The UK’s biggest film production company has its eyes on larger-scale films.

everest

Working Title, whose biggest successes have included rom-coms Four Weddings And A Funeral and Bridget Jones’s Diary, is looking to make more big-canvas films in the vein of Les Miserables and Venice opener Everest.

Speaking to ScreenDaily ahead of Everest’s world premiere on the Lido next Wednesday (Sept 2), Working Title co-chair Tim Bevan said the company would like to produce more films on the scale of the $60m adventure-thriller, which is the company’s first 3D feature:

“I think it’s very much something we want to do, yes: intelligent popcorn [movies] at a scale,” he said. “It’s fun to do a bigger movie.”

Jake Gyllenhaal, Josh Brolin, Keira Knightley, Jason Clarke and Emily Watson are among the stellar ensemble cast of Baltasar Kormakur-directed Everest, which charts the events surrounding the 1996 Mount Everest disaster when a climbing expedition was devastated by a severe snowstorm.

The film was in development for more than a decade and faced significant challenges during production, as detailed by Bevan and director Kormakur in an interview to run exclusively on ScreenDaily next week.

“[Everest] is not the sort of film that Hollywood really makes these days,” said Bevan, who praised parent company Universal’s commitment to the project, but also recognized the growing difficulty of getting away big-budget studio films not based on widely-known properties.

“Understandably, Hollywood makes more commercial films, often superhero movies or sequels, and those are swallowing up a lot of the resource. So it’s difficult to get a more artistic - for want of a better word - film made inside the studio system.”

Among projects potentially fitting the large-scale criteria for Working Title is Everest director Kormakur’s long-time passion project Vikingr – which is in development - about the epic adventures and conquests of Nordic settlers during the Viking Age.

For 2 Guns and The Deep director Kormakur, known for taking on testing shoots and tackling the great outdoors, Everest represented his biggest challenge to date.

“A lot of the people on set - the actors and crew - were afraid they might not be able to pull through it,” said the director.

The shoot included six weeks in -30ºC conditions on the Dolomites in Italy.

“When I came down, my wife said she’d never seen me like that,” added Kormakur.

“There were a couple of breakdowns on the way. But it also bonded people together.”

Working Title’s slate remains impressively diverse. Also heading to the Lido for the London-based outfit is Tom Hooper’s anticipated period-drama The Danish Girl, starring Eddie Redmayne, while Tom Hardy crime-thriller Legend is released next month and Coen brothers comedy Hail, Caesar! will be released next year.