Among the many qualities that have made Lucy Walker one of the preeminent nonfiction filmmakers in the world, whether it is the bracing level of empathy for her subjects or the zest for life that often drives her work, a patience to let the story come to her may be one of the most important, even when it comes to putting her own career in perspective, it turns out.
“I love it when really thoughtful people tell me about my movies. The best thoughts I ever had about my movies were once when I gave a masterclass at MIT and the students were telling me about the titles that you’d like, these oxymorons like “Devil’s Playground,” “Blindsight” and “Wasteland” and I hadn’t noticed before, balancing those opposing things,” says Walker. “But I like to not repeat myself and to keep challenging myself creatively as a filmmaker. I like to tell the stories that I think are the most important, but then meet them on their own terms. It’s like a martial art of actually letting life be the co-writer and trying to capture the what is and posing my own version of events.”
I can see Walker’s patience first hand when she indulges a question about a through line between her work when the director found herself on the side of some of the world’s largest mountains for a third time with her latest film “Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa,” even when she’ll be the first to tell you she much prefers the beach. Still, it doesn’t take long to find out what compelled her to put her hiking gear back on upon meeting Lhakpa Sherpa, a Nepalese native who holds the record for climbing Mount Everest more times that any other woman and dreams of being back there any time she’s away, particularly since resettling in Connecticut where she makes do as a single mother to two teen daughters Sunny and Shiny (with an adult son that’s moved out) and pays for the roof over their heads with a job at a local supermarket.
Like Walker’s other high-altitude adventures — her 2006 film “Blindsight,” in which the mountaineer Erik Weihenmayer battled the expectations that came from the loss of his eyesight at age 14, and the 2013 film “The Crash Reel,” which charted the rivalry between snowboarders Shaun White and Kevin Pearce that took on an entirely different dimension when the latter was critically injured — making it to the top of the mountain becomes only part of the achievement in “Mountain Queen” when it’s everywhere else that Lhakpa has really had her strength tested. From having to pretend she was male to become a skilled climber like her sherpa brethren when women in the community were often relegated to roles as homemakers to eventually enduring the abuse of two husbands, more notably the Romanian mountaineer Gheorghe Dijmărescu with whom she climbed Everest on five occasions, who left her with kids to take care of largely on her own, Lhakpa is seen making the trek up Everest for a 10th time in parallel with a life that’s had more than its share of peaks and valleys and while she hopes to satisfy her own thirst to keep reaching greater heights, she makes clear that the ultimate goal is to inspire her daughters, one of whom, Shiny, comes along to connect with her Himalayan heritage while the other, Sunny, slowly tries to connect with the world at large after the traumatic experiences the family has had together.
Capturing Lhakpa’s triumph in all its dimension leads to one for Walker as well, and with the premiere now streaming on Netflix, the director is receiving an much-deserved career-spanning tribute at the Paris Theater in New York where five of her films can be seen on the big screen along with her shorts through August 8th. In the midst of a busy summer, the director graciously took the time to talk about how the path to “Mountain Queen” began when she first went to Everest to film “Blindsight” nearly 20 years ago, putting herself in position for the unexpected to unfold before her lens and putting the camera into the hands of sherpas to be able to tell their own story at times.
Given your other mountain climbs, this felt a bit subversive when it really has an entirely different idea of perseverance in mind. Was that actually part of the initial appeal?
I always had that vision from the very start of the summits of her life as metaphor for the peaks of her mountaineering accomplishments. And when I made “Blindsight” as my second movie, I figured out the structure of a mountain climb is a great one for making a movie. You’ve got a beginning — you set out on this expedition, you’ve got a summit, you’ve got this fantastic act two climax built in, and then you’ve got an end, you’ve got an aftermath coming down the mountain. Even when I went on to make “Wasteland,” it’s structured like a mountain climb. I met this amazing artist Vik Muniz and I was trying to think about how do you make a movie about an artist that’s better than just looking at his art, [I thought] “Oh, what if they had an art project that was like the Everest of art projects with an amazing team of amazing people? And you’d just follow what happens – that has a beginning, middle and end because he’s going to set out to make this art project in this very difficult, hard-to-summit place like a garbage dump in Brazil and it’s going to be very challenging along the way, but what’s going to happen and what’s it all going to mean at the end when they come down from this expedition?
In “Blindsight” we had an ensemble piece where we had the amazing Black blind American mountaineer who summits Everest, the amazing German blind woman who set up the first school for the blind in Tibet and the six amazing blind teenage Tibetans and each of them actually had a backstory that played into the present day moment of the climb and brings emotion and depth. And I always knew that I wanted to do that with Lhakpa’s story, using that unfolding climb as an arc and then at moments in the story, going deeper by taking us into these really dramatic moments of backstory that play with the present tense, and it would make a cracking movie if we followed her on a present day climb. I wanted to climb Everest with her and I knew how to do that because I’d done it in 2004 and because we had two climbs in 2004 to make “Blindsight,” I really learned how to shoot that in every possible way and also how to edit it so that you could have that as this really gripping A-story, but then her backstory, which I thought was just riveting, could really add so much dimension and meaning to the climb.
I want to get back to that in a second, but one thing that was beautiful to learn behind the scenes that seemed as significant symbolically as an actual contribution to the production was actually placing cameras in the hands of the Sherpas for the climb, which I know couldn’t have been easily done for your earlier films, given the expertise and weight required of the equipment.
That was really exciting, and that this is the first movie that’s centered on a Sherpa climber and Sherpas not as support on the expedition, but as the stars of the expedition. I was really genuinely excited because on making “Blindsight” I’d been so blown away by getting to know some Sherpa people on our expeditions and falling in love with that whole region and just the intelligence and just brilliance of this group of people. And I was really excited for them to have their own point of view on things and to see what they would see. They had to be trained in terms my house style of being static where possible and [learn] the kinds of things I’m most interested [for a certain consistency to the rest of the footage], so we spent a lot of time with the team, really helping them focus on what would be valuable in the edit, and [we’d ask] like what’s your favorite view and what’s the image that makes you think most is like that experience of being in that extreme environment? We have a shot like the shot of this Sherpa smoking and some of the stuff inside the tent that I never thought I’d seen before.
So I was really thrilled that we had these amazing shots from the Sherpa camera operators, as well as our main DP. I also knew from making “Blindsight” that you just never know when someone’s going to succumb to altitude, even really experienced people. You never know when someone’s going to have to go down or the team is split or there’s something that you just need to be able to cover — I had two DPs on “Blindsight” and the team split and we needed them both. We did have an incredible high-altitude cinematographer who had summited Everest once before, an incredible collaborator that I was really desperate to bring onto the team, and I was really thankful that we did, but still I didn’t know if I was actually going to pull it off, and we couldn’t afford more than one high-altitude cinematographer, so I got creative and I thought, “Well, the Sherpas are brilliant, they can do this as well and actually it’d be really fun to see what they’re going to shoot.” It really worked out.
I’m guessing the archival process might’ve been nearly as harrowing when as I understand it, because of the divorce, Lhakpa had no archives of her own because of what she had to leave behind. What was it like to build the backstory?
I knew that there’d been a film made about her in the year 2000. She’s not really in that movie that much, but I figured there must be more, so I relentlessly pursued the dailies and the filmmakers. It took a lot of persuading. It’s rare that people let you access their dailies that they shot in the year 2000, even if they still have access to them and they haven’t vanished or rotted. Then all these other expeditions from over the years, it’s like an archeological dig because you don’t know what you’re going to find. You’re getting to know the story and then you get more and more footage and then you actually see these characters. For example, I’d been working on the project for years before I actually saw a video of her ex-husband. And you’re like, “Oh my goodness, there he is.” There’s even material of this extraordinary argument they had that becomes very dramatic that I’d heard about actually back in 2004, because I was climbing Everest from the North side of Everest in 2004 when this actual incident happened on the South side of Everest in 2004. That is how this movie began exactly 20 years ago because I was making “Blindsight” when I first heard about Lhakpa.
That’s remarkable. I wondered did you feel like this film was opening up a conversation inside the family about what happened? There’s this extraordinary scene in the kitchen where Shiny says, “We haven’t shared our trauma” and you really feel as if they’re processing it in front of you, as if something’s just cracked open. Usually, you bring a camera into a situation and you think of it as intrusive, but did it seem like it was having an opposite effect?
You hope that the addition of a camera and a process of documenting a story can be a positive one because it’s also obviously a stressful and challenging one in many ways. But I wouldn’t be doing what I do if I didn’t really see that it’s a great gift that Lhakpa and her family is giving the world by sharing their story. They’ve been through so much stigma and so much trauma that to be able to survive that, not by closing down, but by opening up more and being just really honest about such painful stuff, it’s really moving to me that they had that courage to be so vulnerable and that they trusted me that much. I am only as good a filmmaker as they are able to open themselves up for the audience to really connect with their experience, and my job is to facilitate that connection.
Of course, it’s really difficult for a lot of people, and I’m looking for those people that actually will allow themselves to do that. Even then, it’s still a journey to get there, and it took us a lot to get there, but then it’s such a joy when they do. For example, that scene, which I love as well, we had gone back to the apartment and it’s a tiny weeny apartment, and Sunny, the closed-off older daughter, is the only one who gets a bedroom on her own. She’s really in a place of distress and clearly very traumatized by what they’ve been through, and she comes out of her bedroom after we’ve wrapped the camera, and I’m there just grabbing something to eat, and the cinematographer is there downloading the cards after the shoot’s wrapped. And I say, “Quick, quick, quick.” I can see that Sunny’s smiling at me, looking thoughtful and alert and just ready to talk, and I said, “Roll the camera.” And the cinematographer said, “We can’t, I’m downloading the cards.” I said, “Shove the card back in. I mean, don’t erase it, but this is what we need to shoot today.” And he said, “The sound person’s just driven off. You know, Lucy, come on.” And I said, “I used to be able to record sound. I can do it.” So I grabbed the microphone and sure enough, that’s when the whole [scene] happened — that moment that Sunny is inspired by her mom, and then Sunny builds on that new glimmer of hope and says, “It’s time we talked about that.” And Sunny actually says, “Yeah, what we’ve come through was really, really difficult,” and they’re able to start processing it as a family.
When you’re making a film, you don’t know what’s going to happen, and particularly in this case, I don’t know if I’ve ever been quite so worried. There’s the Everest worry, because that’s a very dangerous thing to be doing and I feel very responsible about that. But it’s also the responsibility for the young. Her son’s a little older and on [a bit] firmer mental health at the beginning of the movie, but the girls, you just feel just greatly responsible for how they’re doing and whether it is appropriate to be filming them and whether it’s going to be okay to share the story. So their blossoming was just an incredible thing to witness and I realized that at the beginning of the movie, we see Lhakpa setting out to inspire and empower women and girls — she says it very clearly in the year 2000, we have this incredible footage of this very self-possessed young woman, who says at 26, “There’s no good being afraid.” She’s so determined to make life for women better and inspire women and girls.
At the beginning of the movie, she’s washing dishes and [talking about how she] was determined to reclaim her legacy and go back to Everest and her own daughters are not at all inspired. And sure enough, you can measure the inspirational power of Lhakpa by just the incredible transformation of her own daughters. You see them almost like watering a wilted plant, you know, and [seeing it] perk up and springing forth and you know that journey that Lhakpa sets out on is a complete triumph. And then we see not only the transformational effect on the girls, but also that the mechanics by which it does start to change Lhakpa’s life. When Shiny says to her mom, “Come on, mom, this summit’s going to change your life,” and Lhakpa remembers this when she’s doing this summit push that’s very gnarly, so it’s a real fairy tale of inspiration.
The girls are such an important part of the story. There’s another scene that I really love at the end of the movie with Sunny, when she’s in the hotel room and she looks in the mirror, and again, I could just see that she was looking at herself differently, and I said, “Sunny, what do you see?” And she finally says, “I see someone that could be somebody.” And you think, “Wow, that is new and that is newsworthy, and we captured it.”
“Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa” is now streaming on Netflix.