Lights, Camera, ACTION!
I didn’t expect to come to Nepal and end up featuring in a Hollywood movie, but that’s exactly what happened the other week!

Called ‘Everest‘ (one of two films with the same name being made in 2014), the film is based on various books documenting the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, including Jon Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air”, and interviews with survivors, and is being partly filmed on location in Nepal. The 2nd Second Assistant Director (seriously did not know that was a title) posted on Google looking for a number of Westerners to come and be extra’s in a scene in the airport. My colleague Kimberly and I decided to go along to the Hyatt hotel on Sunday for a costume check. When we arrived, the 22AD asked for five volunteers to film on Monday, on a bus driving around Kathmandu while the actors delivered their lines. We quickly weighed up the chances of appearing on screen in a busy airport scene (40 Westerners, 150 Nepali’s) against being on a bus (3 Westerners – not including the actors – and 13 Nepali’s) and decided to go for that. It meant meeting at the Hyatt at 6:15 am on Monday instead of 9 am at the airport on Tuesday, but the early morning was a sacrifice worth making.

The scene involved three of the stars of the film, Josh Brolin, John Hawkes and Michael Kelly (all seen in the picture above), meeting on the bus and talking about their prospective climb to the peak of Everest. Josh Brolin (playing Beck Weathers) and John Hawkes (playing Doug Hansen) shared the dialogue with each other, sat across an aisle in a crowded bus (but nowhere near as crowded as a usual Nepali bus) on the way to their hotel in Thamel. Michael Kelly (playing the writer Jon Krakauer) was sat behind them and didn’t speak until they were leaving the bus in Thamel. My position as a Westerner on the bus was standing near the front, holding on to the luggage rack, with a cage of smelly noisy chickens opposite me.

The day was an incredible experience, seeing some ‘A list’ Hollywood actors at work up close. I even operated the clapper board (“Slate 5, take 2, A and B” *CLAP*), and became their continuity expert on the bus, frequently making sure that the little old lady in front of me kept her hat on all day (it was cold when we’d started filming in the early morning, and by 11 am was significantly warmer. She couldn’t understand why she still had to wear the wool hat she’d had on since 7 am. The concept of 6 hours of filming for a 5-minute shot was lost on most of them), and that the women at the back of the bus didn’t keep swapping positions.

After lunch, the director was sat at the back of the bus to direct filming from a different angle. They were about to pull away and I decided to check with him if he actually wanted more people on the bus now than we’d had in the morning? It was twice as full and appeared that all the Nepali’s who had been involved in the morning had called some of their friends to come and join in the fun. No, he said, the bus should have exactly the same people, sitting in exactly the same position, wearing exactly the same clothes.

The director was constantly asking me, by name, to move different people slightly, and at the end of the day, both Josh Brolin and John Hawkes came up, shook my hand and personally thanked me for being so helpful (again, calling me by name… Josh Brolin knows my name! – Note, this was before he became even more famous for playing Thanos in the Avengers movies). I’m not sure if this scene will make it into the final cut of the film (it did), or if it does, even if I’ll be visible (I wasn’t – you can just about see my hand at one point), but whatever the outcome, it was an amazing experience and I’ll always remember the day.