The film is the story of Sasha (Theron), a woman overcoming grief and perhaps a sense of guilt after losing her partner Tommy (Erica Bana) in a freak climbing accident at the beginning of the movie. And on paper, it’s that story of sorrow crossed with the psychological thriller. After all, she meets in those Aussie wilds a fellow outdoors proponent, Ben (Taron Egerton). Alas, he’s also a chap who has read The Most Dangerous Game one too many times, and he has the crossbow to prove it. It’s theoretically lurid adventure story stuff, but in Kormákur’s eye, it’s also an unlikely travelogue guide to the extreme sport scene around the globe.
“I felt Yosemite is maybe a little bit overused, so I wasn’t as interested in that,” Kormákur says of the film’s original setting when the screenplay by Jeremy Robbins first came his way. Initially set entirely in the U.S., beginning with a climbing accident in Yosemite National Park and then transferred to a fictional American river, Apex at one time could’ve looked quite different. However, as a former climber himself, and a director with a firm timetable he could squeeze the film into Theron’s schedule, Kormákur found himself pulled instinctually to the Land Down Under.
“There’s a uniqueness of its nature,” Kormákur muses, “I love that. Also I felt that [you gain a lot] when you cast Eric Bana as the lover, and that she was going through her grief by going to a country that she is not at home in.” Finally, though, it just made sense with the time of the year. “It was informed by the fact that we had to shoot this during the winter months and we couldn’t do that in a cold place. So we needed to find something in the Southern Hemisphere.”
Initially, there was talk of trying to pass Australia off as parts of the North American landscape, but ultimately the production leaned into the loneliness of Sasha being a stranger in a strange land, especially when she realizes she’s alone with a killer.
It adds to the story but also the extremity of the shoot. Theron did many of her own stunts in the film, including jumping off a waterfall in vivid wide-shot, as well as plenty of the rafting. The director also insists almost all of the climbing seen in the film is Theron. But by Kormákur’s own admission, he’s a bit past the days where he does everything he asks his lead actors to do; “I used to be that guy, let’s put it that way, and I would do that, but she wasn’t asking me.” Nonetheless, the movie itself became an extreme sport in its own right for the people making it.
“When I was scouting, I did some of the swimming because we’re going to places we couldn’t get to anywhere else,” the director explains. “And at the end of the day, we had the whole crew swimming with us to locations, because there is no other way to get there.”
