Back in February, we reported that Christian Bale was in talks to star as a mountain climber in Everest, Icelandic filmmaker Baltasar Kormakur‘s upcoming disaster film.
Now comes word that the Working Title production is in talks with Josh Brolin, John Hawkes, Jake Gyllenhaal and Jason Clarke to star in a venture from Universal and Working Title.
Unlike the Doug Liman‘s project, also titled Everest, about an English mountaineer George Mallory, Kormakur’s film will instead focus on the deadliest year in the mountain’s history, when a huge snow storm hit the mountain, leaving eight climbers dead in 1996.
Justin Isbell and William Nicholson (Les Misérables) wrote the screenplay based on a number of books and interviews with the survivors.
While there’s no official word on what roles these actors would be taking, Clarke (Zero Dark Thirty) is rumored to be in talks to play a New Zealander Rob Hall, the leader of one of the twin expeditions, a role that Bale had previously been linked; Gyllenhaal (End of Watch) would play the leader of the second expedition, Scott Fischer, while Brolin who next stars in Spike Lee’s Oldboy remake, would play Beck Weathers, a doctor who was caught out of shelter overnight.
Kormakur is hoping to begin shooting the non-bombastic disaster film in November in his home country of Iceland.
Watch Jon Karakauer’s TV movie Into Thin Air, which made famous first of three attempted expeditions to climb Mount Everest in 1996.
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