Interview de Thierry Donard concernant Pushing the limits-632
Extreme sport is a state of mind and the notion of going beyond your own limits has become more important than proving something to someone. The idea of "pushing the limits" is above all humility. It’s a sort of quest for the Grail. A way of believing in certain values. Never being satisfied with yourself, pushing back the limits without ever overstepping them, simply for personal pleasure. To be men to the full. Men and nothing more, in the original meaning of the word. I mean, in a natural world.
PUSHING THE LIMITS respects and knows the natural world ?
You don’t play with the elements. Nature demands rigor and perfect knowledge of the environment. According to the state of mind with which you approach the dangers, either you avoid them or you cause them. As we see in the film, Dominique is a man alone on his cliff, doing a base-jump*. He concentrates before jumping, he communicates with nature because he respects the place where he is, he evaluates the danger and controls his fear. And that leads to immediate pleasure… Days of effort for a few seconds of ecstasy. Challenging nature necessarily requires humility. In these fantastic and awe-inspiring settings, you don’t try to be a master of the world. If Dominique crash lands at the foot of the Portalet, the Portalet won’t move an inch! It won’t change the mountain or the course of things. In any case, one day or another, nature devours you… * "Building Antenna Stand Earth-jump": a jump from a building, an antenna, a bridge or a cliff.
In the film, you define yourselves as "people who push back the limits", who live on adrenalin and fresh air. What led you to make a film about your extreme experiences and "sports mutants"?
All my passions are united in Pushing the Limits: adventure, the natural world, surpassing yourself, friendship, the tribe… I grew up in the Chamonix Valley, inspired by the exploits of mythical mountaineers such as Desmaison or Gary Heming, in an adventurous and breakneck atmosphere. In addition, I have always loved the cinema. In Chamonix, when I was a kid, I hosted a film club with an old carbon projector! I’ve taken part in skiing competitions at a professional level. Then I started working as a stuntman on American and even Japanese productions. After that, I moved to the other side of the camera and I set up a sporting and advertising film production company. I would always try to find surprising angles for the camera. One day, in Los Angeles, I had had enough of that world. I took a break and as I was sleeping out in the open under a tree in Yosemite National Park, I had a sort of revelation: Pushing the Limits, the symbol, the idea of the film that I wanted to make.
How did you manage to bring this project to completion ?
I returned home to Chamonix where I got my friends together and we decided to create the MGA team. A group of individuals sharing the same passion, specialists in their field, capable of doing both powerful and crazy things. We laid down certain guidelines: refusal of the star system or unconscious escalation, never compete against each other, never lose the idea of danger, never ruin our personal satisfaction that resides in surpassing ourselves for ourselves. Pushing… was life. I never left my camera, I was always ready to set off to the four corners of the world to bring back a few shots of a fifteen-second jump! It wasn’t even enough for a TV subject… If the guy wanted to back down, we never made him go through with it. We never asked the media to cover the event. We filmed a few scenes but I dreamt of making a real feature film for the big screen! After three years of very close friendship, we had the idea of telling this story. A story of friends who at first accomplish exploits for themselves and who, once they start working for a TV channel to finance their projects, lose the real sense of adventure. This leads to a race for the sensational, viewer ratings, the fever of success, an escalation in competition, until their friendship is threatened. But they will never fall into the trap.
Each "hero" in the film carries out amazing exploits. Dominique (the base-jumper) leaps from sheer cliffs, Eric and Christophe (extreme snowboarders) head down almost vertical slopes at breakneck speed, Jean-Louis (the "straight down" skier) schusses down virtually without touching the snow, Marc Twight (the ice-climber) climbs ice walls.
For Dominique, a guide at the High Mountain Military School, the aim is to leap from rocks that aren’t necessarily vertical, with outcropping shelves. He has had the crazy idea of adapting this outlawed American sport to the natural world. Instead of leaping from the Empire State Building, he prefers the mythical settings of mountaineering history, such as Les Drus in Chamonix. After a difficult approach climb, on reaching a summit from which he cannot descend, he tosses an orange into the void to time the impact delay against the rock and memorizes the number of seconds to "live out" his fall. Dominique is a real mutant. Before jumping, he carries out a complete ritual; he’s in a sort of trance. He memorizes his gestures to find his balance in the air because, when you free-fall, there’s nothing to hang on to. The excitement of the jump is a great moment, an amazing surge of adrenalin! Dominique has a notion of time that is different from most people’s. In a fraction of a second, he is capable of deciding which gesture will avoid an accident. But, for him, the six seconds of his jump into the void turn into a sort of ecstasy that lasts forever.
XIGOR, the "silver surfer", surfs through the air like the mythical condor and manages to land without a parachute…
This is the logical outcome of his experience. The craziest thing is that he initially plans on using a parachute but then takes it off at the last minute, just before jumping. To be 100% free. In the film, Xigor first races against a plane, urged on by Farjonnes, the producer of the "Extreme Game" TV show. It’s man against the machine. They set off at 6,000 metres above the glacier. The plane, with its powerful 800 horsepower engine, dives down and circles. The feat is to avoid coming into contact with the falling sky-surfer since it would decapitate him. Xigor uses the aerodynamic support of his sky-surfboard to slip between the clods. All this is much more difficult in Bolivia since in fact they are landing at an altitude of almost 4,300 metres. Reflexes are slower, the cold is terrifying, you’re numb and dizzy from the altitude. The thin oxygen gives magnificent images but it can make you lose some of the lucidity that is essential when any moment of inattention can be fatal. François, our cameraman, had a mortal fall while we were shooting above Lake Titicaca. The footage that we see is his. Of course, I didn’t show the fall, I don’t want to be ghoulish. François was illuminated by the beauty of the footage that he was shooting. He pulled off the feat of shooting with a 6-kilo 35 mm camera strapped to his head, in mid-air where any movement is extremely tiring and where he had to factor in the air displacement of the surfer. Every member of our team has had dramatic experiences. You make it when the person just behind you falls into a crevasse because he put his foot down a little too far to the left.
Your actors, such as Fiona Gelin and Mark Twight, followed you in this crazy adventure.
Fiona told me during the casting sessions, "I can ski." In fact, she hadn’t been on a pair of skis for 15 years! On the first day, she found herself in the mountains, in a magnificent, virgin snowfield at 3,400 metres. She kept falling every ten metres or so! I discovered someone with amazing willpower and genuine courage. To follow this adventure, we wanted someone close to our ideals, convivial and sensitive to human values. Over the two years of the shoot, Fiona became a genuine adventurer. In Bolivia, she camped out with us at the El Condorieri base-camp at 5,500 metres with temperatures of minus 20°C at night… She had a genuine relationship with the royal eagle that lands on her arm. If you’re scared or make a false move, the bird can pierce your arm with its talons. If it had clawed her face, she would have been disfigured for life… Fiona accomplished genuine feats. To shoot the eagle landing at sunset, you can only do a single take. If it doesn’t work, you have to wait until the next evening to try it again. Fiona lived the story of Pushing… to the full. I think she realized that we were crazy, obsessed by adventure. On the day that we shot the avalanche, we were in the clouds in a helicopter, because of the bad weather, and we had to land and spend the night in the open. There were fifteen of us. Fiona saw us build igloos. I started piling up a few stones out of the wind, in the water and snow. She said to me, "What are you doing?" I answered, "I’m making my bed… You sleep in the helicopter, they go in the igloos but I get claustrophobia. I’m always scared the igloo will cave in so I make a little corner for myself!" By throwing herself into this world completely, she was able to play to perfection this adventure reporter who travels the world to film sporting feats. She was able to bring additional credibility to the part because she had spent so much time with all these adventurers. Mark Twight is specialized in ice climbing. He is used to physical effort. He’s one of the most gifted of modern mountaineers, on a level with the very best, and has done a number of "firsts". Alongside his mountaineering activity, he has taken acting classes. He has both charm and charisma. But, above all, he has a very sensitive approach to the mountains. He is a genuine artist, a poet inspired by nature and death. I think that he gets this romanticism across in the images. I chose him for the main part for all these reasons. He’s someone authentic.
You took up a further challenge by shooting in 35 mm.
Yes, that’s another way of "pushing the limits", a desire to surpass myself. The sporting exploits were things that we had already done. I didn’t want to ask my friends to do them again, even better. That was impossible. So I wanted it all to be more beautiful and more impressive for the audience. I positioned the cameras to make the film as spectacular as possible. I wanted audiences to discover the reality of the pleasure that these guys find in nature, in the wide opens spaces, without making a subjective and self-centred film with the camera focusing on their faces. Filming in 35 mm means multiplying everything by four, the weight, the congestion, in short all the problems. A 35 mm camera means a helicopter with four guys, the cameraman, his assistant, carrying a tripod and two porters for the film stock and lenses. In 16 mm, I could set off alone with the camera on my back and the tripod in my hand but that’s a whole other matter…
There’s one word that can sum up your film: authenticity.
The exploits aren’t re-enacted in the studio or shot with special effects. In my quest for truth and purity, when I was writing the screenplay, I never once imagined rigging the feats. And perhaps I was a little naïve too! The idea was to film these different feats live. All the team played their own parts. Fiona did a real parachute jump. I could have strung her up under the helicopter in the studio with a wind machine and do close-ups of her talking. Perhaps that would have been more worthwhile but I’m not into that. For the sequence where Xigor is on a sky-surfboard racing a plane, building a model would have been the easiest option. We had to find the plane best suited to the stunt, modify its propeller, find a pilot who could do a dive like that, adapt the board and helmet, take all the safety measures possible and, on top of everything, devise the best way of filming it all! Shooting that scene alone took four months. Similarly, instead of taking the guys to Lake Titicaca, we could have shot part of it above Annecy Lake to save time and money but that would no longer have been the same story for us. We spent three adventurous years among friends. We lived in a totally austere way, took risks to grab a few shots of us leaping off cliffs, all because we had the same passion. Our project always pushed back the limits of the cinema! And, besides, authenticity comes from people above all. In the mountains, people have remained authentic.
The film’s soundtrack is earth shattering !
It’s a film for young people so the soundtrack is of the utmost importance. Young people want images AND sound. They often like American films for the music. Our problem was finding the tunes that could go with the image and that would correspond to current or future tastes. Through Sony Music, we had access to the groups coming out of Seattle. We were able to work artistically without worrying about the fame of the groups that interested us, whether they were French or Anglo-Saxon: Suicidal Tendencies, Toad the Wet Sprocket, The Young Gods, Curve, NMFT, Deacon Blue, Immaculate Fool, Black Buddha… are all on the soundtrack. For the underscoring, the additional music, we worked with T21. I think we had a good nose because, since we made our choices, some of these groups have gone ballistic in North America.
How about Edward Meeks ?
I mainly chose him because of childhood memories: I used to love to watch his adventures in the series Les Globe-Trotters; he made me laugh and dream. Later, I met him in Chamonix on the set of the TV series La Voie Jackson with Sami Frey. That was an excellent series on the mountaineering and the emotions that is can provide, from fear to exaltation. I needed someone to play Farjonnes who would be sarcastic and eccentric, with an international dimension. It was ideal for Edward! We had fun giving him a very comic-strip appearance, stressing his Machiavellian nature and megalomania, with a baroque castle in the background. You simply have to see him drag on a cigar while caressing his tame python in front of a row of studio screens! On a more serious note, his role represents the ever-present danger of a media drift towards sensationalism, regardless of life.
Interview carried out by Gaillac-Morgue