'Everest' cinematographer Salvatore Totino -­ Variety Artisans

It was all really, really hard. There were avalanche concerns constantly. The minute you stop moving around, you're exhausted. Try to breathe, man. David Cohen from Variety here. This is Artisans. And our guest this week is Salvatore Titino, Director of Photography for Everest. This film, from Universal and director Balthazar Kormakur, is the most detailed depiction yet of the disastrous day in 1996 when eight climbers died on Mount Everest. This movie has one shot after another, which, if you step back to think about it, is impossible. Nothing's impossible when you're making a movie. We shot in Kathmandu, up the Kumbha Valley, as high as 15,000 feet. Then we shot the rest of it in Italy, in the Dolomites, on a mountain at 10,000 feet, dealing with weather conditions there, creating some storm using fans and blowers. There are areas in the Dolomites that look like Everest, which is fantastic. Congratulations. Welcome. Yeah, Lassie, you did it. And then we recreated some of it in the studio as well, where we built the summit, the Hillary Step, and Camp 4 in Pinewood in London. And then with the help of CG, we had a great CG supervisor, which helped to enhance and create Everest. Come on, Dougie! Doug, let's go! Hurry up! I'm always trying to make the audience feel like they're there in the moment. So how do I bring you, the viewer, into that scene? And I want you to feel like you're one of the climbers on Everest. And I do that by putting the camera in places in a way that makes it feel like you're really there. I've been to Nepal. Actually, a year before the events of this movie, and I trekked part of that same route up to Everest Base Camp. The sky looks different, and there's no pollution. The air is really crisp, very sharp. Shadows are really sharp. A lot of detail. Visibility is just incredible. The big challenge with that was recreating that in the studio and creating the summit. So obviously, we couldn't go up to the summit. We built the summit on the 007 stage in Pinewood. And I needed to find lights that were as strong as the sun. You look terrible! My stomach's not so good, man. You have shots where they're walking up a 35 or 40-degree slope, and the camera pans down that line of climbers, and I'm thinking, well, there's no crane you could put on that mountainside. There was a crane. Is there, really? Yes. It was a buildable crane that we brought up to the mountain. Cold is an interesting aspect of it. How do you convey cold with photography? Well, when you're on a mountain, it's easy, because breath comes out. A lot of credit to Bob Vizag, because he really, really was tenacious in pushing this idea forward. And he really wanted you to feel what it was like to wake up frozen. Jason Clarke? Jason Clarke, yes. Rob Hall, his character. So we took one part of the studio and brought in these giant refrigerator units that were like the size of a half of a semi-truck. We got it down to, I think, about 25 degrees. That's pretty cold. 20, 26. It's around there. You see it in his performance. He's frozen. His face is frozen. That's not makeup. You've got to get moving. You've got to come on down. You take all these pieces of your photography of the set, the environment, creating a refrigerator, and you're building these real moments. You just put the camera in there, and you put it in the right place, and it's there. You're real. You're like, I'm here with him. I'm cold. I'm watching. I'm freezing. I'm going to die. As an audience, I believe that's what you start to feel. And that's what I really enjoy doing when I'm making films. Get out there and eat hell!