For his follow-up to the extraordinary Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire, director Danny Boyle chose to go from the teeming, vibrant and heavily-populated streets of Mumbai to the solitude of one man stuck inside a remote Utah canyon.
The result is 127 Hours; a one-man, incredible-but-true story that is more than it may appear to be.
In April 2003, 26-year-old Aron Ralston set off to Utah for a weekend of hiking. He told no one where he was going, and after a fall trapped his arm underneath an immoveable boulder, he spent the next six days pondering his future; with barely any water or food available to survive. Survive he did, after an incredible act of bravery.
This remarkable tale of human triumph over extreme adversity prompted many, including Boyle and his producing and screenwriting partners Christian Colson and Simon Beaufoy, to ask three very relevant questions: What did Ralston go through in this sudden and extreme moment of reckoning? How did he possibly find the will to hang on in such a desperate situation? Would we do what he did in order to live?
These questions forged the basis of the type of film the team wanted to make. Inspired by Ralston’s story, Boyle embarked on the project with one aim in mind – to get under Ralston’s skin and into his head as he moves from despair to survival by doing what seemed impossible.
“I knew I wanted to bring the audience into the canyon with Aron and to not let them go until he himself is released,” the director explains in the film’s production notes.
“Of course, I saw this as an extraordinary story of outdoor survival, but I also think there is a whole other layer to this story that will be surprising for people.
“It’s not simply about how Aron survived, incredible as that is. There is a life force that Aron tapped into that goes way beyond his remarkable courage as an individual, and that’s what we hoped to capture on screen.”
The film’s actual genesis lies in Between a Rock and a Hard Place, Ralston’s memoir detailing the incident and its unbelievable conclusion.
Ralston then approached documentary producer John Smithson, with the idea of making a documentary about his ordeal, yet Smithson saw the potential of making a feature film and persuaded Ralston that this would be the way to go.
The idea was then presented to Boyle who in turn presented it to Colson, whose first reaction was “well that’s an incredible story but there’s no way to make a movie out of it.”
The difficulties that Boyle would face, of making the story about a man who basically couldn’t move for five days interesting, were pretty obvious to the director. “We were out to make an action movie in which the hero can’t move,” he says.
But the director was not to be put off. His concept for telling the story was clear: a concept full of extraordinary intercutting scenes from Ralston in the canyon, to flashbacks of his earlier life and visions of his imaginary future brought to the screen with the astonishing assurance of this visionary director.
Ultimately, however, for all its kinetic action, the film celebrates life. “People often say about the story, ‘Oh, I don’t know if I could do (what Aron did).’ But I think we all would do anything we could for this life that is so beautiful and keeps us going,” says Boyle.
“What I think Aron experienced in that canyon over those six days was a sudden realisation of the full value of life. One of the ideas of the film is that he was never really alone in the canyon. Physically, he very much was, but he was surrounded spiritually by everyone he’d ever known or loved or dreamed about. That made the difference and we wanted to get that feeling into the story.”
Cemented by an extraordinary performance by James Franco, who embodies Ralston’s physical, emotional and mental state to perfection, 127 Hours has deservedly received almost universal critical acclaim, resulting in six Oscar nominations including Best Film and Best Actor for Franco.
Whether it will withstand the onslaught of The King’s Speech or The Social Network remains to be seen. Either way, 127 Hours remains a film of great internal emotion and external visual beauty.