How They Made Touching The Void

In 1985 two ambitious mountaineers, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, were attempting to scale the unclimbed West Face of Siula Grande, a remote and treacherous peak in the Peruvian Andes, when Simpson fell and shattered his leg. Yates attempted to lower Simpson down the mountain but Simpson was inadvertently lowered off a 100 foot ice cliff. Unable to haul him back up the cliff, and faced with being dragged to his own death by Simpson's weight, Yates cut the survival rope holding them together, leaving his friend for dead. Simpson, however, didn't die...

Touching The Void, the account of Simpson's battle for survival, became an international bestseller and a near-sacred text in the climbing fraternity. Now Kevin McDonald, the Oscar-winning director behind One Day In September, has painstakingly recreated every agonising detail of the fateful climb in a breathtaking, awesomely suspenseful cinema documentary, giving the original mountaineers the chance to tell their own stories. Making Movies spoke to producer John Smithson, and was surprised to discovered that, before the shoot, his only contact with mountains had been on a skiing holiday.

How did you become aware of the book?

I'd read it and loved it. Our problem was that people all over the world love it too, and cinema has a long history of screwing up great books. Journalist Sue Summers told me that the documentary rights were available and we both went after them.