Reliving Everest Death Zone horror
How did the crew of ‘Everest’ make their life-or-death thriller as realistic as possible? They hired a survivor, writes Robbie Collin
WHEN you’re climbing Mount Everest, feeling cold is to be expected. Feeling hot, on the other hand, means you’re really in trouble. The medical term for the condition is hypoxia, and it occurs in what’s both evocatively and accurately known as the Death Zone: everything from 8 500 metres above sea level and up, where the air is too thin to sustain human life.
Among its various symptoms is a sudden sense of overheating, which, when coupled with reduced mental function and impaired co-ordination, can cause climbers to start tearing off their protective clothing, though the temperature is around -30°C.
With fully conscious companions to calm you and fit you with an oxygen mask, you might still make it.
Otherwise, the odds of joining the 200 or so corpses that line the mountain’s climbing route grow shorter with every passing second.
This is one of many sensible reasons people don’t tend to climb Everest alone.
In catastrophic circumstances, however, such as the blizzard of May 10 1996, described in the new 3D survival thriller Everest , even well-prepared climbers have found themselves trapped in single combat with this giant of ice and rock.
That blizzard claimed the lives of eight climbers and guides in 24 hours, and – until the avalanche that killed 16 Sherpas last year, an event since superseded by the Nepal earthquake in April this year, in which 20 climbers perished – it was the mountain’s deadliest recorded day.
David Breashears witnessed it first-hand.
The documentary maker and mountaineer, then 40, was on Everest shooting. He and his team had captured the mountain top that morning against blue skies, but after descending to Camp II, at 6 500m, the storm struck. Normally, bad weather on Everest whips in from the west.
This time it surged up the valley from the Bay of Bengal; the wet, black remnants of a tropical cyclone.
“It was the most violent storm I’d ever seen in the mountains,” says Breashears. “I was truly terrified – not for my safety, but for the people I knew were still up there.”
On their way back to camp, Breashears and his crew had hiked past all of the climbers who were making an attempt on the summit that day, including the blizzard’s eight eventual victims. Within 12 hours, they were part of the rescue effort.
As he and his crew helped the survivors to get medical help, their cameras remained in their cases. “None of us had the heart to film it,” he says.
But no film-maker knows Everest better than Breashears, which is probably why Working Title’s Tim Bevan got in touch in 2004.
Since then potential directors and stars of Everest have come and gone.
But Breashears, as a co-producer, has outlasted them all. Recently the finished product arrived in South African cinemas, with a cast including Jake Gyllenhaal, Jason Clarke, Josh Brolin and Emily Watson, and directed by Baltasar Kormákur.
We meet in an air-conditioned hotel room on a private island in the Venetian Lagoon, the morning after the film’s world premiere at the Venice Film Festival.
Breashears, now 59, is in an amiable mood, but it’s clear he’s far from his natural habitat. He first visited Everest in 1979 at 23, and made it to the summit four years later. He’s been back to the top four times since, most recently in 2004.
Part of his job was to judge what level of physical duress to put the cast and crew through during the shoot – and also, as second-unit director, to get footage of parts of the mountain Kormákur and his crew couldn’t reach.
Sanity prevailed at all times, not least for insurance reasons, but Breashears was keen to take the cast as high as possible. “It allowed them to get closer to the essence of their characters,” he says.
The scenes at Everest’s summit were staged at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire, with a green screen, an enormous fan and industrial quantities of salt. In Nepal, the cast and crew worked at altitudes of up to 5 000m. Most of the exterior climbing scenes were filmed at a more manageable altitude of 2 000m in South Tyrol.
The 1996 disaster “changed our perception of the mountain forever”, says Breashears. “So many people had climbed it that it was losing its sheen, but the fact it was now a place of a great storm and a great tragedy made it more alluring.”
Breashears found himself back there in 1997, almost a year to the day after the tragedy. He returned as part of a research party investigating the effects of the Death Zone on the human body, and on the journey to the summit, he saw the bodies of some of the blizzard’s victims.
Many were still lashed to the guide rope that runs for the majority of the route, but one was lying near the South Summit, encased in a gently curved, coffin-shaped snowdrift. — The Daily Telegraph
● Everest is currently showing in East London