A decade ago, director Jennifer Peedom told Willem Dafoe that she planned to make a movie about Tenzing Norgay, the Sherpa who helped British Army officer John Hunt lead the world’s first successful summit of Mount Everest in 1953. Dafoe, who narrated Peedom’s 2017 documentary Mountain, thought it “sounded like a great adventure”.
Now, Tenzing is a reality. With Dafoe starring as Hunt, alongside Genden Phuntsok as Norgay and Tom Hiddleston as mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary, it’s the definition of a tentpole blockbuster. We spoke to Dafoe about the movie, his coming of age in ‘70s New York and why he always feels like an outsider.
NME: Hey Willem, how did you relate to John Hunt?
Willem Dafoe: “John Hunt ended up being, for me, a very interesting character. On the surface, he’s a military guy. The thing that’s important, as I’m approaching this, is that he’s a little bit of an outsider, too, in a strange way – although he’s representing the Empire. He’s an unlikely candidate to lead this expedition. People resisted him in the beginning because he wasn’t in [the Everest climbing] community.”
Was it a high-stakes atmosphere on set, since you were shooting up in the mountains?
“Beyond! It was. There’s a spirit of expedition even in the filmmaking. When we were filming at altitude, we were being helicoptered in every day, very uncertain when we can go and always looking at the weather. Sometimes it’s marginally dangerous. We have very good people teaching us how to do what we need to. I saw a lot of avalanches. Thank God we weren’t where they were!”
How would you describe Jennifer Peedom’s approach to this story?
“She knows the Sherpa community well. Any good director makes the world. And she knows that world and she made the world. She’s spent so much time in the Himalayas and knows the family of Tenzing Norgay – she’s speaking a language she knows. A lot of the film is dedicated to Tenzing’s background because it’s important to focus on that. She didn’t want to make another macho mountain climbing film.”
You mentioned that John was a military man. You considered joining the army in the early ‘70s. What appealed to you about that life?
“I needed something to challenge me. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, basically. I’ve always been interested in travelling with work and… it was a silly notion. It was not so much that I was attracted to the military, but I wanted something to come up against because I knew there was a bigger world out there. I grew up in the Midwest in a perfectly comfortable and nice, middle-class upbringing, but there was also a certain kind of oppressiveness of following the rules. Experimentation and individuality were not encouraged.”
Have you ever felt any tension between your love of the avant-garde and big, mainstream movies like Tenzing?
“Yes! There’s always tension. It’s the tension between commerce and experimentation. These things are always fighting with each other. Sometimes the good things win the day, and sometimes they don’t. People talk about ‘the movie business’. I’m not involved in the movie business. I’m involved in making things. I mean, that sounds kind of arrogant or snotty, but really I think of it as a business only to the degree that I wanna keep opportunities coming.
“Money, in most societies, is value – so they take care of things. There are some very good independent films that don’t do that well because they didn’t cost that much. But once you commit a piece of change to something, you really try to connect it with people.”
NME started out as a music magazine…
“Yes, I know! It’s a famous magazine, baby. You’re working for a famous magazine!”
… and came of age in ‘70s punk. What were the best gigs you saw in ‘70s New York?
“I used to go to CBGB’s. You’d see Richard Hell, Television, Ramones and James Chance And The Contortions – people like that. I’m leaving out many. There were also club performances of people that had a band for about three weeks. But that was the scene downtown, [it had] a do-it-yourself aesthetic. You had musicians that were just learning how to play their instruments, doing gigs. Similarly, you had theatre companies that weren’t trained as theatres. You had filmmakers that weren’t trained in film. It was all mixed up and that was the beauty of it.
“New York was so f***** up at that time that people were doing things for their community – so they could hang out with the people that stimulated them and sleep with the people they were interested in. It was possible because people could get it together to rent a space with some friends and try to make a go. I appreciate that my coming of age in New York was at a very good time.”
You suggested, earlier, that you’re an outsider like John Hunt. Do you really still feel that way, even after all your success?
“I’ve been lucky that I’ve been able to do what I love to do, but still: many things that I think are valuable fall by the wayside, given distribution structures and new developments in technology. And some things that I think are absolute b******* are heralded as great things. So that makes you feel a little outside. It’s a personality thing. What things do I think are b*******? I’m not in the business of making enemies!”
‘Tenzing’ is in cinemas from October 9 before being available to stream via Apple TV on October 16
The post Willem Dafoe tells us about adventurous new film ‘Tenzing’ and still feeling like an outsider: “There’s an oppressiveness in following the rules” appeared first on NME.
