On Location: Where was Tenzing filmed?

On Location peels back the curtain on some of your favorite films, television shows, and more. This time, we ask: where was Tenzing filmed?

Jennifer Peedom first visited the Himalayas over 20 years ago as an aspiring filmmaker, tagging along with a friend who was working on an Everest expedition. One opportunity led to another and she began working as a camera operator, where she observed the huge amount of work done by Sherpas—and their disproportionate share of the risk in helping foreigners reach the summit. “This so often ends up on the cutting room floor,” Jennifer says. “Which motivated the documentary I made in 2015 called Sherpa.” Through this very film—and the relationships built in local communities as a result—came the idea to tell the story of Himalayan climber Tenzing Norgay. “I always wondered why no one had told an Everest expedition story from a Sherpa’s point of view.”

“Some of the most impactful people live in the dip of society,” says Tibetan actor Genden Phuntsok, who plays the film's namesake, Himalayan climber Tenzing Norgay. “There aren’t many stories about what Sherpas did before the mountaineers.” In Tenzing, Peedom looks at the first ascent of Everest through the lens of Tenzing, who summited alongside New Zealand mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary (Tom Hiddleston) after persuading Colonel John Hunt (Willem Dafoe) to give him a place on the British climbing team.

“Tenzing—as did Hillary— pushed the boundaries of what was imaginable,” says Hiddleston. “What the pair’s friendship can teach us is that there is strength in human fellowship. You begin as outsiders with different frames of reference, but we're more united by the things we share. Tenzing came from the higher Tibetan plateau, Hillary from New Zealand. They shared a love and respect for the mountains—and recognized each other.”

Condé Nast Traveler sat down with Phuntsok, Peedom, and Hiddleston to discuss recreating Everest’s summit in New Zealand, filming a nail-biting sequence in a seemingly bottomless crevasse, and the power of being an outsider in a team setting.

Mustang, North Nepal

The team spent three months in Nepal during pre-production, then shot for six weeks before heading to New Zealand. “Tenzing was born on the high Tibetan plateau, which is now China,” Peedom says. “We shot in Mustang, near the Tibetan border, for scenes showing Tenzing’s early life. The villages up there doubled beautifully for Sherpa communities, which we'd originally thought to shoot in the Khumbu region, [but the earthquakes prevented this]."

Ensuring cultural accuracy was key. “We had to check carefully because there are still sensitivities,” Peedom says. “There’s push and pull about Tenzing's identity—[not a ‘born Sherpa,’ as we see in the film]—and who he belonged to. We needed sign-off from his family to get the facts right.”

Peedom spoke to friends of Tenzing’s, who told stories of him training up the hills of Darjeeling, with rocks in his backpack. “I met Tenzing’s grandson in Australia before meeting his sons in 2003 in New Zealand, at the same event where I met Edmund Hillary,” Peedom says. “I went up to Darjeeling a couple of times when I was making Sherpa and the stories Pem Pem [Tenzing's daughter] shared about her father found their way into the fabric of the story. Then people throughout the community joined us as language and cultural consultants. The film was a sum total of 23 years of relationship building that enabled those doors to open.”

Patan Durbar Square, Kathmandu

When asked about shooting challenges, Peedom laughs—they did, after all, shoot at a UNESCO World Heritage Site. “Patan Durbar Square [city centre in Yala] is an active place of worship and ritual for thousands of people,” she says. “We managed to carve out two hours to shoot two major scenes, and with a huge amount of extras.” The team also shot in real monasteries: “Getting around various religious holidays and finding days to work together, these were challenges from our first day of shooting.”

South Island, New Zealand

The film’s Everest sequences were filmed across New Zealand’s southern Alps. This required consultation with Te Rūnanga o Arowhenua, a group representing the Indigenous Māori tribe of the area, and the Department of Conservation. By the time the team got to New Zealand, they had done rope and rock training, so it was all about the stunts and ice climbing. Peedom credits an amazing mountaineering team she worked with through pre-production and the shoot. “I had to find new locations because 10 metres of snow had fallen!” she says. “You’re navigating changing weather all the time. We also had to rehearse the scenes that were up on the mountain on safe ground. So when we got up to the actual locations, everyone knew what they were doing because they’d done it at base camp.”

Aoraki/Mount Cook, New Zealand

The summit scene was filmed on a clear day on Mount Cook. “The awe on our faces is real,” Hiddleston says. “Jennifer didn't want artifice. We were really attached by the same rope, and took turns in leading—and if you’re leading, it's your responsibility to prove the ground ahead of you, make sure that the snow you're stepping on is firm.”

The most physically demanding element was the mountaineering side of it. “There was a lot of logistics and safety involved,” Hiddlesont says. “We were shooting in very remote villages. Being in New Zealand was like shooting a different [kind of] movie. You're on snow and ice, and safety gear has to double for props.”

The scene where Hillary falls into the crevasse and is saved by Tenzing really happened. “They were working as a pair cutting steps on the Lhotse and through the Khumbu Icefall, which is exactly what it says on the tin,” Hiddleston says. “It's a frozen waterfall, so everything you're standing on could give way at any time.” Mountaineers who climbed Everest say it's the most dangerous part of it. Phuntsok notes he knew in that moment that Tenzing had made a quick and life-saving decision called a self-arrest, when you jam the bottom of your ice axe into the snow, tie a rope around it, and it locks.

The team found a crevasse in the Darwin Glacier in Arakiman Cook on the South Island of New Zealand. The Southern Alps are an almost exact replica of the Himalayas in terms of their lot formations and crevasse fields, according to Hiddleston. The advantage is they happen to be 4000 meters lower, “So you can take a film crew up and you can breathe,” he says. “It's still icy and snowy and windy. There’s just oxygen. Mercifully, the crew had drilled a safety line into the mountain.”

The camera was suspended on a wire jib for the scene. “You build your own ladder because you're faced with a wall of ice,” adds Hiddleston. “You have to cut, literally, the steps. It’s a jigsaw puzzle for your brain because the handholds become footholds, and Tenzing is holding in the rope.”

On the day, the pair remember the sun dropping and the wind picking up as if it were sweeping the valley. Phuntsok was blasted with snow, as was Hiddleston as he came over the lip of the crevasse. When the two laugh in the scene, they are laughing for real. “It was our lucky day,” Phuntsok says, from an authenticity perspective.

Though the film focuses on technicalities, it’s more about tensions between the climbing and serving teams and their varying relationships to the mountains, which ultimately unites them. “Bonds were made on that mountain,” says Peedom. “Colonel John Hunt remained great friends with Tenzing until the end of their lives. Climbing and achieving this extraordinary first no one knew was physically possible became such a moment in history because it was symbolic of something bigger. It’s testament to Hunt’s leadership, too, because it could've torn them apart—there was conjecture in the aftermath about who got to the top first—and I know Tenzing was grateful for the way he navigated it.”

Khumbu Valley, Nepal

Nepal's Khumbu Valley, homeland of the Sherpa people where Tenzing met his wife Dawa—the woman who would largely inspire the spiritual drive for his climb—played an important role, even though the team pivoted to shooting the Khumbu scenes in Mustang. “I sent Genden up to the Khumbu Valley before Tom arrived to spend 10 days with Phurba Tashi, a legendary Sherpa leader who was the star of my documentary, to walk in the shadow of Everest,” Peedom says. “Then, of course, Tom did the trek, so the emotional bonding was a huge part of their training—to experience the landscape that Tenzing and Hillary actually walked through.”

The Khumbu Valley from Lukla Airport is the only way to get to Everest: “You share the trail with the donkeys and yaks,” says Phuntsok, who first met up with Hiddleston at the Lukla [Tenzing-Hillary] Airport. Says Hiddleston: "For a week [we] shared our thoughts and ideas over this breathtaking landscape. After about four days, we spotted the Goddess [Everest] in the skyline. 8000 meter-plus peaks of the Himalayas, which you can’t wrap your head around.”

Phuntsok and Hiddleston stayed in teahouses on their six-day trek from Lukla airport to Everest camp. “We were with two brilliant Sherpas, one who submitted Everest 21 times,” says Hiddleston. As the two remember it, because any acclimatization period of that latitude takes time, they never climbed more than 500 meters per day. “Otherwise you risk the brain swelling or the lungs filling with liquid because the oxygen deficit is so extreme.”

The training

“I practiced the technicalities of climbing in crevasses,” Phuntsok tells me. “As an actor you sacrifice your energy for your character. That’s your duty.”

Phuntsok and Hiddleston devoured every written account by Tenzing, Hillary, Hunt and other climbers. “I studied the expedition from a distance, from an intellectual point of view. Then, it was about preparing the body and mind to step into the shoes of Hillary, who at the time was at his peak as an athlete,” says Tom. “I’d never been at those altitudes before and the preparation is a baseline of fitness.” This included running, strength training and agility.

“You can control yourself, but you can’t control the mountain,” Genden notes. “I wanted to be ready for anything Jennifer asked me to do.” Led by an expert mountain safety team, the pair practiced coiling rope, cutting steps in ice walls, learning a Tyrolean traverse. They slept in down jackets, with Phuntsok frequently checking on Hiddleston. “I worried about him,” Phuntsok jokes. “He’s from lower down! But he was fine.”

The allure of the mountain

“For Tenzing, the approach to the mountain comes from a place of gratitude,” Phuntsok says. “The planet gives us so much. In Sherpa culture you approach the mountain with respect. In the movie, Tenzing tells Hillary they need permission from the Goddess to summit.”

Was that reframing was key to the duo’s success? “Hillary was a deep thinker and open to Tenzing's wisdom about a different way of approaching the mountain,” says Hiddleston. “It wasn't just a conquest, it was more spiritual.”

People climb mountains to find themselves and test the limits, the pair ruminate. “They climb to understand something more deeply about the experience of being alive. Humans go in search of awe. There’s a feeling that you get in wild places of smallness,” says Hiddleston. “A human life in the scale of such natural magnificence fills you with the privilege of being alive. The privilege of experiencing those environments, and returning to your man-made life with a deeper understanding. There's something about the loss of ego—it’s almost the most honest version of you as a human being. The soul, which really just inhabits the body, experiencing awe.”

“Tenzing says to Hillary that we are the blood. The mountains are the bones,” adds Phuntsok. “We are not there to conquer the mountain. We’re there to be accepted by it.”

For Peedom, this film is also about pursuing your dreams when the odds are against you. “So many people know what it is to feel underestimated and Tenzing was somebody who was underestimated,” she says. “So was Hillary. Everest has become a symbol of achievement and overcoming obstacles, but what I hope people take from the film is that you don't need to conquer something to achieve it. Approaching nature with humility and reverence is a beautiful approach to life. There’s a different way to be a hero.”

Tenzing is in select cinemas on October 9, and globally on Apple TV on October 16.