Sundance Winner 'Meru' Scales Heights Of Himalayas

(MENAFN- Arab Times) Warner Bros hosted an intimate press gathering in New York on Thursday to reveal new footage of its upcoming movie "Pan," a retelling of J.M. Barrie's classic Peter Pan story, starring Hugh Jackman, Rooney Mara and Garrett Hedlund. Director Joe Wright and Australian newcomer Levi Miller, who plays Peter, met with reporters and spoke candidly about the film during a Q&A session.

Five clips were shown as the presentation and boasted the movie's action sequences, Jackman's starring role, the emotional plot, comedic moments and a highly visual fight sequence. "It's a complete reframing of the myth and there's lots of winks to those who know the story well, but overall it's a reimagining of the original story," Wright told the crowd at the Crosby Street Hotel. "I read the story as a kid and I went back to read the original source material and discovered to my surprise that it's a lot richer and darker than I had imagined. There's a strange psychological level to it as well and I wanted to include that in the film."

Adventure "Pan" marks Wright's first $100 millionplus big-budget Hollywood feature. He explained he had some reservations, but knew he was the right person to direct an action-adventure film. "With no track record in big-budget studio movies or family movies, it was daunting at first. The challenge I set myself was to make a film that fulfilled all the expectations of a big actionadventure movie and yet have a very strong, emotional core. I think it's a misconception to think that films of this scale can't be personal.

So I tried to do that and was ready for the challenge." Wright immediately felt a connection with Jason Fuchs' screenplay that focuses on an orphaned Peter searching for mother. "I have a son, and my wife and I fell totally head over heels in love with him from the moment he was born. Every day I witness the passionate love between my wife and our son and then came along the 'Pan' script, which is about the love between a son and his mother," he said.

"Once I read the script I couldn't put it down because I could connect emotionally. There's this huge caravan that comes along with a film like this but at its core it's love." One clip showed an emotional Peter living in an orphanage and discovering a letter his mother had once written to him promising to reunite with him some day.

"I can relate to Peter because I love my mother a lot like him," 12-year-old Miller told Variety. "I could understand his feelings and acting the sad scenes was sad for me too." Miller beat out thousands of kids around the world to portray Peter Pan. His favorite part of the role was tackling the stunt work.

"Mastering all the stunts was a lot of fun," said Miller, who enjoys indoor rock climbing and playing tennis during his free time. "But there were a couple that I hated. There was a lot of falling and being kicked. Doing the wirework was difficult because I wore this thing that was like a straitjacket, but it didn't hold your arms and it always left these marks from the rubbing of it. That bit was difficult, but when I got up into the air it was pretty fun. " According to Wright, the "Pan" set was the largest ever to be built indoors in the UK. Instead of relying heavily on CGI, many of the film's sets were built at Warner Bros. Leavesden Studios. Also the Neverland forest was created with hundreds of real trees and plants to give it an authentic look.

Producer Sarah Schechter recalled the size of the set being a "couple of American football fields." Also at the presentation were the film's costumes designed by Jacqueline Durran. On display were Tiger Lily's inspired-by-punk rock, intricate headpiece worn by Mara and one of Hedlund's Hook costumes. A replica of one of the tents from the native Neverland village was also on display. Warner Bros., Wright and Miller also hosted an event in Los Angeles Friday. "Pan" is set to open in theaters on Oct 9.

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With Baltazar Kormakur's star-studded "Everest," which opens Sept 18, looming on the horizon, moviegoers are likely to be treated to not one but two films that finally promise to capture the life-or-death stakes, not to mention the seemingly impossible physical odds, of extreme alpine climbing that Jon Krakauer chronicled so rivetingly in his bestselling book "Into Thin Air."

The other film is "Meru," the Sundance Audience Award-winning documentary that Music Box Films is releasing on Aug 14, and in which Krakauer appears. "Meru" documents the two separate attempts - in 2008 and 2011 - to scale the Shark's Fin peak on Mount Meru in the Indian Himalayas. What sets "Meru" apart from "Everest" is its firstperson perspective, having been co-directed and shot by one of the expeditions' three climbers, Jimmy Chin.

"I think the filmmaking achievement was what was shot in the mountains; that's never been seen before," says "Meru" co-director Chai Vasarhelyi, who met Chin in 2012; they eventually married. "We've seen excellent mountain climbing films, but they're all reenactments. The cameras (used) on 'Meru' were not fancy, but it works, and it's authentic." According to Chin - a notable photographer whose work has appeared on the cover of National Geographic, and one of the few people to ski Mount Everest from the summit - he used first-generation handicams for that failed first ascent, which ended 150 meters short of the summit after a protracted storm depleted their rations.

"They were very rudimentary," he explains about the Panasonic Lumix and Sony Handicam the team used in 2008. "And then between 2008 and 2011, the DSLR (digital single-lens reflex camera) video revolution happened and the 5D (Panasonic TM900) came out where you were able to shoot with much more cinematic quality-type footage at high def. I'm also a photographer so I used that camera both for shooting stills while I was shooting video."

Since Shark's Fin, at almost 22,000 feet (versus Everest's 29,000 feet), is by many accounts the most technically difficult, and perilous, peak in the Himalayas, climbing and shooting simultaneously was no small feat. "There are two threads happening in your head," explains Chin. "That is the climbing, which requires most of your bandwidth, then there's the filmmaking. The basic rule we set for ourselves was to not let the shooting affect the climbing, because the climbing objective was really the priority. "We tried to shoot whenever we could," Chins adds, "which wasn't that much, because we are very busy doing other things.

We also didn't have the battery power, or storage, so we had to be very thoughtful of how much we shot (but to have) enough for the editor to work with." Chin's fellow climbers are among the world's foremost adventurists: Conrad Anker, a captain of the North Face climbing team who located legendary explorer George Mallory's body on Everest in 1999; and Renan Ozturk, a fearless climber known for his video dispatches from the world's most remote locales, who also acted as the doc's co-d.p.