VIDEO EXCLUSIVE: Emily In Paris’s Michel Biel On Learning To Climb For ‘Summit Fever’

Summit Fever follows a group of friends as they begin their quest to climb the three most dangerous mountains in the Alps. Their friendship is tested as they search for a way out when a storm threatens their lives.

Michel Biel, the French actor know for his role in Emily in Paris who plays JP in the film, recently sat down with uInterview founder Erik Meers to discuss what it was like to shoot a movie that took place on a mountain.

“It was all on location,” the actor revealed. “We shot everything between Chamonix, Italy and Switzerland so we were actually climbing and going up on the glacier and doing almost every single stunt by ourselves. The only thing where we used green screen was we were, for example, climbing in Chamonix on a rock climbing wall and instead of being 1,000 meters up high, we would be maybe 30 meters up high and use a green screen on the grass so you have this feeling of height. There is no studio whatsoever. We were literally climbing. We were literally cold all the time. I remember the very first day of shooting, we went up high to 3,800 meters and we were up there for 10 days. I was minus 10 or 15 and it was freezing. That was the condition on the shoot, really feeling what the character is feeling and you know the height and the cold. It was helping us portray the character as well.”

Biel also shared about learning to climb for the role.

“Beforehand, I was not really climbing,” he said. “I went to a climbing gym and really tried to focus on climbing and the technical side of it. I booked the role a couple of months back, so I had some time to focus on it. I was climbing for a year more or less to get the feeling to get physically into the character. I was running a lot because when you’re up high in altitude, you’re short of breath and we had to do things over again ten times so I really needed to have really good physical condition to be able to do my own stunts. I didn’t want to look like a fool doing the climbing so I really wanted to get the technical aspect of climbing.”

Summit Fever is available for streaming on Amazon Video now.