“A Rarified Space”: Shooting A Movie At The Top Of The World

Meru is a movie about a mountain, but the heart of its story is human: the failures and triumphs of three men as they attempt to summit the most technically challenging peak in the Himalayas, the 21,667-foot Meru Central. Perhaps that emotional core is why it has captured mainstream attention—it won the Audience Choice Award at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, and debuts in select theaters nationwide this weekend—where so many climbing and mountaineering projects have struggled.

Meru is the work of three of the most accomplished mountaineers in the world: Jimmy Chin and Renan Ozturk shot the film; Conrad Anker, who had long sought the summit of Meru Central, completed the team.

The trio chose to ascend Meru Central via the Shark's Fin, a 4,000-foot sheer rock wall at the top of the mountain whose physical and technical demands were long considered impossible to surmount. Chin described it as Yosemite's El Capitan placed on top of Mount Denali. For the climbing, the route required hauling big-wall gear to high-altitude camps; taking hundreds of load-lightening measures, including cutting tags off jackets; and tightly rationing food. For the photography, the high wall meant a thin supply of spare batteries and only two shared cameras, a Canon 5D and a Panasonic TM900, a "beer-can shaped" video camera. There were no tripods, and no way to backup data. Battery life became one of the most valuable resources, and selecting what to shoot and when to roll the camera was a constant triage. Time lapses shot at night, for instance, had a heavy resource cost but also the potential to produce valuable images.

Adventure media generally comes from two types of expeditions: those staged with the primary goal of producing media, like a film, and those where media production is secondary to a physical goal, like summiting a mountain or filming a rare species of wildlife.

"The hardest type of shooting is what we did on Meru—when it's run-and-gun, expedition-style shooting, and the production is secondary to the climbing objective because the climbing objective is so tough, so intense," said Chin, who directed the film with Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi. "That's a rarified space, especially if you're trying to shoot really high-quality cinematic footage because, essentially, you have to be a professional athlete as well."

Chin has been a professional skier and climber for The North Face since 2001. Ozturk has been a professional climber for TNF since 2005. Both have been involved in adventure media for the past decade; on projects like Meru, they are continually faced with balancing priorities of the climbing and the shooting.

It took the team two attempts to climb Meru Central. On the first, in 2008, the three men were trapped on the mountain for 19 days, surviving on one week's worth of food. "In the context of climbing that hard and trying to pull your weight as a team a member and contribute to Conrad's dream, you feel like you're lucky to get every shot," Ozturk said.

"When you look at the number of people who have climbed mountains as extreme as Meru, and from those elite few the number of people who have the skills to shoot a film that makes it to Sundance and then wins at Sundance and is now releasing in theaters—that is absolutely unheard of," said Sadie Quarrier, a senior photo editor at National Geographic Magazine who's worked with Chin and Ozturk in the past.

"Typically films that make it to Sundance have big crews, they're able to set up shots, they can re-shoot things," Quarrier added. "Here you have guys in extreme conditions, and to stitch together a film with the cinematic quality of Meru is extraordinary. I'm sure there's one or two other people in the world who could do this, but these guys are in a league of their own."

In addition to Sundance, Meru has won several other awards, including the Charlie Fowler Award at Telluride Mountain Film Festival. Meru opens in theaters in New York and Los Angeles and select cities on Friday, August 14, with national roll-out to follow.

"Meru is shooting from the inside out, not the outside in," Chin said. "The rawness of the experience, and actually being part of that experience is what makes it so real. You can't recreate that. People know it when they see it."