When Jennifer Peedom was looking for a narrator for Mountain, she knew she needed voice that could stand up to the Australian Chamber Orchestra. The musical documentary explored the relationship between thrill-seekers and the great outdoors with sparse dialogue. She needed a mountain of a voice, like Willem Dafoe’s.
“I knew if we were going to approach someone on his level, we needed to be sure,” said Peedom at the 14th Dubai International Film Festival. “You need a big voice. You need a voice that’s like a mountain. Willem’s voice is absolutely that, but more importantly, it’s what he represents as an artist, which is that he’s a risk-taker.”
Mountain premiered at the Sydney Opera House as a concert. It showed an amalgamation of footage from years of shooting, straight out of the libraries of some of the best mountaineering cinematographers in the world. If someone shot a 30-second commercial for North Face, for example, they would hand over five hours of footage to Peedom and her director of photography, Renan Ozturk, to use. (Ozturk also worked with Peedom on 2015 Bafta-nominated documentary Sherpa.) To shoot from scratch would’ve taken up to eight years and cost tens of millions of dollars, said Peedom.
In her 20s, the Australian filmmaker worked on three Himalayan expeditions as a climbing camera operator.
“I was really interested in the idea of why some of us are prepared to risk ourselves and then everybody else thinks you’re crazy,” she said.
“This film is trying to explore the space between the crazies and not-so-crazies, and why some people are willing to risk themselves for this thing that can’t love them back.”
The story as a universal one, and deliberately so: “There are mountains in every country. We never say where we are, geographically. You might be in Alaska one minute, Antarctica the next, and then in Canada, and then on Everest. We don’t say where we are. It’s more about the human relationship.”
