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Photo:Joe Simpson and Sue Summers on location in the Alps
Andes with his 21-year-old climb- ing partner Simon Yates in 1985. Both men were keen to make their mark and set their sights on the hitherto unclimbed West Face of Siula Grande, one of the high- est and most daunting mountains in the world.
Despite underestimating the difficulties of the ascent, they made it to the top. But Joe fell and shattered his leg, precipitat- ing an epic tale of near tragedy which ended with Joe crawling down the mountain for three and a half days.
The fact that so long after its publication this amazing story had failed to reach the screen seemed inexplicable. Sally Field’s Hollywood production company had it under option for years as a potential vehicle for Tom Cruise and a procession of documen- tary companies had tried and failed over the years to get the factual rights. Joe and his agents at the book’s publishers, Jonathan Cape, were – so I was told – much keener on the lucra- tive prospect of a feature film than a documentary.
But my training on newspapers like the Evening Standard and The Sunday Times has taught me never to give up. Using the jour- nalist’s favourite secret weapon, the telephone directory, I tracked Joe down in Sheffield and rang him. He told me he was fed up with production companies say- ing how much they loved the book, then failing to raise the money to bring it to the screen.
But I persisted and after sev- eral weeks of calls, Joe agreed to meet. Over a couple of pints in a pub next door to Random House, he began to accept that far from killing the movie industry’s appetite for Void, a high-profile documentary could renew its interest – as had recently been the case with Channel 4’s Shackleton.
What’s more, a documentary, with its combination of interviews and dramatised reconstructions, would be the most accurate way of telling the story. Joe had been horrified by one Hollywood script which got round the dramatically inconvenient fact that he and Simon were separated for most of the film by making them commu- nicate by walkie-talkie.
But an option on the book was going to be expensive. John Smithson, who was going to pro- duce the film on behalf of his company, Darlow Smithson, went to see the head of Channel 4 International, Paul Sowerbutts, and said he thought we could
get Void. “I’ll do it,” Sowerbutts replied. It was the quickest pitch in TV history.
From the start we had high ambitions for the project. But even with the support of Channel 4, raising the kind of budget nec- essary to do it justice proved hard, especially after September 11. This process received a much- needed boost when we were joined as director by Kevin Macdonald, who won the best documentary Oscar two years ago for One Day in September, his outstanding film on the Munich Olympics.
As befits the grandson of Emeric Pressburger and brother of Andrew Macdonald, Kevin was keen to bring Void to the big screen. Darlow Smithson, too, had a background in factual drama and had made three major films for HBO. The Film Council and – despite the uncertainty over its own future – FilmFour came on board as coproducers with Channel 4 and PBS of what was now to be a feature documentary.
Since then we have taken Joe and Simon back to the mountain in Peru for the first time together to relive their experiences for the camera. The location was so remote that the production team had to walk for four days after the road ran out, accompanied by 57 donkeys to carry all the equip- ment plus food stocks which included live chickens and pigs.
Most of the dramatic recon- structions, however, were done in the less hostile terrain of the Alps, with two young actors playing Joe and Simon and some of the best climbers in Britain acting as stunt doubles and as our all- important mountain guides, under the direction of head mountaineer Brian Hall – the man without whom this production could never have been made.
The Alps may be less hostile than the Andes but the weather proved about as unpredictable. At one point, our crew of up to
40 found itself working at 12,000 ft in temperatures of –20c. One group had to be airlifted off the mountain after the onset of hypothermia. But the proud boast of everyone involved is that they never missed a day’s shooting.
Touching The Void will be released next year
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peaks & troughs
As my friends will tell you, I am not the outdoors type – my games mistress once wrote “Who is she?” on my school report. So finding myself 12,000 ft up an Alp as the co-pro- ducer of a film of one of the greatest British mountaineering stories of all time was, I must admit, a surprise even to me.
But then Touching the Void is not just a story about moun- taineering. The book by climber Joe Simpson about his ill-fated ascent of the remote Peruvian mountain Siula Grande 17 years ago is one of the most inspiring true stories of endurance and survival ever told. A best-seller all over the world since its first publication in 1987, it has made Joe a modern hero of almost mythic proportions.
I first heard of the book in a most circumstantial way. Trying to assemble a documentary series of modern Great Escapes, I rang an old friend, Jim Curran, himself a well-known climber and maker of climbing films, to ask whether he knew of a mountaineering story I could include. “There’s always Joe’s story,” he said. “But you’ll never get it.”
From the moment I read the book, I knew I had to. Joe Simpson’s story is made for the screen.
Now 41, he was an obsessed and impoverished young climber of only 25 when he set out for the
Co-producer
Sue Summers
reports on the making of Touching The Void, Oscar-winner Kevin McDonald’s latest documentary