Meru: Filming the Epic Climb | Nat Geo Live

We called this talk "The Making of Meru" to try to give you guys some insight on how a story like this, you know, a climb like this of rather epic, historic proportions can be translated into a film for a general audience that may have absolutely no knowledge of climbing. I started working on this project not really thinking about making a feature documentary. It was really just about shooting for posterity. And when I finally had a chance to watch what Jimmy had sent me, I was just struck by this material; I'd never seen anything like it before.

And what was so special about this material is unique to Jimmy and Renan and their particular skill-set where they are professional climbers and also professional shooters. And it was just... like, how visceral the footage was, how authentic it was really moved me. The shooting on it was certainly one of the obvious great challenges. Some expeditions are really based on the production where the production kind of almost finances or funds the trip and it's really about shooting and coming back with a story. This climb was the opposite. This climb was about the climb; it wasn't about the shooting. And you approach it very differently.

We had, you know, 400 yaks and a huge team when we went to Everest to shoot "The Wildest Dream." And on this climb, it was Renan and I shouldering each a small camera, and so... it really made it kind of the ultimate challenge as kind of a filmmaker for... expedition shooting, so... there's a ton of shots that we missed and I try not to dwell on those too much but... ( audience laughter ) And, you know, in the documentary world if you didn't get it, it didn't happen, so... you know, then you're juggling that pressure.

I mean, just a zillion details here that, you know, they're not backing up their footage; they're bringing a finite amount of cards up on the mountain, alright? They have no batt-- like no way to charge their batteries. And so, weight is a real issue but I can't, you know, as a documentary filmmaker, I can't conceive of not being able to back-up my footage and not-- and having a finite amount of tape. So, it just charges these shots; I mean-- it's a lot of pressure, and that's one of the things that makes the footage just so special. A lot of the rules of shooting go out the window.

Like, you're supposed to have a head and a tail to every shot. You know, so that there's five seconds in front of it in the beginning of the shot and there's five or ten seconds at the end of the shot so the editor has some space to cut. But our shots don't have heads and tails. And when you watch it, you know the... it all-- 'cause you have to hold your breath when you're shooting up there, and it's really hard to hold your breath up there. So, all the heads and tails go like this... ( inhales deeply ) ( audience laughter ) And then the end of the shot is like... ( exhales ) ( audience laughter ) And they're like only 15 seconds long; this is no joke.

I mean, we'd sit in the edit room, we'd be like, there must be more. ( audience laughter ) There must be more. You know, like, we... it... I don't know, it was... It posed this, you had these like kind of jewels of footage yet with some very real-like narrative constraints around it where there just wasn't that much. No, it was classic because we'd be sitting in the editing room and everybody would be glued to the screen and we'd be watching this clip and it'd be like this great, great clip and everybody is excited and then it would end and then everybody would look at me. ( audience laughter ) And I'd be like, "Well, let me explain something to you. We're at 20,000 feet, I'm like trying to stack the rope because Conrad's basically starting to get to the point where like, 'You're still shooting? You should be stacking the rope. You should be re-racking the gear.' But that's hard to explain to your editor when you're trying to make a film.