Johnny Depp, Kristen Stewart and More Kick Off Awards Season in Venice

Two fictional features by up-and-coming directors from Turkey and one documentary feature about Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk’s İstanbul-based museum are slated for world premieres in various sections of the 72nd festival, which opened on Wednesday. Australian actor Jason Clarke (Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Zero Dark Thirty) is Rob Hall, Keira Knightley (Atonement, Begin Again) is Jan Arnold.

“I love you, please don’t worry too much”, Hall, whose hands and feet are frozen and who has run out of essential oxygen, tells his wife – nearly his last words.

Anyone old enough to remember what unfolded will recognise the dramatic and cinematic qualities that made it an obvious candidate for the big screen, but what Kormakur and writers William Nicholson (Unbroken, Mandela) and Simon Beaufoy (127 Hours, Slumdog Millionaire) have achieved is both sensitive and nothing short of sensational. We had helicopters. We shot in the memorials and people had to evacuate because people started to be shaken.

“I think Jake worded it very well when he said there’s a difference between pain and injury”.

The Deep filmmaker admits he was hard on his team while making the movie, telling the Guardian newspaper, “There’s a difference between pain and injury, I put them through a lot of pain, but no injury”.

Three of the most experienced mountaineers among them – their guides – would not.

But the opening-night slot carries considerable cachet, and pressure. In 2013, it launched Gravity on a course towards seven Academy Awards, and last year’s opener, the midlife-crisis comedy Birdman, soared on to win four Oscars including best picture.

A passion project 15 years in the making for producer Tim Bevan, the NZ-born founder of Working Title Films, Everest is finally ready for an audience. But as a functional adventure-cum-disaster flick it works hard not to let the grandeur of its setting become obscured by anything as extraneous as plot or human connection: “Everest” boasts drama so high it’s Himalayan, but the characterization is thinner than the air up there.

“There’s a tremendous responsibility trying to re-create something which has happened”, Gyllenhaal said at the “Everest” Lido press conference.

“It was actually a attractive thing to sit down with the two of them and hear who their father was to them”, Gyllenhaal said.