It was great to see Sheffield’s Showroom Cinema packed today with people of all ages eager to watch the latest from the Sheffield Adventure Film Festival. There was an extra buzz tonight as we awaited the arrival of this year’s festival patron, Joe Simpson, to be interviewed on stage by Gordon Stainforth alongside clips from the feature films Touching The Void and Beckoning Silence.
In 1985, Joe was just 25 when he had his now famous accident in the Andes, which saw his climbing partner Simon Yates forced to cut Simpson’s rope, sending him hurtling into a crevasse – recounted in his book Touching the Void and Kevin Macdonald’s 2003 film.
Gordon began the interview by asking Joe about the writing of his book and how he came to choose the title. Joe said that after thinking “What the hell do I call this?” he made a list of words and “void” just stood out, partly because “It’s about how I no longer believe in God….”, a subject he was to return to later in the interview.
There was talk of making a film with Tom Cruise playing Joe. Joe had a very clear opinion about this. “Any Hollywood film about mountaineering is going to be crap.” Examples which came to mind were Cliffhanger and Vertical Limit. I can’t disagree with him on this. He praised Kevin Macdonald’s docudrama as “a great film”, though Joe didn’t enjoy making it. Apart from the panic attacks which struck when he had to re-enact his dreadful experience, Joe and Simon found all the hours of waiting around on set extremely tedious. He complained that they were never told how the film was going to develop and that in the end Macdonald “ probably didn’t have a clue of what made us tick.”
Gordon asked Joe about his 2002 book The Beckoning Silence, which deals with the death in 1936 of the young German climber Toni Kurz on the north face of the Eiger. It was this tragic event, Joe claims, which inspired him to take up climbing in the first place “because he never gave up, right to the end”. There is a circularity in Joe’s life: he was to find himself in just that same position, hanging on a rope in the Andes.
Pursuing a self-confessed interest in the dark side of climbing, Gordon asked about the oft referred to “death wish” among climbers. Joe strongly repudiates the existence of this, but talks of a sense of being utterly in the present, which makes you feel immortal. He also says it is the possibility of death which gives validity to the experience.
Brought up a Catholic, and even wanting to be a priest at the age of 14, Joe is now an atheist. But, he says, being an atheist doesn’t mean that you can’t recognise the spiritual. He talked of his wonder at seeing the stars from mountains, comparing it with being an astronaut.
Returning finally to Touching The Void and why both the book and the film achieved such huge success, Joe said he has always been interested in stories and storytelling – “A good book or film should have a good story,” and he refers to this one as “ an everyman story”, tapping into the myth of the returning warrior. “People don’t read your story, they read their story. You know that you will die. You wonder what it will be like. Will I cut the rope….”
