I'm going to begin.
First, I loved the movie.
Guys are obviously wonderful.
I found it really moving and just really tender.
I was going to ask you first, what what made
you think that this would be the perfect idea for your next project
and just how pleased by you when Sir Ranulph Fiennes agreed?
I'm very, very pleased.
I can thanks, but I think
obviously really pleased.
And then just hoping that I could sort of get that level of trust and
and ultimately sort of friendship,
I guess that meant that I could tell the story
and get to know him and why I've got to know him
and hopefully have shared that through the film.
That was kind of one of the key things.
I think it was always
the idea is,
was in the sort of contradictions that I could see in the
this idea of what he was the explorer and also challenging
some of the assumptions about what people think.
So the frost, the eyelashes, the chiseled jaw,
that sort of image that people have in their minds actually is a truth.
There is a truth to that as well as the myth.
But also there's this other sites around this,
not the explorer of the everyday person, the sort of gentleness, the friendships,
the love, the loss, all those things that I wanted to get to
to make this film, not just about expeditions, but about,
you know, about life and about things we can all relate to.
So that was it to me.
It was all it has to be
isn't always set it, but it's always this idea of it being a portrait,
not an autobiography.
I didn't want to just go through a list of events that happened.
I wanted to sort of get a sense of
who and what makes him tick in it.
Because just as it I'm just interested as a documentarian, how much
can you allow yourself to do before getting the green light from the subject?
Or does that have to be the very first thing that happens?
I think I you know, I think green light is always such a technical term.
And you're right.
I mean, it's but it's like there was no green light
as such from a broadcaster, but I needed a green light from around me
just to know that he likes me and wants to do it and that he trusted me.
And then we went through the process, as always of, you know, a bit of filming.
And I realized the first day of filming with him, which is that scene in the car
park, was the first thing I filmed, and that whole day was extraordinary.
We went from the car to the festival hall and Bear Grylls and he's a hero to bear.
Big book deal eating chocolate cake.
You know, all these different sides of the personality was sort of on show.
So that was filmed before there was in a green light, if you like.
What I had the green light for round about.
He knew what I was doing and we talked about it and yeah, but
no green light from my wife about chocolate cake.
Yeah. So I ran.
I was going to ask, I mean,
but as Matt just mentioned, it is a real portrait of your life.
How was it for you to watch this film back?
Is it quite an emotional experience?
Is it quite profound when you actually find it
quite difficult to sift through to sift through this movie?
Yeah, I mean, a lot of it went back 60 years sort of thing.
So it's amazing to relive memories
because film exists,
which you couldn't even remember was still around to look at sort of thing.
And it had been sitting in our office in tins 16 millimeter tins,
and after I think 30 years of looking at the age time
past the office door and realizing that when you die
they're going to be thrown away sort of thing.
I heard there was a thing called the British Film Institute
and that they would stock them and they even had the Titanic disaster
on movie footage.
So we got on to them and they took everything away,
which is great and stored it, unlike where it had been at the correct temperature.
And yeah, that's where it remained.
But they were an archivist unit.
Their job was to store an archive file, not to get commercial
sort of involvement, but that switch not all that long ago
and they started to make available a reasonable two.
I mean, you know, that it could be shown in public sort of thing
and that is how it started.
you think that you can learn more
about yourself from watching someone else
dissect your own life?
I suppose that is absolutely true, but you're just thinking about
the actual event, the past that you are seeing, looking at it again,
like, you know.
Jeremy Renshaw With sort of 12 or younger,
because that was about the age.
She was nine when I first met her.
That sort of thing was such a long time ago.
It was amazing watching it all over again.
Hula-Hoop thing around a necklace, which is the hula hoop.
Yes, it's a great one. She's got the hula hoop.
And we were so lucky to get to get that stuff.
But that archive was it was a gift.
But again, always being
I always felt like it could be driven by the fly on the wall stuff,
the observational stuff, just being that helps me sort of navigate
all of the masses of it.
I mean,
there was no I mean, I found it a very I feel like, as I said before,
I find it really moving something so full of humanity.
How was it for you when you're piecing this all together for, you know,
current days of footage and news with the kind of archive footage
that you can you get emotionally caught up?
Was there a distance when you're in the process of casting it?
Yeah.
I mean, you get you do get caught up in it emotionally for sure.
But I think, as you know, if you're making films yourself,
you know, you get you need a bit of distance
because you end up watching over and over again.
And so it does become that has become an exercise of.
Yeah, you've always got to remember the emotional response.
Absolutely.
Like if you lose that and you've lost everything,
so trying to keep it fresh or let Charlie the editor
and then the editor,
let them work on an idea and sit back from it
so that I can have a natural response to it.
That would be the sort of process.
But I think also having it all laid out, you know,
like you would have a classic sort of whiteboard with pen in the edit suite.
You know, you've got all of our
sort of personality traits that I feel like I've learned about him
through conversations, and we know we want to reveal those,
but not just state them in a boring sort of sciencey sort of way,
but actually feel them and understand them not by me doing it with voiceover
or anything like that, but actually just seeing it come through the archives
or the present day or a letter or a school report or an autobiography from his mum.
You know, using those layers and textures was really important to me
because I mean, is a documentary about I mean, about you, right?
As, as a man who's pushed himself to succeed like few others kind of ever have.
And I think what I loved about
this is trying to understand and well, what drives you is one thing.
If you are you able to articulate what it is
that drives that keeps you going, was it something that just kind of happens
and you are unable to kind of put your actual finger on what it is?
The I keep pushing you to go further than so few men ever have.
Well, as the years go by, your motivation for doing it and doing it again
and again to if you can succeed the first time
it's changing, there are different things.
And initially
we just wanted to make a living.
Then that moves on to realizing that
it's going to cost money to do things like that sort of thing,
and how can we evolve a way of doing it where it doesn't cost money?
And Junior came up in the early days with the idea that if you're starting
an electrician company or a plumbing company,
you get one good electrician, and from there you build a company up.
But she said, No, that's too slow.
What we need to do is to take advantage of the fact that there are only four
TV channels that can be watched in the UK.
BBC one and two, ITV one and two and the World.
About our series was watched by a huge number of people in the UK
and they usually showed expedition films and I happened to have got onto a thing
called Expedition Under London, not Barbara Windsor, but
Liz Fraser, who is the other blond in the carry on things.
And I got chosen for that.
And then the what's his name, the cubby broccoli
bloke was looking for a new bond because the other one was
George Lazenby, who was costing too much to carry on.
So they were looking for somewhere.
They had 200 people
they wanted to look at and I was lucky enough to be one of them.
And I got into the last six, so
I began to the good God, this might actually get somewhere.
And Roger Moore came along and he definitely got that.
And Bob introduced to us the fact
that we could get onto movies by doing expeditions,
which were really big news, like the first this sort of first that.
And so Jenny planned the first journey up the longest river in the world.
Yeah, we got married.
That's the Nile. 4000 miles long.
And we eventually she discovered
that there was a hovercraft, a two seater hovercraft prototype,
and that
was in the Guinness Book of Records for having hovered without a breakdown
for 2 hours around a gravel pit in Peterborough.
Therefore, obviously the right model for the Nile
and it had to turn to clearance.
We took eight and a half months to do the dog, partly because there were
a lot of three inch obstacles on route
and but it got great viewing.
So immediately the number of people who wanted to sponsor us was right up there.
So we got boom boom quite quick.
Thanks to Jenny's planning.
And over the next 36 years we did 30 expeditions
and all of them going for records to grim with hot countries.
But then the UK media started only wanting cold polar ones
and so we switched.
But there were only two poles surround all that many records to break
and what the was had almost all been broken by the enemy the Norwegians.
And so we had to realize that and that became a rivalry
and that was one of our first motivations to carry on doing it.
Then there was another one, which was when scientists got interested in joining
all expeditions, and then there was another one raising money.
We're up to about 19 million at the moment for charities
who were chosen by the sponsors.
Yeah.
Now, this also you sort of see in that that there's this
incredible sort of hustle and sort of response and,
you know, a changing way, I guess, of exploring perhaps.
I mean, I haven't been around to charity, obviously, but I sort of feel like
from what I've seen,
there was the era of, you know, the great Shackleton and Scott,
and then there was the now the today, which is different in its own way
and ran in Geneva at this age where, you know, PR was there
and they need to do things and they needed to sort of figure out
how to get the scientists involved and how to get the sponsorship.
And it was a really interesting period, I think, in exploring and I sort of
I want the film,
I guess, a little bit to challenge that idea of what it means to be an explorer.
But I think that's changing always is, you know.
Yeah, because by I mean you are right
widely known and as I consider to be the kind of greatest living explorer.
Is that something you ever think about?
You ever stop and think, actually, I probably am.
No, I don't find myself started thinking about that sort of thing because
I like to paint a black picture
to people who are wanting to join the expedition.
So that black picture is, in my mind, sort of my reaction to getting overexcited
because, you know, somebody has chosen you to do this or the other.
And I didn't call myself the world's greatest living explorer about becoming a
what's his name? Who introduced it?
David Frost. And David Frost.
And the Guinness Book of Records.
So, no, I don't.
I look at the people who I want to be selected and choose them
on very amazing grounds, like the word nice if they're nice people.
But on top of that, you've got to have their motivations
going to be strong enough to deal with the horrible, weak voice
which comes into their heads during an expedition
when they're starting to get frostbite through gangrene and crutch.
Scott And once they start not saying,
I can't keep going, that's not good motivation.
So we choose them on their motivational strength.
I also think it's that that word inspiration
which gets thrown around a lot, but that's what you get I think from it.
And I don't mean that just in what he did in the expeditions,
I mean just also like just sleeping in your car
because you have to or, you know, making ends meet
because you've got no money to do the next thing.
It's like that,
that that greatness is somewhere in between, you know, doing the mountains,
but also just being on the road and lecturing and being busy every day
and having a day job effectively, which is to sort of do the talks and all of that.
It's kind of that I think that's what's what can be looked back on
and carried back.
But also carried forward is that idea.
If you can bottle them up
and sort
of contain him, then he'd be you know, everyone needs a bit of that.
I think it's a my my final question.
I just want to give this to both of you both,
obviously, one of you, but it's in a few more corners of another
of the
of the most people, of all the places both of you have ever been in your life.
Is that one you both have a yearning to go back to?
That's happened to me, is it?
I would say that we do hot expeditions.
We do cold polar expeditions, and more recently
we have done vertical expeditions as well into the mountain billed,
not the polar field, which is nearly all flat.
And things have changed.
And in the seventies we were using the same navigational processes
as Scott and Shackleton for that and changed because there were no polar
orbiting satellites, no GPS or sat nav or iPhone or anything else like that.
So we went through a changing series of problems
and in many cases that got less as we moved into the nineties
and the polar orbiting stuff got over the poles as well.
So I think for me I kind of think
I've I've been really lucky to travel to a lot of places through the filmmaking.
I can't climb any sort of thing, that kind of stuff, nothing like that.
It's always been slightly
sort of cocooned in filming and all that, so I didn't really have that same thing.
I think it's always got to be the person personal,
the character or the lens through which you see that landscape.
So it will always be to me.
I think it's always going to be the person more than the actual place,
you know what I mean?
That's always going to be it.
So it's hard to say really.
But I do like I'm
drawing strange, jumping to the cup, to the sort of cold, the Arctic stuff.
I find that really interesting, compelling,
inspectorate's bleakness, but also for its beauty.
So I do I do like it,
although I always get sort of I start to complain as soon as I get that
you know why.
But thank you so much for speaking to me today
and best of luck with the release of the film.
I can't wait to go and see it again when it comes out on the big screen.
This time. Thank you. Bye bye. Thank you.