The scene where Hillary falls into the crevasse and is saved by Tenzing really happened. “They were working as a pair cutting steps on the Lhotse and through the Khumbu Icefall, which is exactly what it says on the tin,” Hiddleston says. “It’s a frozen waterfall, so everything you’re standing on could give way at any time.” Mountaineers who climbed Everest say it’s the most dangerous part of it. Phuntsok notes he knew in that moment that Tenzing had made a quick and life-saving decision called a self-arrest, when you jam the bottom of your ice axe into the snow, tie a rope around it, and it locks.
The team found a crevasse in the Darwin Glacier in Arakiman Cook on the South Island of New Zealand. The Southern Alps are an almost exact replica of the Himalayas in terms of their lot formations and crevasse fields, according to Hiddleston. The advantage is they happen to be 4000 meters lower, “So you can take a film crew up and you can breathe,” he says. “It’s still icy and snowy and windy. There’s just oxygen. Mercifully, the crew had drilled a safety line into the mountain.”
The camera was suspended on a wire jib for the scene. “You build your own ladder because you’re faced with a wall of ice,” adds Hiddleston. “You have to cut, literally, the steps. It’s a jigsaw puzzle for your brain because the handholds become footholds, and Tenzing is holding in the rope.”
On the day, the pair remember the sun dropping and the wind picking up as if it were sweeping the valley. Phuntsok was blasted with snow, as was Hiddleston as he came over the lip of the crevasse. When the two laugh in the scene, they are laughing for real. “It was our lucky day,” Phuntsok says, from an authenticity perspective.
