Vertical Limit

We're talking The Mask of Zorro.

We're talking Vertical Limit.

But those aren't the movies we chose, folks.

We're going to be talking about none other than Pierce Brosnan in GoldenEye.

And I went up to him at the end and I said, thanks for coming.

Can I, next time you're making a movie, like I'd seen him in movies with Arnold Schwarzenegger and stuff, do you know what I mean? And he was in Vertical Limit.

I said, next time you're making a movie in Glasgow, can I come and be your tea guy or coffee kid or whatever? And you know that job description, coffee kid.

Yeah, can I be a runner for like a week? And he was like, absolutely kid, you're in.

The crevasse scenes, we early on identified a fabulous area for shooting those scenes.

I've actually worked on films up there before, Vertical Limit, Beyond the Edge, which was a New Zealand-made film by Liam Pooley, where we were utilising some of the crevassing in that same area.

And actually being able to drop people into crevasses is something that's normally reserved for mountain guides or stunt crew.

But Jen was really adamant that we would be utilizing the actors as much as possible.

Something went down in these labs." So before this even starts as a, as her waking up in the shower, is you start in the labs when everybody starts freaking out, and when basically they shut down the lab, and they k- like, on purpose, kill everybody inside it.

And so it's, it starts with this really, I would almost say Vertical Limit style opening scene that is thrilling and really good, but that does not, that's not where this movie peaks, and it just gets better from there.

I, I will admit that the acting is not great in this movie, but I think because this movie's so quick and sorta so streamlined in its purpose, like, the point of this movie is to be a nonstop thrill ride mystery with zombies and kickass fighting, and it's nothing more than that, nothing less than that.

Like, it totally is that movie.

You were a high altitude camera operator for the first summit by Nova in 1997.

You were the safety and climbing coordinator for Vertical Limit.

And you scouted locations for The Last Samurai.

And you directed the Everest filming for Beyond the Edge.

Yeah, something like that.

Yeah, no, it has been a long period of time working alongside film projects in the mountains.

Even prior to Vertical Limit, I had been supporting and doing safety for mountain films here in New Zealand.

But Vertical Limit was the real breakout for me.

And look, movies have been doing this for years.

Vertical Limit turned those same mountains into K2 back in the day, and Peter Jackson turned the whole country into Middle Earth.

New Zealand has always been the world's great stand-in, so watching my own backyard play Alaska was less of a distraction and more of a little private game running alongside the movie.

But now we have to talk about where Heart of the Beast stumbles, because it stumbles somewhere important.

Yeah.

And Hayes just went on to have this long career writing high stakes, purely visual momentum films, things like Vertical Limit.

Decades of his professional life were just spent in the low budget, high octane trenches of action cinema.

Okay, right.