The most famous story in the history of mountaineering has always been lopsided. In 1953, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay earned their place in the history books by becoming the first to summit the highest mountain in the world. Their achievement on Mount Everest became the stuff of legend.
But this epic story often relegated Norgay to the sidelines. Despite being an elite climber and equal partner on the expedition, Nepal’s most famous Sherpa was frequently downgraded as a guide or helper, rather than a critical player.
Moreover, Norgay “had his own dream,” according to Jennifer Peedom, the director of a new Everest film that finally puts the spotlight on Norgay himself. Peedom came into the project with plenty of experience. Not only has she climbed Everest herself, but she also directed the 2015 documentary Sherpa, which focused on the ethnic group’s deep history with the mountain.
In a Q&A with GearJunkie, Peedom reveals the lessons she learned from Norgay’s family, the difficulty of filming on a real mountain, and how Sherpas continue to shoulder more risk in the mountains than anyone else.
Tenzing is currently available to stream on Apple TV.
GJ: As someone with personal experience climbing Everest, do you think it’s still as fascinating for the general public as it was in 1953? What was your big takeaway after climbing it?
Peedom: I don’t think Everest can fascinate us in quite the same way it did in 1953. Back then, it represented one of the last great unknowns, a place almost no one had seen and no human being had stood on top of. We didn’t even know if it was humanly possible. Today, through GoPros, drones, and social media, we can see almost every stage of an Everest ascent. Very few people seem to climb the mountain without documenting the experience.
And yet the fascination clearly hasn’t gone away. Everest has become perhaps the ultimate symbol of human achievement, and I think that’s because it has also become an arena for some very fundamental human questions: ambition, risk, ego, courage, mortality, and our relationship with nature.
My biggest takeaway from working on Everest is how quickly the mythology of individual conquest falls apart when you’re actually there. Nothing happens on Everest alone. It is an intensely collective endeavour, and Sherpa climbers undertake an extraordinary proportion of the work and the risk. That understanding ultimately led me to make Sherpa, and it is very much part of what drew me to Tenzing’s story.
Past documentaries and feature films on the 1953 ascent have focused on Hillary, rather than Norgay. What do you think is the significance of making a film that focuses on Tenzing? And why did it take so long to get one?
Peedom: What struck me was that Tenzing wasn’t simply helping another man achieve his dream. He had his own dream.
By 1953, he had more experience on Everest than anyone else on the expedition. He had been trying to reach the summit for years. And yet in much of the Western telling of the story, he gradually became a supporting character in Hillary’s achievement, sometimes even incorrectly described as Hillary’s guide.
I wanted to reframe that famous first ascent from Tenzing’s point of view. That doesn’t diminish Hillary. In fact, I think their partnership becomes more compelling when you understand that these were two remarkable climbers who came from profoundly different worlds and met each other as equals on the mountain.
As for why it took so long, I think history is often shaped by who has had the means to record and disseminate it. The dominant English-language account of Everest emerged through British and Western institutions and media, so inevitably certain perspectives were amplified and others were diminished. Seventy-three years later, there is an opportunity to look at that history again and ask whose experience we haven’t fully understood.
It looks like you filmed most of the mountain scenes in New Zealand. Was there anything especially difficult about the filming that you can share?
Peedom: It was an incredibly demanding shoot because we made a decision very early that the mountain couldn’t simply be a backdrop. We wanted the actors climbing in real mountain environments wherever we safely could.
We filmed extensively in the Southern Alps, including around Aoraki Mount Cook and The Remarkables. The conditions could change incredibly quickly. At one point, around 10 meters of snow had fallen and locations we had planned to use simply disappeared, so we had to find new ones. Everything also had to be meticulously rehearsed at lower altitude before we took the actors and crew onto the mountain. We were moving people and equipment by helicopter, working in extreme cold, and constantly making decisions around weather and safety.
But that difficulty gave us something I don’t think we could have manufactured. When Genden and Tom are climbing, they really are negotiating ice, rock, crampons, and ropes. That physical effort is real, and I think the camera feels the difference.
With the recent exception of Nims Purja, few Nepalis have become widely known internationally, and no one more than Tenzing Norgay. Was there anything specific you learned from Norgay’s family that became an important part of the script? And what do you hope this film may offer to Nepalis more generally?
Peedom: I’ve known two of Tenzing’s sons, Jamling and Norbu, for many years, and Norbu is an executive producer on the film. I wouldn’t have wanted to make it without the family’s blessing.
One of the great gifts was also meeting Tenzing’s eldest daughter, Pem Pem, back when I was making Sherpa. She spoke about him not as this monumental figure from history, but simply as her father. She also told me about her mother and the family life behind Tenzing’s expeditions. Those conversations helped enormously because they brought the private man into focus. Behind the photographs and the mythology was a husband and father whose ambition came at a real cost to his family.
For Nepali audiences, I hope there is something meaningful in seeing a Himalayan man placed firmly at the center of this story, and in seeing Himalayan people, cultures, and perspectives represented on this scale. At the same time, Tenzing’s own identity is complex. He was born into a Tibetan family, spent part of his early life in Nepal, and later made his home in Darjeeling. He became a hero to people across the Himalayas and far beyond. I think it’s important that the film honors that complexity, rather than trying to fit him neatly inside a single national identity.
The conversation about Sherpas in high-altitude mountaineering has changed dramatically in recent years, as you showed in the documentary Sherpa. Are you hopeful that this film may provide some additional context to that conversation? What’s the significance of understanding more of Tenzing’s story as mountaineering reevaluates the role of Sherpas?
Peedom: Very much so. And one of the most fundamental things is simply understanding that Sherpa is an ethnicity, not a job description.
When we made Sherpa, I was interested in the imbalance between the enormous risk being taken by Sherpa climbers and the way their contribution was often described as support for someone else’s adventure. What fascinated me about Tenzing was discovering how far back that dynamic went. He was an elite mountaineer. He had extraordinary experience and ability, and yet on British expeditions, he still had to fight to be regarded as a climber rather than simply as someone serving the climbing team.
That makes his story feel remarkably contemporary. I didn’t want Tenzing to become a lecture about the politics of modern Everest, but I do hope that by understanding who Tenzing actually was, audiences may look differently at the generations of Sherpa climbers who came after him. They aren’t peripheral to the history of Everest. They are central to it.
Few things are more important in a biopic than the actor portraying the historical figure. How difficult was it to decide on Genden Phuntsok? What do you think he brought to the role that you knew going into this was absolutely necessary for the film to succeed?
Peedom: Finding him was difficult. Deciding on him wasn’t.
We conducted a global search that took several years because Tenzing required an unusual combination of qualities. I needed tremendous emotional depth and physical strength, but also warmth, humour, and a kind of quiet authority. Tenzing wasn’t someone who necessarily announced what he was feeling. The actor needed to be able to carry a great deal internally.
A friend eventually suggested I look at the films of the late Tibetan filmmaker Pema Tseden, and Genden had appeared in several of them. From the first film I saw him in, I had an overwhelming feeling that he was Tenzing. Genden is an accomplished actor, although he had never worked in English before. He also grew up on the Tibetan plateau at altitude, in a family that kept yaks, so there were aspects of Tenzing’s physical and cultural world that weren’t foreign to him.
Most importantly, though, he has enormous presence without needing to demand your attention. The film simply couldn’t work unless the audience was willing to follow Tenzing rather than the much more familiar figures surrounding him. Genden could hold the center of the film.
Anything else you’d like to share about the film? Do you have a favorite element or scene you can share?
Peedom: My favourite scene is probably the summit.
Everyone knows that Tenzing and Hillary reach the top, so the challenge was never how to create suspense around the outcome. The question was what reaching that place meant to Tenzing.
For him, Chomolungma wasn’t simply an adversary to conquer. It had spiritual meaning. He had grown up herding his father’s yaks on the Tibetan high plateau beneath Everest, looking toward this mountain for much of his childhood.
So when he finally reaches the summit, I wanted it to feel less like conquest than arrival. There is a moment where Tenzing looks down towards the world below, and we connect him with the boy who once looked up at that mountain. For me, the whole film lives inside that exchange.
