There’s method acting — and then there’s freezing on a snowy mountaintop for weeks on end. Such was the fate of Idris Elba and Kate Winslet, who signed on to The Mountain Between Us, the tale of two strangers who survive a plane crash and must travel hundreds of miles of freezing fields while attempting to be rescued.
Shooting in Canada on the border of Alberta and British Columbia, temperatures were so cold, “You can’t talk,” says director Hany Abu-Assad. “When you close your eyes, you can’t open them sometimes because there’s water.”
In The Mountain Between Us, based on the 2011 novel by Charles Martin, Elba plays Ben Bass, a surgeon whose flight is canceled, opposite Winslet as Alex Martin, a bride-to-be journalist afraid of missing her wedding. Despite weather warnings, the two strangers charter a jet from Idaho — and are left with only each other when the plane goes down.
But it's difficult to shoot on a mountaintop. The cast and crew had to helicopter to the peak each day with their supplies. The director drove 40 minutes each morning to the film's “base camp", where he and producers would determine if the weather was clear enough to work on the top of the mountain.
“Elba is tough, ”Abu-Assad says,“You can believe he survived this wildness.” Winslet insisted on really plunging into ice cold water at base camp to film her character falling through thin ice. “The studio, the producers were very scared that something was going to happen during that scene,” says Abu-Assad.
Why did the director choose the disaster drama? “For a long time, I think optimism and hope are important to survive," he says. "And to go on with your life even if you’ve had a lot of bad luck. So if you give in to the bad luck, you will die. But if you fight the bad luck, you will have a better chance to survive and make your life better. This is very simple wisdom, yes?”
13980503458
13980503458
admin@qisuen.cn
