Talk About an Uphill Battle

It seems as if, once every 10 years or so, some ambitious filmmaker decides to buck the odds and mount a big-budget drama on the side of a mountain.

Once you eliminate the most recent additions to this craggy little niche within the action genre--the Imax “Everest” and the opening five minutes of “M:I-2”--only Renny Harlin’s “Cliffhanger,” Clint Eastwood’s “The Eiger Sanction” and, of course, “Heidi,” leap immediately to mind. And, no, “The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain” doesn’t count.

Next month, Martin Campbell follows up “GoldenEye” and “The Mask of Zorro” with the high-altitude adventure “Vertical Limit.” The tick-tock thriller pairs Chicago natives Chris O’Donnell and Robin Tunney as estranged siblings thrown together by fate--and an untimely climbing disaster--on the world’s second-highest peak, K2, in Pakistan.

Also making the trek up the mountain are thriller vets Bill Paxton and Scott Glenn, and a veritable United Nations of fresh faces, including Izabella Scorupco and Steve Le Marquand, who are featured in one of the picture’s most memorable rescues.

Although “Vertical Limit” is set in the Himalayas, Campbell discovered a reasonable facsimile in his native New Zealand, where the southern Alps provided all the steep cliffs, ice caves, crevasses and avalanches-waiting-to-happen he needed. And no one missed the 14,000-foot difference in altitude between Mt. Cook and K2.

Unlike the choreographers of Tom Cruise’s dramatic dangle in “M:I-2,” Campbell freely admits to creating some of his more eye-popping visual effects in front of a blue screen on a New Zealand sound stage. But no amount of computer-generated imagery, or CGI, possibly could do justice to the spectacular locations and first-rate climbing, much of which is performed by a team of world-class guides and teachers.

Calendar asked Campbell, O’Donnell, Tunney and “lowly home-grown Kiwi climber” Whitney Thurlow (patched in by phone from New Zealand) to sit down for a discussion about the making of “Vertical Limit,” learning how to climb mountains, emoting in thin air and the world’s highest craft-services meal.

Question: Robin and Chris, how did growing up in Chicago--where the prairie meets the Great Lakes--help you prepare for tackling New Zealand’s Mt. Cook?

Tunney: Well, I’ve taken an elevator to the top of the Sears Tower and Hancock Building. But I’d never even been skiing . . . ever.

O’Donnell: You’re kidding.

Tunney: No.

O’Donnell: Actually, north of Chicago, there’s a man-made hill, called Wilmot Mountain. You have to wait 45 minutes for one of the little chairlifts, and then it only takes 30 seconds to ski down the hill. It’s all man-made snow, and sometimes it takes less time to run up the hill than taking the lift. But for kids in Chicago, it qualified as a mountain.

Q: Did you remember to bring your earmuffs and mittens to New Zealand?

Tunney: Actually, it wasn’t nearly as cold on the mountain as Chicago is in January.

O’Donnell: Everyone complained about the weather . . . but, for me, it was, like, “What cold?”

Q: Some of the action scenes were pretty harrowing. Did you have your insurance paid up before you left, or did Martin Campbell simply hand you the script at base camp?

Campbell: It was all there in Robert King’s script, so there were no surprises. In fact, several actors passed after reading about what they would have to do up there, on the mountain, and how long it would take.

Tunney: Actually, I thought, “There’s no way they’re going to let any actor do any of those stunts. I’ll have a stunt double.” But the scene in which I have to make the “Tyrolean crossing”--hanging upside-down, on a cable spanning two cliffs--took 18 takes!

Campbell: It was quite exhausting, really.

O’Donnell: Exhaustion probably was the furthest thing from Robin’s mind when she was up there.

Tunney: I was more worried about falling.

Q: They didn’t teach the Tyrolean crossing at acting school, then?

Tunney: No, but our training here was really great, so while we were shooting, I was never scared or uncomfortable. The most important things we learned involved looking like we were real mountaineers, even when we were just sitting around or trying to pick something up in the snow. After seven weeks, you sort of got the hang of it. Plus, on my days off, I’d go rock climbing or hiking with the trainers.

O’Donnell: Obviously, we had to be in shape going into the shoot, but it wasn’t as if the trainers were going to turn us into real climbers in 30 days. What they were able to do, though, was teach us how to look and feel comfortable on the mountain. When I first went up and was put in some of those positions, I literally was shaking.

Tunney: He didn’t like the heights.

O’Donnell: I didn’t like the heights, and I didn’t like the rappelling. But by the end of the shoot, I felt comfortable and trusted that the equipment would prevent me from falling down the mountain . . . that it wouldn’t snap for no reason.

Tunney: Also, being familiar enough with the equipment that you can sell the idea you’ve been up there, using it for a long time . . . tying knots, attaching carabiners, handling picks.

Campbell: We had some of the best climbers from all over the world. As we were shooting, they were right there, on site, giving us advice.

Q: Did these guys at least pretend to raise a sweat, while you Hollywood amateurs were being put through your paces?

O’Donnell: Most people who observe a movie being made for the first time will say, “I didn’t know it could be so exhausting.” But for the trainers, it was, “You’ve got to be kidding.” . . . They were laughing at us.

Tunney: I think, for the first few days, it was exciting for them to be on location and see how a movie is made. But after the first week, they were bored and needed to look for something more exhilarating to do--like bungee-jumping.

Thurlow: Our role was to train them in climbing and, through that process, get to know them. That way, when they were on the set and had to do something dangerous, we could anticipate their concerns and talk it over with them. We spent well over a month training them for climbing . . . or, at least, to look like they were climbers.

Q: What’s the pinnacle event in the mountain-climbing genre?

Campbell: I’m not sure there is one, but “Cliffhanger” probably had the best climbing scenes. We all went to see the Imax “Everest” while we were preparing to make “Vertical Limit.”

O’Donnell: The scene in “Everest” that got me was the one in which the climbers were walking over a crevasse on a ladder, and the camera was looking down into it. We shot all around that kind of stuff, and we all had to be tied together by safety ropes, even when we weren’t filming.

Tunney: Setting out each morning, they gave us avalanche detectors to put inside our costumes. That wasn’t to save our lives, though . . . it was so they could find your body and send it back home for the funeral.

Q: How about the cinematic challenges?

Campbell: The biggest problem I had was shooting all of the shots looking down into the snow and ice and being able to provide visual perspective. On a standard-size screen, there’s no adequate way to provide viewers with a sense of height, or depth, like you can do by putting a car or truck alongside a skyscraper or cliff. The funny thing was, we couldn’t go up there when the weather was bad and, yet, most of the action in the film takes place in terrible conditions. So, what we did was wait for a perfectly good day, fly up the side of Mt. Cook and bring in wind- and snow-making machines. We’d have to re-create the storms that we were avoiding.

Q: Robin, any chance you’ll be offered the Sandy Hill Pittman role in any new big-screen adaptation of “Into Thin Air”?

Tunney: I wish we had a Sandy Pittman in this movie . . . she was incredibly colorful. When I read Jon Krakauer’s book, I didn’t know anything about climbing, but I connected with the people. I was interested in the relationships and the drama. It gave me confidence that our movie would work, and K2 would be a great setting for a drama. It didn’t have to be about some bad guy, with a mustache and mysterious powers, running around the mountain threatening the climbers.

Q: Earlier this year, the publicists for “M:I-2” worked overtime trying to convince reporters that Tom Cruise did all of the climbing shots at the beginning of the film. How did you pull off your most dramatic moments?

Campbell: Blue screens, safety wire and body harnesses. A lot of the slippery-slope stuff with Izabella and Steve was done in a sound stage, but the real sliding took place on the mountain.

Tunney: The harnesses were really uncomfortable. In the opening scene, which was shot in Utah, sometimes we’d just hang there for long periods of time. We’d come home with bruises all over our bodies.

O’Donnell: That scene required us to be dropped vertically. Every time the rope would stop me falling, there would be this hard jolt. Historically, I’ve had a bad back, so I had to bring X-rays with me, in case it went out again.

Q: It was a 140-day shoot. How was everybody able to maintain the necessary level of intensity?

Tunney: It’s always easier when there’s something real to play off of--like real ice and cliffs. You never feel like more of a schmuck than when you’re forced to react to a monster that really isn’t there . . . that’s when you look like some . . . soap-opera actress. Until they get done with the CGI, you don’t know how big the creature is going to be and what it’s going to look like. But this was all based in reality, and you know what it looks like on top of the mountain.

Q: Not that you were required to spend all of your time bivouacked at 10,000 feet.

O’Donnell: When we were shooting on Mt. Cook, we stayed at the Mt. Cook Lodge and were helicoptered up to the various peaks--and that was the scariest part of the whole experience for me. But besides taking five-hour hikes, there really wasn’t much to do.

Tunney: We’d have to drive 45 minutes just to get Band-Aids. That’s where the nearest town was. I drove 3 1/2 hours just to see “Eyes Wide Shut” when it opened in Christchurch. I think I enjoyed it more than anyone else in theater, because it felt so great to get away from the lodge.

Q: Did the craft-services chef prepare barbecue yak or some other high-altitude treat?

O’Donnell: The best food we had was on top of the mountain. When we were down at base camp and they had time to prepare, it somehow wasn’t as good. Maybe it was because we were so hungry up there.

Thurlow: I’ve never had someone come up and offer me a crab meat and Camembert sandwich in the middle of a climb before.

Q: Robin, is your character one of those outdoor ingenues who manages to overcome great obstacles while maintaining a perfect hairdo and gleaming nails?

O’Donnell: Actually, she didn’t take a shower for six months.

Tunney: I was jealous that, in “Mask of Zorro,” Martin gave Catherine Zeta-Jones gorgeous hair and amazing outfits, and I get to have pulmonary edema and snow in my face. I got bored wearing sensible shoes for nine months.

Thurlow: They were very ambitious. I don’t recall working on a movie where they took a whole crew and had to put them on top of a mountain as extreme as where they wanted to do it. They had everything up there: hairdressers, makeup people . . . right there on a little pinnacle at very high altitude. Sometimes there’s a very thin line between crazy and ambitious, and I often wondered on which side of that line Martin was.

Q: Chris, how did the stork manage to find your wife in New Zealand?

O’Donnell: Actually, I left the mountain the day before we had the baby, in Christchurch. Martin was really supportive and was willing to let me leave the location at a moment’s notice. But we decided to induce labor, because I didn’t want to be stuck on top of a mountain when Caroline went into labor, and I’d miss the birth of our first baby, Lilly Ann. Our second child is due to arrive sometime around the movie’s premiere.

Q: Ever consider the name Kiwi? Thanks, everyone. *