I'm interested to know why you guys chose to write a story about mountain climbing. Also, why did you choose Mount McKinley instead of a bigger mountain like Mount Everest or K2?

When developing the treatment, we quickly chose a location that would present a wealth of strong visual metaphors and invite original scenarios and set pieces. No film that Bob and I had seen had really used high altitude mountain locations realistically or interestingly. Movies like "Cliffhanger", "K2" and "The Climb" were, in our opinion, one dimensional and hokey. We studied these films very closely before writing to learn from their mistakes and avoid their clichés. The dramatic cry of "Avalanche!" and other such familiar scenarios were strictly forbidden from our story. In the end, "Denali" is a universal story about people who just happen to be mountain climbers, not about mountain climbers who just happen to have a story.

Jan De Bont is famous for calling the tornado the star of "Twister" and Wolfgang Petersen has called the weather in "The Perfect Storm" a character. For us, the location and the conditions it would present were a stage, a backdrop for a human foreground based in character.

When it came time to choose a location, we chose Denali because we didn't want the mountain to be the star. Because "Denali" originated as a road movie across the American Southwest and not as a climbing story, we were never thinking bigger is better. Choosing Everest or even K2 would have introduced a well-known "character" into the cast that would have detracted from the people central to the story. Also, even to the jaded American city resident, Alaska seems closer to home than Nepal and may be easier to connect with on some level.