaal, Jason Clarke, Josh Brolin, Emily Watson, Jon Hawkes and Michael Kelly to talk about the experience of bringing Everest to the big screen.

What was it about this story that made each of you want to be a part of it?

Baltasar Kormáku: Well, for me it was a no-brainer, an offer to make a movie on Everest. There was no question in mind that I wanted to do this. The story is very real, and it’s hard to come by those kinds of stories, but it also has a huge scope. As I’ve said, it’s not about a storm hitting people on a mountain; there are a lot of things that happened before that. And I think that it’s also about getting down a mountain, not getting up a mountain.

Michael Kelly: By the time I jumped onboard all these people were already attached, so for me it was like, “Oh, wow. These are all these actors who I very much look up to and respect.” So the opportunity to work with them, that with the story itself—it’s an incredibly compelling story—so to try to tell that story and be a part of that was just a huge honor for me.

Josh Brolin: I knew the story. I knew the book. I had a massive reaction to the book. And then I also, before I had met Balt, I had a director come over to my office and sell the film to me and say, “We’re gonna do a film and it’s not gonna be any of that Hollywood bullshit. It’s gonna be real.” And I thought, “Who is this kook?” (laughs) And then Baltasar came into the meeting after that and I thought, “I need to work with this guy.” Because there was none of that. It was real, it was him, he was 100% organic, and the fact that I thought he was perfect to direct something as powerful as this, and as sensitive as this, I needed to work with him. And it really turned out well.

Jason Clarke: I was always haunted by the fact that Rob (Hall) was a man who was trapped on top of the world and couldn’t get home to his pregnant wife. That really haunted me. He was sitting up there, his wife was pregnant, and he couldn’t get home. And then the more you dive into it, the richer and more complicated it got. It was like a detective story of what happened. (Author) John Krakauer wrote an extraordinary book of it [Into Thin Air], and you kept following this trail. And it’s just this massive journey of people dying and wanting to live. Just wanting to live in extraordinarily inhospitable places, and understanding what it is to live. It’s just stayed with me forever.

Emily Watson: I had a very strange and bizarre connection to the story. I wasn’t connected myself to the story, but this event happened on the day that my very first film premiered in Cannes. And I was having the most intense moment and bizarre moment of my life, but I remember hearing the story that this guy was on the mountain and he couldn’t get down, he was dying, and he called his wife. Hearing the story unfold—just being transported away from my own sense of importance for a few minutes—of this unbelievable event. So then when I read the script and met Balt, I felt a connection to it. But it also really fascinated me to play somebody like this, who is being a bystander. I thought that was a really interesting thing to do, to be a bystander in somebody else’s incredibly intense emotional story, and being helpless to serve it.

Jake Gyllenhaal: I loved the book, and I was aware of the situation when it happened in reality. But to me what was so moving was the idea of the inevitable in a movie, which felt like reality to me, in a massive, entertaining movie where Mother Nature wins. These characters, particularly with Rob and Scott (Fischer), were not necessarily afraid of. They ventured into the idea of life and death, and walked the precipice of that all the time. And I liked that idea. I liked a movie that was dealing with something that felt very honest. And a tangent of that is that the experience was like that, too. Like Josh said, Balt promised us that we were going to be in the elements. That we were going to make a movie where we would legitimately be cold and legitimately be scared. And that’s fun for someone like me. And I speak for almost all of us, I think, when I say that’s what we’re looking for. We get to learn something about our lives as well as do the work that we love, and that’s what Balt promised us. I just wanted to be a part of it in whatever way.

Jon Hawkes: I had gotten the script in January 2013, I think. I sat down with Balt a month later. And for me it was Balt. I just had a feeling that this would be the guy to make this movie, and somebody I would really enjoy getting to know and work with. It all turned out to be true.

As actors, do you feel you have an adventurous spirit, similar to the spirits of the real-life people you’re portraying in the film?

JG: I find it hard to compare acting to anything in the real world in a sense that, what we’re trying to do is mimic what these guys did and continued to do, which is legitimately risk their lives. I mean, we had maybe 25% at times when it was the harshest for us, from what they experienced in reality. But I think there is nothing more fun than putting yourself, at least for me, in a situation that feels as real as possible; because it’s fun for me to think of an audience watching that and feeling those feelings as well. I believe in the unconscious experience of a movie. That is all in there. It’s all over the frame and all over everybody who is in the movie.

JB: We’re trying to be as respectful as we possibly can, given what we do. We fake it; we simulate it. But we’re not even gonna get 1% of what really happened. We’ll never understand it. But if we can respectfully honor this incredible story in any possible way through what we do, that’s the intention.

When portraying real-life characters like these, how much of that informs your process?

JC: Everything. It has to. And maybe Balt will use it or won’t use it, but when these are real people and you’ve met them, and they have a daughter, and they’ve lived their lives and have opened up themselves to give you little bits to help you make it, especially after holding onto it for twenty years, yeah, you do your homework. You come with everything that you have, and eventually you submit to the director and the film that he’s making, but you fight to maintain the integrity of the person that you’ve gotten to know and understand.

JG: I don’t really look like Scott (Fischer), but the essence of who Scott was was very important to capture. Because in other stories about this expedition, Scott had been made into the antagonist. I think for the purpose of trying to create tension in any story, you need someone like that. But what I discovered was that he was truly a free spirit and an incredibly positive and loving person. And his children contacted me because they were worried; they didn’t know how he was going to be portrayed. But it wasn’t just us specifically looking after ourselves; it was all of us looking after all the characters and people who were on this expedition. Just double-checking that nobody was put into a corner of cliché or caricature, and just finding the essence of who these people were. That was the most important thing; because none of us are ever gonna get who these people are. We’re not doing imitations. We’re trying to create the spirit of this adventure, and that all came from Balt.

EW: I think one of the reasons that the sense of the characters works is because, in real life, details don’t all add up. They don’t add up to a nice equation of who somebody is. I felt one of the principal factors in this film was chaos. Nothing quite made sense, nothing quite added up. And so you just have to go with that.

 

Read part two of the interview here.

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