It's a little strange to be sitting across from someone who by all rights should be dead.
Joe Simpson, a compact Englishman in black with close-cropped hair and intense blue eyes, is smoking like a fiend. You can see why he's in demand as a speaker. The guy can talk. He can also write, and he's a daring climber. He's written seven books about mountaineering, but the best known is the 1988 bestseller "Touching the Void," his tale of survival in the Peruvian Andes.
Nicholas Aaron scales a wall of ice in his role as Simon Yates in "Touching the Void."
(Filmfour Ltd./ifc Films)
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Now Oscar-winning documentary director Kevin Macdonald (2000's "One Day in September") has brought Simpson's 1985 near-death adventure to the big screen, transformed into a suspense thriller.
Simpson has lived with the story for 18 years. "I'm compelled to tell it," he admits, "but it's not who I am. It's not a climbing story. It could have been set in the jungle or the desert. It deals with the big questions we will all deal with: loneliness, failure, trust, friendship, betrayal, death."
Hollywood came calling early on: Tom Cruise and producer Frank Marshall ("Alive"), among others, chased the movie. But nobody could figure out how to make it as a feature. When Macdonald finally read the book, however, he knew how to do it: as a docudrama.
He quickly raised $2 million to make the movie. "It's so much easier now to raise money for feature docs," Macdonald says. "There's no way we could have done this two or three years ago."
Just as filmmakers such as Steven Soderbergh ("Traffic," "Full Frontal") are borrowing documentary techniques to make their fictions seem more real, so are many documentarians deploying tried-and-true tricks of the feature trade to pump up their works.
Audiences flocked to see surprise hits such as "American Splendor," which blended a fiction film of the life of comic book artist Harvey Pekar with animation and interviews with the real man; Michael Moore's leftist polemic "Bowling for Columbine," in which the camera tags along behind the writer-director; and "Capturing the Friedmans," Andrew Jarecki's startling portrait of an unraveling family, which combined contradictory interviews with home-movie footage without ever providing a clear sense of what really happened. As these films show, the once clear lines between fiction and fact have blurred.
To dramatize Simpson's harrowing story, Macdonald took advantage of cinematic tools: an orchestral score, swooping helicopter shots, actors and stuntmen, and percussive editing. In the end, critics say, "Touching the Void" (which opens Friday) has the ring of truth. The New Yorker's Anthony Lane wrote: "Kevin Macdonald has a terrific tale on his hands, and his telling of it, very British in its matter-of factness, can barely be faulted."
Simpson was 25 and his climbing buddy, Simon Yates, was 21 when they attacked the "unscalable" west face of the 21,000-foot Siula Grande. Its summit, higher than Alaska's Mount Denali (North America's highest peak), was covered with deep plumes of soft snow and unstable. But over 31/2 days, Simpson and Yates painstakingly advanced to the peak.
On the descent, Simpson fell. The impact smashed his right leg: The thigh bone was driven through the knee and into the bones of the lower leg, shattering them. It looked like a fatal mistake. But Yates chose, at great risk, to try to get his friend down the mountain. In a blinding blizzard, he spent an entire day lowering the crippled Simpson down the face on a rope, a few hundred feet at a time.
"He put his life on the line in a way he shouldn't have done," Simpson says.
They were nearing the base of the sheer mountainside when Yates unknowingly lowered Simpson over a ledge. There the crippled climber dangled for an hour, unable to communicate with his partner 150 feet above, who was losing his footing and slowly being dragged down the mountain. Just before he would have gone over the precipice, Yates broke the climber's taboo: He cut the rope to save himself, thinking he was sending Simpson to certain death. "The paradox was that by seemingly killing me," says Simpson, "he put me in the position of being able to save my own life."
Simpson fell 100 feet onto a glacier, and then crashed an additional 80 feet down into an icy crevasse. But he didn't die. His partner circled away from the ledge and made his way down. Unable to find Simpson's body, he went several miles down the mountain to base camp, arriving battered, exhausted, dehydrated and grieving.
Simpson remained trapped deep in the ice. Without food or water, in excruciating pain and often hallucinating, the young man managed to crawl out of the crevasse. That left him on the side of the mountain, miles from the camp.
The journey he faced seemed impossible. So Simpson broke it into 20-minute segments. Get from here to that rock in the next 20 minutes. As he inched, crawled, slid and stumbled, he focused on his watch. Ahead of schedule or behind? Early or late? Twenty minutes at a time he crossed a glacier laced with crevasses, navigated a massive boulder field, circled a lake, rolled and flopped down a rocky valley.
It took 31/2 days. He collapsed 100 yards outside the camp just hours before Yates was leaving to go home. Yates found him, lying on the ground in horrendous physical condition, raving.
" 'Touching the Void,' " says National Geographic Adventure Executive Editor James B. Meigs, is about "the psychology of survival. Extreme survivors like Simpson go through the stages of anger, denial, bargaining and acceptance. And they experience a breakdown in personality, the mind splits as they keep on going."
"I think part of him was destroyed," says Macdonald. "Joe was so completely alone. He was in an enormous mountain range surrounded by ice walls that made him feel like a gnat who could be crushed at any moment. It's threatening to your ego, that sense of aloneness in the world."
When the two men returned to England, the alpine community judged Yates harshly for abandoning his climbing partner. Simpson, after long series of operations, was able to climb again. But he continued to be bothered about the attacks on Yates in the mountaineering world. To exonerate his friend, Simpson wrote his account. The survival story has sold a half-million copies in 14 languages.
"It's about what makes us continue on when everything seems awful and depressing," says Macdonald. "The book is given by therapists to show depressives who are in a dark hole that it's worth fighting their way out."
Much as Warren Beatty did in "Reds," Macdonald cuts from reenactments with professional actors and stuntmen on location (the climbing sequences with the actors were filmed on lower, safer slopes in the Alps) to the real participants telling their stories. Macdonald taped Simpson for 18 hours and Yates for 10.
"I cut the script from their interviews," says Macdonald, who ignored the book. "It's a documentary featuring two people telling their story. You enter a new and novel world; it could be the moon."
The film's most moving moments are not on the steep slopes of the ominous Siula Grande. They come when Simpson -- who over many years has survived icy hazards that probably would have killed anyone else -- looks straight at the camera, on the verge of tears.
"Kevin spent the entire bloody film trying to make me cry," says Simpson. "The emotion you see me expressing is when I think about how lonely and frightened and weak and destroyed I felt. When you're going through it, you can't be highly emotional. You've got to be very pragmatic. You're in deep [expletive], and if you lose it, it's only going to get worse. At the time, I just had to do it. I didn't have a choice."
It was a four-day walk to Siula Grande from the camp for the five-member film crew, seven climbers and 70 donkeys laden with equipment. Even at the base camp's altitude of 18,000 feet, "it was hard to walk or sleep," recalls Macdonald, who filmed there for 21/2 weeks. "We had to drink endlessly. My nails started to bleed and my teeth to crack. It was unpleasant. I've never been more focused."
But it was even tougher psychologically on Simpson and Yates, who had no clue how revisiting the site of their ordeal would affect them. When Yates showed Simpson where he had found him, in a dry river bed near the camp, "I was flushing, sweating and my heart was going," Simpson recalls.
"I remember looking up this gully, up these rocks, and thinking, 'Jesus, how did I do that?' Simon was pointing where he had found me on the ground. I had this sensation of somebody holding my shoulder from behind. I almost turned round. When Simon first found me he bent down and grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me toward him to get me up. In real life I was just gone, I was crying, and I was getting these sensations while I was on camera."
Simpson is still distressed that he and Yates weren't given proper screen credit for some of their reenactments on Siula Grande. (Their names are buried in the end credits.) Long shots of the mountain show a tiny figure dragging himself painfully across the rocks. It is Simpson.
"I was dressed up in the same gear, 17 years later," he says. "I wasn't showing it to them but inside I was having panic attacks. Weird mental things were going on. I kept looking at these figures filming on a ridge about a mile away, and I became convinced that I was going to turn and they would be gone. It was as if going back to that place went straight down this neural pathway, triggered this memory of where I was supposed to die."
When Simpson went home the symptoms got worse. "I had an appalling sense of vulnerability," he says. "I kept thinking I was going to be attacked. I felt like someone was trying to stab me. I split up with my girlfriend. I kept feeling very tearful."
Only by going back did Simpson realize that "the mental trauma was more powerful than I had let myself believe." He finally overcame his aversion to therapy and visited a psychologist for the first time. The psychologist diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder and made an appointment for him -- for six months later.
"By then I had cured myself," Simpson says. "Climbers are by their nature resilient and tough. We've lost friends and we deal with it. The best thing you can do [with trauma] is put it in a box, nail it shut and never open it again. It's odd that people think making the film was cathartic. To my mind, you put your finger on the table and hit it with a hammer, you're not going to take the same finger and hit it with a hammer to see if it hurts."
Ultimately, Simpson attributes his survival to being sent away to a British boarding school and, later in life, avoiding therapists like the plague. "When you're used to being rejected, like being sent away when you're a youngster, you become very good at hugging yourself. And I think if I hadn't been like that, I wouldn't have survived. So I'm not going to go screw that up."
