'Touching the Void' is a gripping tale of cheating death on a Peruvian peak. Director Kevin Macdonald tells Donald Clarke how he made the film
Four years ago, Kevin Macdonald's documentary about the Black September terrorist attack on the 1972 Olympics, One Day in September, proved an unlikely hit at the box office. At the time, the director admitted that so hostile were distributors towards documentaries that he felt himself forced into structuring the film as a conventional thriller. Sitting in the Irish Film Institute a few months ago, Macdonald, a fresh-faced man with a gentle Scottish accent, acknowledges how the climate has changed.
"Look at that," he says, pointing towards posters for the spelling bee saga, Spellbound, and the natural history epic, Winged Migration. "There are four films advertised here and two of them are documentaries. I think things have got much better. It started with films like When We Were Kings and Hoop Dreams. But the change is mostly down to Bowling for Columbine. Distributors made real money from that. People have been convinced that they can go to a documentary in a cinema and have a good time."
Indeed they have. And, since our conversation, Macdonald's most recent film, Touching the Void, has continued the trend. Based on Joe Simpson's 1987 book of the same name, the film, which tells the story of the author's disastrous, near-fatal attempt to scale the Siula Grande Mountain in the Peruvian Andes, has received ecstatic reviews on its British release and has done excellent business at the turnstiles.
The book had been optioned several times (including, distressingly, to Tom Cruise's production company) for development as a dramatic film by the time Macdonald came to read it. He immediately realised that the story had the makings of a great documentary.
Three days into his ascent of the mountain, Simpson fell and shattered his leg horribly. His climbing partner, Simon Yates, bravely attempted to lower his injured friend back to base camp. But after a day's arduous descent in dreadful weather he found himself faced with a horrendous dilemma: having inadvertently lowered Simpson over an overhang, he had to decide whether to cut the rope connecting them or allow his partner to drag both of them to almost certain death.
"The philosophy among climbers, as I understand it, is there is an unspoken rule that you never cut the rope," Macdonald explains. "When you are tied to somebody your fates are intertwined and when you cut the rope you are breaking a bond of trust. Although rationally if climbers heard this story they might think they had no other option, irrationally they might think, "Oh, how awful."
Miraculously, Simpson survived the fall and over three days and nights, plagued by hallucinations and tortured by pain, he crawled his way back to the base camp.
"I thought: let's just throw the book away and talk to the two guys and see if they can tell the story themselves," Macdonald says. "I interviewed both of them for 20 hours each and it was clear that they were honest, they were frank and were prepared to go beyond just reiterating the facts."
The director intersperses the interviews with dramatic reconstructions using actors, but the narrative is indeed advanced mainly by Simpson and Yates. Both men seem distressed at times and, watching the film, one occasionally feels oneself intruding on private grief.
"Yes, that was difficult for me," Macdonald says. "One of the great quandaries of documentary is the things you want most - the raw emotions - are often the hardest things for people to talk about. You are in the same position as a journalist, of course, and I remember what Janet Malcolm said in her book, The Journalist and The Murderer: 'Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible."
Though Simpson found reliving the experience difficult, he remained supportive throughout the project. "He was like the Ancient Mariner, when he got talking," the director says. Yates, by contrast, coped less well with returning to Peru. Macdonald believes he has still to face up to his guilt.
"Simon actually got quite abusive towards me and the crew. He actually got very, very difficult and hasn't spoken to any of us or to Joe since he came back. It brought up a lot of emotions and he had to face up to a lot of things. He wouldn't do things we wanted him to do. He got drunk a few times and pushed me around. He then came back completely paranoid and wouldn't have anything to do with the film."
This, one imagines, was all Macdonald needed. While filming the reconstructions, which feature the climbers themselves in the occasional wide-shot, he must have had enough on his hands dealing with the horrible weather and the perils of life at high altitude.
"We went up to 19,000 feet - and that is high," he says. "You just roll over in your sleeping bag and you are out of breath. Your nails start to bleed and fall out. Your lips start to crack. Horrible. You can't get that across in a film. Your body is deteriorating when you get to that height. The highest town is 17,000 feet. So you are higher up than people should really live."
Surprisingly, given the heights to which the crew had to climb, Macdonald claims that he learned few mountaineering skills himself during the shoot. Much of the initial ascent was filmed by a climbing cameraman. Nonetheless, he found himself in some pretty hairy situations.
"For the stuff with the actors I had to get myself in a position to film them. The most precarious section was where we had to film the guy cutting the rope. We were on a very steep slope with a drop below of 150 feet and we were all perched on this thing for eight hours there. And you have no idea how slow it is filming in that position with a whole film crew roped together."
To Macdonald's delight, the climbing community have really taken to the film. His climbing adviser, Brian Hall, showed it to a group of professional mountaineers who declared it the most authentic representation of their sport they had yet seen. "Most climbing films are made in a studio and it is nice and sunny all the time. We tried to make it look difficult."
Macdonald's own professional colleagues may be harder to win over. Though One Day in September won him an Oscar, he has never been popular with those from the hard-line, fundamentalist wing of the documentary community. There was a little too much rock music in the earlier film, the vérité Taliban said. It was all a little too exciting. And now, in Touching The Void, he indulges in the most impure of documentary techniques - reconstructions using actors.
"I hope that Touching the Void feels honest," he says. "It doesn't try and trick the viewer. The interviews are one thing and the recreations are something else. You are not being hoodwinked into confusing one with the other. That is what can annoy me about reality TV - you are not sure what the participants have been told to do and what they haven't. One Day was attacked quite a lot by purists, and this film will not win prizes on the documentary circuit, because that conservative movement is still quite powerful."
That Macdonald talks so fluently about film should come as no surprise. He is part of a movie dynasty. His brother, Andrew, produced Trainspotting and 28 Days Later, while his grandfather, about whom he has written a fine book, was the great producer, writer and director, Emeric Pressburger.
Was it always inevitable that he would find himself in the movie business? "Oh no. We grew up on a farm in Scotland and there was never a feeling that we would go into the film business. But then my brother, at the age of 14, began making these little Super 8 films. We then started making films together and got a chance to do some stuff for BBC Scotland, which was a great opportunity."
So, now that they both have a degree of success, has a rivalry developed? "I think there was a level of competitiveness. But to be honest, because we went off into these completely different spheres, there was less rivalry than you might think: he is in drama, I'm in documentary." But the rivalry may fire up again. Macdonald suggests that he might try to edge his own career towards drama.
"There are certain things you can't show in documentaries, you can't show people's interior lives as well. The next thing I am hoping to do, which is set in the Angolan civil war, will be 90 per cent drama and 10 per cent documentary." So he is gradually transforming his career by stealth? "Yes," he laughs. "So maybe after that I will make something that is all drama and everybody will still be calling me a documentary film-maker."
Touching the Void opens on Friday