Every time filmmaker David Breashears looked at the 42-pound cube that was the IMAX camera he would transport to the top of Mt. Everest he had a terrible sinking feeling.
“No, that is just not possible,” Breashears thought whenever he looked at the camera and contemplated the task of filming a team of climbers as they made the perilous trek to the summit of the world’s highest mountain.
Then he would think about the scores of film magazines he would need to take–each of them weighing 10 pounds. Next he would consider the monopod to support the camera. Finally, he would realize that he was taking all this to the thin air of 29,028 feet where even the world’s greatest mountaineers have trouble drawing a single breath.
“It was an enormous challenge,” said Breashears. “I quickly decided that the only way to handle this was to have a credo. I had to get it out of my head that this was impossible.”
Breashears finally did get that notion out of his head, and with the help of a special team of four rugged Sherpas he did manage to get all that gear to the top of Everest and to record the ascent of the three climbers who ultimately made it to the summit.
The result is “Everest,” a spectacular IMAX film made under some of the harshest conditions on Earth. The movie is now at the Museum of Science and Industry and will run through January 1999.
Shot during the three-month expedition on Everest in May 1996, the film combines the spectacular beauty of the Himalayas with the personal stories of three climbers, American Ed Viesturs, Spanish mountaineer Araceli Segarra and Sherpa Jamling Tenzing Norgay as they make their assault on the summit.
Segarra became the first Spanish woman to reach Everest’s summit, and Norgay finally followed in the footsteps of his father, Tenzing Norgay, who was at the side of Sir Edmund Hillary when they became the first people to reach the world’s highest peak on May 29, 1953.
The film also includes the tragic story of the deaths of eight climbers who were killed when a sudden storm with 80 m.p.h. winds struck the mountain as they were descending from the summit as well as an account of the IMAX team’s swift work that saved the life of a ninth man who amazingly survived the horrific night in temperatures that sank to 100 degrees below zero.
The enormity of the logistical challenge of filming at the top of Everest is hard to comprehend.
“It was essential to plan everything really well,” said Greg MacGillivray, the producer and director of the film. “It was an amazingly complex task.”
Putting aside the normal logistical problems associated with getting a 32-person expedition up the mountain, MacGillivray and Breashears had to find ways to get a complex and delicate camera, the film and other gear safely to the top.
Breashears, a filmmaker and mountaineer who has climbed Everest three times, said the IMAX camera had to be modified for this task. The IMAX camera, which normally weighs 80 pounds, had to be redesigned to reduce weight and to replace metal parts with plastic bearings, synthetic drive belts and other protective equipment to enable it to function under the withering cold of the mountain.
The extra wide IMAX film was specially made from a mylar base stock so that it would not crack, or break in the sub-zero conditions.
And some 40,000 feet of film had to be used for the roughly 40-minute film because of the speed with which the IMAX camera consumes film. A single cartridge holding 500-feet of film is consumed in 90 seconds.
“You only need one camera, but you have to constantly refresh your film supply,” Breashears said.
Most of the film was stored at the advance base camp at 21,300 feet and smaller amounts were ferried up to higher altitudes as needed. Another supply was carried up to 24,000 feet for storage. As cartridges were used, they were carried all the way down the mountain and shipped to California for editing.
The camera was broken into pieces, the largest being the body which weighed 24 pounds. While that might not seem like much at sea level, the load was enormous at high altitudes.
“Twenty-four pounds at high altitude is really tough duty,” said MacGillivray.
Breashears said that once the Sherpas reached 24,000 feet, they were asked to carry no more that 40 pounds and on summit day the loads were cut to between 33 and 35 pounds.
With their packs full of camera gear and film, the Sherpas clawed their way up sheer rock and ice faces, trudged through thigh-deep snow and picked their way across ladders thrown as mini-bridges across crevasses that plunged hundreds of feet to ice and rock bases.
Each step of the way, as Viesturs, Segarra and Norgay trudged to the top, Breashears was a few steps ahead, or behind chronicling their feats. While he himself was climbing through the thin air, he was also pausing to set up the camera and shoot. “It takes between five and seven minutes to set up and shoot,” he said, adding that timing his shots was critical so as not to delay the progress of the climbers.
When they made their final push on May 22, 1996, Breashears took only three film cartridges with him and had to calculate his shots very carefully.
“I shot the first roll at 27,580,” said Breashears, who had to load the film bare handed in the sub-zero temperatures near the top. “I used the whole second roll at 29,028 feet. We only have 90 seconds worth of film from the summit, and it is all in the movie.”
Satisfied with what he had, Breashears never used the third cartridge.
“It just seemed like a good time to start down,” he said.
