Blizzards didn’t stop Winslet, Elba in ‘Mountain’
TORONTO: Kate Winslet and Idris Elba may have been thrown into blizzards while filming the survival love story ‘The Mountain Between Us’, but the unpredictable Canadian weather and wading in knee-deep snow did not scare the actors away.
The film, based on the 2011 novel of the same name by Charles Martin, follows two strangers stranded on a mountain after a spectacular plane crash. It was filmed in the Canadian Rockies.
Winslet plays a photo journalist who is rushing to her wedding, while Elba is a neurosurgeon on route to a patient who needs emergency surgery.
They charter a plane after their commercial flight is cancelled, but after the pilot suffers a stroke mid-flight, they end up trying to survive in harsh mountain weather, making a perilous trek down thousands of feet.
“We literally wouldn’t know what conditions we’d be confronted with every day and we just had to cope and get on. You can’t not do it because there’s a blizzard,” said Winslet.
If anything, Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad saw an opportunity with the inclement weather.
“Hany would say, ‘Get out there! It’s amazing! The blizzard is incredible!’” Winslet said at the film’s red carpet premiere at the Toronto film festival on Sunday.
“We made this film in Canada, with Canadians. We did not want to go home,” Winslet said of how much she enjoyed making the film.
Abu-Assad, who previously directed Oscar-nominated films ‘Omar’ and ‘Paradise Now’, told audiences there were no green screen special effects other than the crash.
‘The Mountain Between Us’ is Abu-Assad’s first big English language film and starts its movie theatre roll-out in October.