Kate Winslet and Idris Elba in “The Mountain Between Us.”
Hany Abu-Assad’s low-budget 2013 drama “Omar,” about a young Arab baker-turnedfreedom fighter, and his new epic-scale survival movie “The Mountain Between Us,” starring Kate Winslet and Idris Elba, might seem to have little in common.
Yet Abu-Assad, the first Palestinian director to receive multiple Academy Award nominations (for “Omar” and his powerful 2006 drama “Paradise Now”), says that regardless of budget size, star power or the presence of overt political content,
The Mountain Between Us (PG-13) opens Friday, Oct. 6 in Bay Area theaters.
these two seemingly unrelated films feel “very, very similar. Why? They are about what can happen when ordinary people are stuck in extraordinary circumstances.”
Abu-Assad was recently in San Francisco during the final stages of editing and sound mixing “The Mountain Between Us” (with music by “Game of Thrones” composer Ramin Djawadi), before hitting the film festival circuit with the gripping adventure-love story.
“All of the movies I’ve made are entertaining stories on the surface, but underneath, they’re a way to explore much more meaningful issues, most of all human connection,” he said.
Adapted by Chris Weitz (“About a Boy”) from a popular novel by Charles Martin, “The Mountain Between Us” features Winslet as an impetuous photojournalist, Alex, and Elba as a restrained neurosurgeon, Ben, who meet at the Salt Lake City airport when their plane to New York (to Alex’s wedding, and Ben’s planned pediatric procedure) is canceled. Alex hatches a spur-of-the-moment plan to charter a private plane to get them to Denver, a promising solution until their pilot (Beau Bridges) has a stroke at the controls, crashing their twoseater Piper in the deep snow atop Utah’s Uinta Mountain range.
“Two beautiful actors are stuck in the snow; they are strangers confronting the possibility of death,” said AbuAssad. “OK, that’s on one level. But underneath, it asks: What is the meaning of life? Is it serving another? Is it communicating what is in one’s heart? Is there a higher meaning than just surviving?”
Over a SoMa lunch, AbuAssad, 55, was animated in conversation about making his first English-language film and his foray into “a high-concept Hollywood production,” as well as his own unusual path to moviemaking.
Abu-Assad was born in Nazareth in northern Israel, and moved to Holland at age 18 to study aeronautical engineering. After a few years working at an aerospace company, he “became a filmmaker by accident” after meeting Palestinian director
Rashid Masharawi and becoming his assistant.
Abu-Assad, fluent in Arabic, English, Hebrew and Dutch, now splits his time between Nazareth and Los Angeles.
“People in both places are unhappy, striving for more — but in Nazareth they have a reason,” he said with a laugh.
Jokes about Palestinian hardship aside, AbuAssad has a reputation in the film world for telling stories that on their face grapple with oppression and occupation, yet are fundamentally sensitively drawn character studies — a quality that appealed to “Mountain Between Us” producer Peter Chernin (“Hidden Figures”).
In Abu-Assad’s moving “Omar,” the title character sneaks repeatedly across his hometown’s security wall in the West Bank to visit his Israeli girlfriend. “Paradise Now” delved headlong into the contentious subject of young suicide bombers.
When Abu-Assad read the “Mountain Between Us” script, he “couldn’t recall another love story told behind a survival story,” he said. “Maybe ‘The African Queen,’ in which two people, strangers, have to survive great danger and, by surviving, they fall for each other.”
Elba had already been cast as Ben, the careful, introverted neurosurgeon, when Abu-Assad, searching for the right female lead, “saw Idris and Kate meet for the first time at the BAFTA Awards two years ago, where both of them were presenting a prize,” he said. “Pictures of the two of them together were everywhere the next day, and the producers and I thought, aha. It turns out Kate had said to Idris that evening, ‘We should do something together.’ ”
Abu-Assad described the monthlong shoot – in Canada’s Percell Mountains, at elevations at or above 11,000 feet — as “unimaginably challenging. Just a normal walk feels like running up there.”
The high alpine areas were accessible only via specialty helicopters, which flew in the crew and actors and immense amounts of gear daily — “along with a week’s supply of food and gear, and survival huts, in case conditions shifted and you got stuck up there.”
“We haven’t seen Kate in this much peril since the sinking of the Titanic,” Abu-Assad said with a laugh.
Elba recently joked with Trevor Noah on “The Daily Show” that the “movie was a chance to see what happens to a black man at minus 38.”
It’s hardly a spoiler to mention that these two gorgeous actors’ characters would likely find some creative ways to keep each other warm during the subzero nights.
Abu-Assad said he wanted the “color-blind love story” to be “believable, absolutely. We see two people who seem to hate each other in the beginning, and in the end love each other so deeply, we have to wonder: Do they love each other because they survived? Or did they survive because they fell in love?”