Tenzing movie: Director Jennifer Peedom on honouring Tenzing Norgay’s legacy

There are many starts to how historical biopic Tenzing came about but one of the crucial points was in 2015 at, of all places, Sydney’s State Theatre.

Australian filmmaker Jennifer Peedom had just debuted Sherpa, a documentary about the sherpa community best known for being the guides to foreign climbers on Mount Everest.

Among those she met during production was Norbu Tenzing, one of the subjects of the documentary and the son of Tenzing Norgay, who along with New Zealander Edmund Hillary, were the first men to summit Everest. He came out to Australia for the premiere.

“The reception that he got when I brought him out on stage, made us both realise there was something going on here, that there was this interest and respect for Tenzing’s story,” Peedom told The Nightly.

At the time of Sherpa, Peedom had already spent 10 years working on and off in that part of the world, and she had thought Sherpa would be her last film in the region, not the start of another one.

It would take another decade, during which she continued to make more documentaries about nature and the human relationship to it, but she and screenwriter Luke Davies (Lion, Candy) were steadfastly working to make Tenzing happen, her first narrative feature and an Australian co-production.

Tenzing’s name and his legacy is famous in Nepal, in South Asia, perhaps in New Zealand and within the climbing community, but to the wider world, he hasn’t had the same recognition as Hillary.

This biopic starring Genden Phuntsok as Tenzing, Tom Hiddleston as Hillary and Willem Dafoe as John Hunt would be a corrective, a tribute to a man as well as a lesser-known historical figure.

“Most of the media today still report that Everest was climbed by Edmund Hillary and his sherpa guide, and sometimes they name him and sometimes they don’t. So it was about giving Tenzing a name and giving him his achievement its rightful place in history,” Peedom said.

The decision to make it a dramatised narrative film rather than a documentary was that there was limited archival footage of Tenzing, and certainly not from his childhood growing up near Chomolungma, the Tibetan name for Everest.

“This story needed to be the whole journey. It had to be about Tenzing’s identity, family, belonging and spirituality, which are very much an internal journey, and none of that had been documented, so documentary had really taken me as far as I could at that point,” Peedom explained.

The production split the production between Nepal and New Zealand – all the scenes up until the 1953 British expedition to ascend Everest reached base camp was shot in Nepal, and then everything above that in New Zealand including on Aoraki Mt Cook

Although all the aerial work was of the real thing, it was much safer to have the actors work in New Zealand where the mountains are just as large and majestic, but they start at sea level so the logistics were easier.

Not that it wasn’t without challenges. It wasn’t like they were filming a season of The White Lotus in a cushy resort.

“The way we did it was essentially to stage an expedition,” Peedom said. “Even though we’re flying home and staying in reasonably safe, warm accommodation, when we were going to work every day, we were doing it for real.

“We were clipped into real ropes, and so were the actors. Their prop ropes were also their safety ropes, they were designed to work as both. In you talk to any of them, and certainly what they’ve been saying is that, for them, not nearly as much acting was required because they were doing so much of it for real.

“So, when you’re cold and the lips are blue and you can’t quite speak properly, it’s because it’s so cold. We were in at least minus 15 degrees temperature, so we were in really cold conditions.”

That meant no green screens and almost no days shooting inside, and the actors were on the summit of one of the biggest mountains in New Zealand “to give them that experience of looking down and seeing the world at their feet and being on the precipice of something so big”.

Any chat about the motivations of the characters or changing the dialogue happened down below in warmer climes. Once they were up there on mountain in the snow, there was no time. The weather could change very quickly so getting the shots had to happen just as fast.

Producer Liz Watts (Animal Kingdom, The King) understood that for Tenzing to look and feel authentic it couldn’t be faked in a studio.

“When (Jen and I) started talking, she made a very, very good case for holding the authenticity brush to the whole storytelling of this in a visual sense,” Watts said.

“I’m not a mountaineer but I was really interested in the lens of the story and the prism of history that we’re looking through from Tenzing’s point of view. So to have that authenticity was very important even if it was logistically challenging.”

For Watts, Peedom with her documentary history in Nepal, her bond with Tenzing’s family and her understanding of this landscape meant she was the only filmmaker who could do this.

Peedom picked a tough set of circumstances for her first narrative feature, and she had to remind herself throughout production that the sum total of her experiences led to her being able to stand there and direct this film.

“That means you are the right person to tell the story and, at a certain point, you just need to trust that,” she said.

That also meant respecting the environment as not something to be tamed and conquered but to connect with, as Tenzing did.

Peedom added, “It was about saying here is a different kind of hero, here is a different way to approach the climbing of a mountain being the metaphor for so many obstacles that we all need to overcome in life. Here is a man that achieved something extraordinary.”

Tenzing is in cinemas and on Apple TV