A flag has been planted in one of the most hotly contested territories of the film festival season. Everest, a new movie about the two rival missions up the mountain in 1996, has been chosen as the opening night film of this year’s Venice film festival – a spot which has recently proved itself a premier launchpad for Oscar contenders.
Last year’s Venice opener, Birdman, went on to take the Academy awards for best picture and best director, among others, while the previous year’s, Gravity, took best director and made nearly $1 billion at the box office.
Like Alfonso Cuarón’s space epic, Everest is also an English-language drama directed by a non-native speaker and using 3D technology. The 10th feature by Icelandic film-maker Baltasar Kormákur, it stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Jason Clarke as leaders of two expedition groups which encountered substantial storms on their way to the summit. Also shinning up the snow are Josh Brolin, John Hawkes and Sam Worthington, while Keira Knightley, Robin Wright and Emily Watson play concerned spouses back at home.
The film is one of London-based studio Working Title’s most ambitious projects to date, and hopes to emulate the awards success of its contender from last year – Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything. It has been scripted by two veteran British screenwriters: William Nicholson, who penned Shadowlands, Gladiator and last year’s Unbroken, and Simon Beaufoy, who won an Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire and was nominated for The Full Monty.
The writers have adapted the script from five different non-fiction books about the incident, which led to the deadliest day on the mountain until the 2014 avalanche, which some of the second unit crew were caught up in.
A trailer released for the film in June concludes with an appeal to people to donate towards relief following the Nepal earthquake in April 2015 – which triggered another Everest disaster.
Mountaineering movies have fared well both critically and commercially over recent years. In 2003, Touching the Void, a docudrama about Joe Simpson and Simon Yates’s grisly trip to the Andes, won the best documentary Bafta, while Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours was nominated for six Oscars.
