PUSHING THE 'LIMIT' CAST, CREW WEATHERED MOUNTAINOUS OBSTACLES FOR NEW ADVENTURE FILM.

Byline: Glenn Whipp Film Writer

``Vertical Limit'' director Martin Campbell could handle the freezing cold. He could deal with the snow, sleet and rain. He could even tolerate the 13 days he had to postpone filming due to some unexpected blizzard or record rainstorm in the Southern Alps of New Zealand. But when thousands of moths descended upon his set one night, attracted by the production's lights, Campbell finally flipped.

``You're making a movie that's supposedly set in the Himalayas, but there's one problem - they don't have moths in the Himalayas,'' Campbell says, still fuming when recalling the night when thousands of low-flying extras invaded. ``I mean, I should have laughed at it, but I couldn't. This movie threw every bleeding thing at us. It was hard not to go out of your gourd sometimes. But we took the challenge, so you might say we bloody well asked for it.''

The challenge that Campbell and his filmmaking team took was to mount a big-budget movie in the rarified air of a mountain range. Campbell (who directed ``The Mask of Zorro'' and the James Bond thriller ``GoldenEye'') likens the task to every director's nightmare - filming on water - where you assume that ``whatever the schedule is, you triple it.'' Making ``Vertical Limit'' didn't turn out to be that bad. Sure there were 158 shooting days, spread out over six months. But no one was hurt - and they eventually found a way to get rid of the moths.

Movie studios have never taken the phrase ``climb every mountain'' to heart. There were some moderate early successes, notably the 1938 Matterhorn film, ``The Challenge'' and the 1950 psychological thriller ``The White Tower,'' set in the Swiss Alps. But modern attempts like Clint Eastwood's ``The Eiger Sanction'' (``very good mountain climbing, but a bloody awful movie,'' Campbell says) and ``K2: The Ultimate High'' (``they didn't have the budget,'' Campbell notes) have failed miserably.

``I looked at them all, and 'Cliffhanger' was the only one I really enjoyed,'' Campbell says.''

``Vertical Limit'' isn't much for subtlety, either. Not merely content to make a mountain climbing movie (``that would be boring,'' Campbell says), Campbell and screenwriters Terry Hayes and Robert King have created a thriller that features avalanches, nitroglycerin, helicopter heroics and lots of dangling from precipices.

Says Campbell: ``I remember seeing the trailer for 'Cliffhanger' and there was a shot of (Sylvester) Stallone running to the edge of a cliff and they cut, and I thought, 'That's going to be a marvelous shot.' And then I went to see the movie and it wasn't in there. I wanted to have that shot and a bunch of other gut-wrenchers with it.''

``Vertical Limit'' stars Chris O'Donnell as a mountain climber who must come out of a selmposed retirement to rescue his sister (Robin Tunney), who, along with a arrogant billionaire (Bill Paxton), is trapped near the summit of the world's second-highest peak, K2. Help is enlisted from a grab bag of character types: an Australian ``Beavis and Butt-head'' climbing team (Ben Mendelsohn and Steve Le Marquand), a surly loner (Scott Glenn), a devout Islamic porter (Alexander Siddig) and a beautiful French-Canadian medic (Izabella Scorupco).

The filmmakers spent six months shooting in and around the Southern Alps of New Zealand, with 11,000-foot Mount Cook doubling for Pakistan's 28,250-foot K2. The mountain scenes were filmed first to take advantage of the cold weather; later the crew moved to a soundstage in Queenstown where the more difficult stunts were created against a blue-screen backdrop. In all, more than 400 visual-effects shots were used to give the audience what Campbell calls the ``visceral experience of being on the mountain.''

The cast and crew didn't need that. They enjoyed enough visceral experiences during filming to last a lifetime. Tunney had never been skiing, much less mountain climbing, yet she ended up crossing a wide mountain crevasse, suspended from a wire. O'Donnell cops to a fear of flying, but had to endure daily, and oftentimes shaky, helicopter rides to and from the remote shooting locations on Mount Cook.

Only Glenn really got into the spirit of things, learning how to ice climb and convincing Campbell to include a shot of him scaling the side of a mountain.

``I figured rock climbing would be fun, but ice climbing looked cold and miserable and dangerous,'' Glenn says. ``But the first time I did it, I had a smile a mile wide. It's like climbing the face of big diamonds made by God. With ice, unlike rock, you can go anywhere you want. Rather than taking inventory of the rock, you take inventory of yourself.''

O'Donnell wasn't about to get into any such stock-taking.

``Scott's a little different,'' O'Donnell says, laughing. ``He would go off on his own and really push himself. But we all did our share of stuff on the movie. They kind of broke us in slowly and trained us. They taught us enough so we looked like we knew what we were doing and that we knew how to handle the equipment and trust it.

``That was my biggest fear, learning to trust the harness and the ropes. You look at these little things and you think, 'That's holding my whole life.' It's insane. You just can't think about it.''

``That said,'' O'Donnell continues, ``we made a movie on a mountain, but we didn't climb the mountain. I can't even say we got a taste of it. We got to put on a lot of equipment and hike through snow, but to really be at an altitude like that and be in the death zone - well, it's something I hope to never experience.''

Producer Lloyd Phillips agrees. After establishing elaborate training protocols to satisfy the insurance companies, after dealing with the logistics of hauling 20 tons of equipment to and from Mount Cook on a daily basis and after watching his production be shut down numerous times because of freak snowstorms and a record downpour that flooded Queenstown, Phillips says he will pass on any future movies that require him to travel above sea level.

``We set the bar high on this one,'' Phillips says. ``I think the next mountain movie would have to be entirely computer-generated.''

Upon hearing that, Campbell says: ``That would be fine by me. You'd be a hell of a lot warmer.''

CAPTION(S):

4 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) The icemen cometh

Filming `Vertical Limit' becomes a chilling experience for its cast and crew

(2 -- 3) Director Martin Campbell, above, says more than 400 visual-effects shots were used to give the audience the ``visceral experience of being on the mountain'' for his latest adventure film, ``Vertical Limit,'' top.

(4) `They taught us enough so we looked like we knew what we were doing and that we knew how to handle the equipment and trust it.'

- Chris O'Donnell