Mountaineering: The Making of Touching the Void

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Making the Cut (cont.)


	Stills from Touching the Void:Clockwise from left, Actor Brendan Mackey as Simpson trapped in the crevasse; a moment of hope after the improbable escape; Siula Grande. (IFC Films)

For the film's few Peru segments, Simpson and Yates doubled as their younger selves for long-distance shots of the snow-fluted couloirs of Siula Grande. They didn't stay long. "Seeing those landmarks, the dread came screaming back," Simpson says. "It was deeply unpleasant." Two weeks after returning home, Simpson was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. During the shoot, Yates lost patience with Macdonald's multiple takes. By the end of their time in Peru, he and the director weren't speaking. "He accused me of having repressed emotions about what happened," Yates recalls, mystified. "I was just ready to be done with it."

For both climbers, the film promises renewed—and bittersweet—notoriety. Following the 1988 publication of Touching the Void, Simpson became a much-sought-after corporate speaker, and he went on to write five more books. Yates encountered mixed reviews upon returning home in 1985. As the story played out in the press, not everyone got it straight: UK newspaper The Mail on Sunday wrote that Yates "had tried and sentenced his best friend to death." However, once Yates and Simpson published their own accounts, most climbers took up Yates's defense. "Anyone who's critical of Simon hasn't got a clue," says British climbing great Sir Chris Bonington, 69. "If you have a grasp of the circumstances, you appreciate that he had no choice."

Despite the flak, Yates didn't miss a beat. Two months after the Peru epic, he was in the Alps; he's never lacked for climbing partners, and today he runs Mountain Dream, an international guiding business. For all that, though, he remains the Guy Who Cut the Rope.

"You've got to laugh at it," Yates says. And he does, in The Flame of Adventure, his second book, published in 2002 by The Mountaineers Books. In it, he describes the hazing he endured at a London construction site where he worked—often roped up—to pay for trips. Nicknamed "Slasher," he arrived one day to find SLASHER WAS 'ERE penned across a poster showing a fallen high-rise worker dead in a pool of blood.

In his book, Simpson describes Yates as "everything I would like to have been...dependable, sincere, ready to see life as a joke." But over the years, the two drifted apart, teaming up on only one foreign expedition, to India's Garhwal Himalaya, in 1991. "What happened in Peru didn't push us apart," Simpson says, "but it didn't make us closer, either." The new film appears to have had the same effect: As it toured festivals late last fall, the two had a brief falling out over promotional duties.

"It's two-edged, isn't it?" Yates says of the odd fame the rope cutting still brings him. "I make my living around mountaineering, so it's helped. It's gotten my name out there. But it is strange. Whatever I do in life, I'll be known for that."

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