We’ve got Cliffhanger, Vertical Limit and Touching the Void, but there hasn’t been a great mountain climbing movie in awhile. We recently showed off the trailer for the indie A Lonely Place to Die, which mixes the genre with horror, but now Sony Pictures is eying a big-budget adventure surrounding a real-life story on the highest mountain the world.
Deadline reports that Sony Pictures have set The Bourne Identity and Go director Doug Liman to direct Everest, a film the follows the story of George Mallory and his repeat attempts to tackle Mount Everest. Set in the early 1920’s, he would become the first man to do so. Up in the Air‘s Sheldon Turner has written a script based on Jeffrey Archer’s novel, which you can read a synopsis below.
A real-life mountaineering mystery serves as the springboard for bestseller Archer’s abysmal latest. The plot begins promisingly with the body of mountaineer George Mallory discovered on the slopes of Mt. Everest in 1999, possibly having been the first man to have reached the summit. But hopes of an adventurous yarn are soon dashed as the novel becomes a long flashback, offering stock vignettes of Mallory’s childhood, Cambridge days and mountaineering adventures. These passages are hampered by phoned-in writing, clumsy attempts at verisimilitude and a notable lack of psychological depth. Along the way, Mallory marries, becomes a father, serves in WWI and finds himself pitted against Australian mountaineer George Finch as a potential leader of Britain’s push to conquer Everest. Archer does eventually offer his opinion as to whether Mallory summited Everest, but by that point all but his most devoted fans will have fled the icy crags of this lifeless novel.
This one is very much in the early stages though, as Liman plans to assist Turner with the next draft, while Turner still has his directorial debut By Virtue Fall in pre-production, with James Spader, Carla Gugino and Eric Bana starring.
Liman is also currently juggling two other projects. One is his space film Luna, which just got dropped by Warner Bros. and has Paramount and New Regency rebuilding it. There is also his sci-fi film All You Need is Kill, which recently got Brad Pitt attached.
Expect one of these three films to be his next and hopefully production kicking off next year.
Which film which you like to see Liman direct? What do you think about Everest?