Press Junket
Jake Gyllenhaal, Josh Brolin, Emily Watson And Jason Clarke Talk The Emotional Challenges Of EVEREST
By Gary Salem
How do you take an audience on an intense, mind-blowing journey to the highest point on Earth? By keeping it real. That’s the sentiment repeatedly expressed at the EVEREST press conference a few weeks ago in Beverly Hills.
Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur’s film follows two teams of mountain climbers and their extraordinary ordeal when a violent blizzard hit them soon after they reached the summit in May of 1996. Realism is definitely what they achieved by taking a nuanced approach to tell a story that explores both the beauty and danger of extreme mountain climbing.
The acting performances by the cast in attendance, including Jason Clarke, Jake Gyllenhaal, Josh Brolin, Emily Watson, John Hawkes and Michael Kelly all find a great balance between the physical and the emotional demands of the story.
Kormákur may be known for directing action films with Mark Wahlberg like Contraband and 2 Guns but he wanted to tell a real and personal story with huge scope. After turning down Fast & Furious 7, he said there was no question about wanting to direct EVEREST, saying “For me, it was a no-brainer.” He wanted a visceral feeling for the 99.99% of people who will never experience the mountain and was pleased when he noticed the presentation in IMAX made the acting and the “little moments” so powerful.
Considering the lofty goals that Kormákur and his producers set for those who would be cast in EVEREST, they knew there was no better way to achieve them than to take the actors on that journey themselves.
Josh Brolin knew the story and the initial pitch he heard stressed that “It’s not going to be any of that Hollywood bullshit, it’s going to be real.” He met Kormákur and knew they could make something both powerful and sensitive. Brolin got laughs when he shared his feelings about the difficult, painful times during production that helped his performance: “Okay I am feeling an irritation that I hope will look good on film. Because it’s there. For sure. For you.”
Jake Gyllenhaal was moved by the idea of a massive, entertaining movie that deals with characters walking the precipice of life and death in an honest way. In playing the team leader Scott Fisher whose story has created some controversy about the teams’ cooperation and competition, Gyllenhaal said he wanted to avoid caricature and imitation.
For Jason Clarke, portraying real people means “you do your homework” and “fight to maintain the integrity of the person you’ve gotten to know and understand.”
Despite having many details work with, Emily Watson felt “one of the principals factors was chaos” and the director used that to work with the actors, announcing on the first day “We’re going to create the scenes from chaos…I didn’t want to stage this movie, I wanted to find it.”
John Hawkes believes that the director’s background makes him uniquely qualified to bring Everest to the screen. “He’s from Iceland, and he likes a challenge,” the performer sums. “We always joked that he’s a Viking. He’s formidable. He was tough and tireless through the very difficult process of filmmaking in extreme conditions.”
EVEREST opens exclusively on IMAX 3D and premium-large format 3D screens on Friday, September 18th.
It will be released wide—including standard 2D and 3D—on Friday, September 25.
PG-13 for intense peril and disturbing images
© 2015 Universal Studios.
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