I really loved the film, it really caught me out – I wasn’t expecting it to be what it was.
Yeah a couple of people have said that to me, which is great. It’s good that’s it’s a good surprise, I guess the poster doesn’t give away what kind of film it is.

From what I’ve read you’ve been working on Everest and with the Sherpa people for a considerable amount of time. What is it about their culture and what they do that resonates and interests you as a filmmaker?
It started when I was in my twenties, when I was a young aspiring documentary filmmaker that I went to Nepal. For starters I just fell in love with the place, like so many people do, not just the grandeur of the mountains but also the gentleness of the people that live in such a harsh environment. To me there always seemed to be a stark contrast between the how the Sherpas perceive the mountain from a spiritual view and what it means to them compared to what it means to visiting foreigners and how they are at odds.

How did you come to first visit the area and what made you come back?
My very first story was a Dateline piece as a video journalist and that was a decade before I made this film, and I think I was always intrigued by how the Sherpas see their place in this Everest industry, which is a job which is at odds with their spiritual beliefs. I felt to me that there was a story there and then it just so happened that I was offered a job as a camera operator because my body held up well to altitude.

Where did the idea for Sherpa come from?
When I kept going back and going on those big Everest expeditions I could really see the extent to which the Sherpas do the majority of the hard and dangerous work to get the foreigners up and down the mountain. Down being an operative word as well because it’s often the time when Sherpa’s lives are put at risk. Also the extent of which none of that is shown in the resulting documentaries or films is something that was in the back of my mind and I eventually stopped going and doing that sort of work and decided to have kids. But the film idea was always in the back of my mind and as I observed from afar I saw the dynamics continuing to change as sherpas got better education and got access to technology and information – they started to notice that they were being left on the cutting room floor and they didn’t really like it. That was the motivation behind the film – to show it once and for all from their point of view, which is avery different point of view from the western one and show what really happens.

It definitely seemed to be a film of two halves. Obviously you couldn’t predict what would occur once you got the filming underway but was the brawl that took place in 2013 one of the things that instigated your return?
It consolidated it. It was actually Russell’s (Brice, Everest expedition leader) decision to cancel the expedition in 2012 out of concern for the safety of the Sherpas. I have been on three expeditions with Russell and that same Sherpa team. They are two-month stints each time, so I got to know them and I always stayed in touch afterwards. I’d know Everest climbing season was happening and I’d have a look at the website and I read one day that Russell had cancelled his expedition. I wrote him an email – we had talked about the idea of the film before – and I said to it now was the time to make the film. It took a while – I had to write up the idea and get his OK to do it on his expedition and I had to attach my producers. I got my fabulous John Smithson who did Touching the Void and then an Australian producer Bridget Ikin. It was when we started cutting our pitch trailer that the fight broke out. It was a combination of those two incidents and that proved that it was time to tell the story – that things had reached a tipping point. Despite the fact that we couldn’t have anticipated that accident, it did feel like the right time to be there.

What’s the biggest misconception that tourists from Western countries have about the Sherpa culture?
As a starting point, most people think that Sherpa is a job description, and don’t realise that Sherpa is actually an ethnicity. They are people that migrated across the mountains from Tibet many, many years ago and had settled in the foothills of Nepal. The other thing is that they are human beings like the rest of us and they do this job because they want to give their children a better future. There is a line in the film where Sherpa Tenzing Norgay’s son said that his father climbed Everest so that we wouldn’t have to. You can see that his children were educated – they don’t need to climb Everest. The focus characters in my film are in the same position – they are trying to climb so their children don’t have to. They want to avoid it if they possibly can.

Since the movie was filmed a lot of stuff has happened, especially in 2015. Since you’ve been there and made the film has anything changed for the better?
Yeah, it took until about August of 2014 to negotiate with the Nepalese government for certain demands to be met. But from what I understand all the demands they made in the aftermath of the 2014 season were met and that included compensation for the victim’s families, lifting the arbitrary insurance cap for Sherpas and they also managed to receive a small royalty to be paid from the government to be paid to the Sherpa community as acknowledgement of the great sacrifice that Sherpas make in the Everest industry. A lot did change and that was what they were fighting for but I think more than that – the fact that they cancelled the season, which has never happened before, made them realise that they had more power than before and that they could command more respect. They are not often acknowledged or given due regard for what they achieve every year, which is quite tremendous.

The 2015 season was again cancelled because of the terrible earthquake, which triggered another avalanche that killed ten Sherpas. There hasn’t been another season yet, so this season that is just beginning now will hopefully go well and we’ll see some positive change.

Do you hope that the film will also instigate some change from our side as well?
Yeah, I do. It’s not for me to say whether people should climb Everest or not – it’s one of those things that really grabs people by their imaginations and when they want to climb Everest there usually nothing you can do to convince them otherwise. The industry is very important – it’s the backbone of the Nepalese economy and the Sherpa economy so it’s important that it continue. What I hope is that foreign climbers – if they are able to see the film – not be naïve about what they are asking other people to do. They are asking people to risk their lives on their behalf in order to make it possible for them to climb the mountain. I think also to be more understanding of the Sherpa’s relationship with the mountain and what it means to them. Ultimately it can only be more mutually beneficial if both sides respect each other better and I think the film can give those foreign climbers more information and insight into a world they might not have had access to otherwise.

I’d like to touch briefly on the mechanics of filming such a documentary. How much preparation goes into filming on Everest?
The intention was to film the ascent, to go all the way to the summit. I personally wasn’t planning on going all the way – I had a permit to go as far as Camp Two, and I wasn’t certain that I was going to do that. I’d never experience the icefall before, I had always worked on the Tibet side, which has other dangers but not the ice fall. Preparation took over a year. The big thing was to get the right cinematographers and the people that were physically able to climb Everest, who had either done so before or had altitude experience. You don’t want people on your crew who are going to be a liability to Sherpas and so I really carefully handpicked two Sherpa cinematographers and two American guys who had the requisite experience. One those guys is Renan Ozturk who is one of the world’s most accomplished alpinists who happens to be and amazing cinematographer, and Ken Sauls who had been on Everest with me before and had summited the mountain three times. We also had Hugh Miller working at Base Camp. I knew I also needed translators to work with the people in their own language. We put together a team that was really considered. What I learned operating a camera on Everest is that you have to be fitter than the clients. There is a lot to keep in mind – someone turning up and doing it for the first time would have struggled. It was the years of doing it myself that taught me what it would take to do it.

Where do you hope to turn your attention to next? What project are you looking to take on?
I am working on something else right now – a project with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, which will come up to Brisbane when it is finished. It’s a musical and cinematic exploration of the nature of our fascination with mountains and that will have a standalone film and I am collaborating again with Renan Ozturk on that and also with a British writer Robert McFarlane who wrote Mountains of the Mind. It’s a really creative, visually and musically stunning exploration of why we are so fascinated by mountains and the hold they have over our imaginations. I am also slowly developing a Tenzing Norgay biopic – I am really fascinated by him as well.

Do you imagine you’ll return to Everest and document what is happening in the future?
I don’t know. I’m keen to do the Tenzing film but it’s not exactly the Everest part that I am interested in. Who knows! I don’t ever have a desire to climb it or twll another Westerner glory film so I don’t know but maybe there will be follow up down the track. It’s not Everest itself that I am drawn to exactly it’s the human stories around it.

To find the cinema closest to you that is screening Sherpa, head to the official website.