RUSSELL: "Paradise Falls, a land lost in time."
You're going to South America, Mr. Fredricksen?
CARL: Don't touch that! You'll soil it.
We needed a place for Carl to get stuck with this kid,
with no hope of pawning him off on the nearest policeman or social worker.
And we saw this documentary by this guy named Adrian Warren,
about these amazing tabletop mountains, called tepuis,
jutting up out of the jungle.
ADRIAN WARREN: These mountains are peculiar
in that they're pretty much flat-topped,
isolated from the surrounding landscape by cliffs that
may be 2,000, 3,000 feet in height. It's really enormous.
DOCTER: There are something like 120 of these mountains.
They're so inaccessible and remote
that, to this day, over half of them have never been set foot on by humans.
We have a story where this character goes to the extremes of the Earth.
Out, disconnected from the rest of the world, and we've never had that.
MARK NIELSEN: All of act two takes place in Venezuela, in South America,
and we could make it up or we could actually go there
and see what it's like so we could really be influenced by it.
Pete came to me and says, "We're going there."
I'm like, "No, we're not!" He's like, "Yeah, we are!" And then we did.
DOCTER: Adrian Warren set up the whole trip and came along with us.
Just getting to the place was an adventure.
NIELSEN: It takes about a day
to get from the San Francisco Bay Area to Caracas,
in Venezuela, which is where we stayed our first night.
PETERSON: The next morning we took a flight from Caracas to Barcelona
and then onto Puerto Ordaz.
WARREN: And then from there we took a small aircraft to Santa Elena,
a long, long, long way south.
RICKY NIERVA: Is this Hotel Gran Sabana?
Enjoy, because tomorrow you're not going to sleep on a bed.
(BOTH LAUGHING)
WARREN: Then next day, we drove to an Indian village called Paraitepui.
NIELSEN: It's about a two-hour drive from Santa Elena,
second hour's on a really rough dirt road with lots of potholes.
WARREN: And from there we were picked up
by the helicopter to ferry us to the base of Roraima.
We could have landed on top of Roraima,
but I decided to make them walk from the bottom of the cliffs
to give them a bit more of an adventurous experience.
PETERSON: And we finally got there
and here's this looming giant block of rock coming...
DOCTER: Yeah, it was really foreboding.
It's this dark thing that shoots up out of the ground.
-"We're climbing that?" - Yeah.
It looked like "Oh, no, you're not!"
You're trying to relate your size cues to this thing.
And then Adrian Warren starts to point out,
"Oh, look, there are some people
"who already started to make their trip up."
And then somewhere on the face of this tepui,
you see these kind of like salt specks.
"Those are people?"
After everyone was gathered,
we put our backpacks on and started climbing up Roraima,
from about 6,300 feet up to about 8,900 feet.
DOCTER: The trip up was like six hours of StairMaster, you know?
'Cause nothing was just a straight path,
everything was over roots and down into mud and up,
and step by step, it was finding a place to put your foot that wouldn't slip.
BRYN IMAGIRE: It was so steep in certain areas,
it was like I had to use my arms to pull myself up.
It was a lot harder, I think, than any of us thought.
We had our humungous big boots on,
our GORE-TEX, everything, you know.
The guides, on the other hand, they had flip-flops.
NIERVA: Emilio, he was wearing socks and slippers that were two sizes
too small for him that he actually borrowed from his girlfriend.
He climbed Roraima with that,
and walked through all the other stuff with that.
(PANTING)
DOCTER: And what you're climbing up past
are millions upon millions of years of sediment layered on top of each other.
You could see ancient seabeds of, like, the sand
in those wavy lines from pre-dinosaur times, you know.
It's supposedly some of the oldest exposed rock on the planet.
And then you'll come out of a clearing and you'll look down,
and it's the whole world, yawns before you.
I just never will forget coming over a rise thinking we were close
and looking down and then just my head went up,
realized that last climb was 1,000 feet on rocks
that could sort of tumble down, and I just cried.
- Right there. - Right there?
Yeah.
NIERVA: When we got to the top for the first time,
it was one of the most amazing feelings I've ever had,
the sense of achievement,
'cause you realize, "Wow, I did something like that."
The next morning and you look out at it, you just can't believe this place.
It's amazing.
NIELSEN: These tepuis are surrounded on all sides by these 2,000-foot cliffs,
and it's just an exhilarating feeling.
PETERSON: You inch over and you look down, and it's a mile down.
DOCTER: Yeah.
PETERSON: And it just... It's so far down.
Scared myself.
You can't capture how scary it is to be looking down over the edge.
There's no handrails or safety equipment,
like, you're not attached to any ropes or anything.
You're basically on the edge, looking straight down.
You can get a sense of it, but there's nothing like
your own life being in danger to really heighten that sensation.
WARREN: The tepuis consist of sandstone
which is several thousand feet thick,
laid down as lakebed sediments.
DOCTER: This used to be, millions and millions of years ago,
the surface of the ground.
WARREN: And at that time,
South America was joined to West Africa.
And then about 150 million years ago,
South America drifted across westwards
and bumped into the Pacific Plate, which pushed up the Andes.
But it also pushed up this sandstone in a sort of blister shape.
And then weathering did the rest.
And we're left with these standing shapes which are the tepuis now.
I was thinking that it was going to be like a table,
or, you know, a plateau or something,
and that you would be able to see across to the other side,
but you get up there and it's...
You see rock formations go on and on.
NIELSEN: The landscape on top of these tepuis,
it's like nothing I'd ever seen before, or even thought existed.
STEVE MAY: It felt like you were on the moon.
DOCTER: It was the closest to being on Mars that I think I'll ever get.
LOU ROMANO: It felt like we went back in time into some kind of mythical land.
And all these rocks, they have these strange shapes.
There was some shapes of turtles, there's the shape
of what looks like a Mexican with a sombrero sitting by the campfire.
NIERVA: There's dinosaurs,
there's a monkey eating an ice cream cone,
there's rocks teetering on, like, a little spindle.
DOCTER: We said there's no way
if we put this in the film that I would believe it.
It looks like the whole thing's going to fall over, you know.
I would design some more support under that rock
if this were in the computer, and yet there it is in real life, so...
And it's because of the sandstone being in different layers,
some of which is harder and some which is softer.
Of course, the softer rock wears away by the wind and the rain more quickly,
so you get these very, very strange sculptures.
PETERSON: This place does feel old and forgotten
and it feels like the perfect place.
Maybe that's why these feel right,
all these rock slabs that are all at different angles,
is that it feels like it's falling apart, that it's really super old.
Yeah, and since it's sedimentary, it feels like it's wrinkles.
Feels like it's an old man itself.
These tepuis are so tall,
they kind of say that they make their own weather systems.
WARREN: One side will heat up by the sun quite quickly in the morning
and form these swirling clouds which cap the top of the mountain.
What I wasn't expecting was the rapid pace
that it can be totally sunny and then you're in a cloud,
and then it's gone and it's sunny, and then it comes back and it's raining,
and it happens really fast.
You're trying to paint something. You start it, you start, you look down,
you're painting, painting, and then you look up. Clouds.
NIELSEN: Hey, where'd Roraima go?
(BOTH LAUGHING)
Gone.
DOCTER: There's a sense you get just as a human by going somewhere
and smelling and feeling and being there
that you can never get in a book or a movie.
NIERVA: You got to smell it, you got to taste it,
you got to be there to get the real-ness of it.
Scale, you can't really understand in a photograph,
because usually it's like the plants are all close up
and the rocks far away,
but then when you think about everything together in a landscape,
the plants are just really small and insignificant.
NIELSEN: And 80% of them exist only on top of these tepuis,
so it's all new. It's things you've never seen before.
When you see them in the photos they just look like cactus,
or, you know, something that you already know.
But when you actually feel some of those, like the Stegolepis,
it's so thick, it's like a piece of plastic.
I think because they have to be so hardy,
and retain so much water within themselves.
There's not much soil on top of a lot of these mountains.
It only settles in little gullies.
PETERSON: And from that little bit of soil,
you'll have as many plants as it could support.
- DOCTER: Yeah. - It just felt like we were
looking around at a flower shop.
Like little Japanese ikebana or little Japanese gardens.
PETERSON: Everything just seemed to be arranged by somebody up there.
DOCTER: Yeah, it was beautiful.
WARREN: We walked all over Roraima, we went to the edge
so could look across to Kukenan across this beautiful forested valley.
We walked up to the Valley of Crystals,
the whole valley, it's covered in quartz crystals.
I took them to a sinkhole.
The way it's eroded, it looks like pillars.
And they would suddenly sit down
and say, "Okay, we're going to stop here," and make a lot of drawings.
If I have a time to draw something, even if the drawing is lousy,
it somehow sits in my head more.
Like, there's something about the act of putting it on paper
that makes me experience it more vividly.
WARREN: It was an interesting experience for me
because they would gaze in wonder at something
and want to examine it in fine detail.
To feel it and make beautiful watercolors
and ask very different kinds of questions.
What you pull out of the experience as an artist
is essentially what you're trying to show the audience.
And that means that what we localize on,
and what you can feature is very important
while you're there in the location.
Their sketches really tell you a lot about who they are,
what they look for, and what's important in the landscape.
Ronnie Del Carmen's had a real emotional, colorful quality
to what he did.
Don and Nat were looking at
wonderful rhythm of structures of things.
Lou was looking for the whimsy of things.
And Bryn, you could tell,
she was really keyed into the beautiful textures she was seeing.
We modeled some rocks and painted them
so that you could really see
the lichen deposits and all the mineral deposits,
things that are stuck onto the rock
and it was really helpful in getting that look into the movie.
Darn thing!
DOCTER: There are certainly very specific things that ended up in the film.
There are these cave walls that have been carved by water rushing past,
that we ended up using for Muntz's cave.
You know, the same sort of feel of this erosion.
PETERSON: And coming out of the mist
and thinking you're looking at a person,
but really it's a rock shape. I mean, that really happened.
Hey.
(SNICKERS) You were talking to a rock.
NIERVA: Also, Muntz's lair,
all the rocks around the entryway of that cave
were influenced by the Kukenan tepui that we visited.
PETERSON: There is another tepui next to Roraima called Kukenan
and we decided that we would go there.
WARREN: But, of course, you've got thousands of feet of cliffs
and impossible landscape in between.
So, we did it by helicopter, which sounds easy enough,
but of course you can't carry many people in a helicopter.
So, we all took turns shuttling over to the top of Kukenan.
And the plan was for us to just spend an hour, maybe two hours there,
exploring that summit a little bit.
There's nowhere to land on this tepui, except for certain little islands
in the middle of these vast stretches of crazy rocks and marsh.
MAY: And when you get there, it's just all rock.
Almost none of those little plants
or anything that looks like anything besides rock.
DOCTER: Most of the time up there it was just dead silent, nothing.
No birds, just the sound of wind.
IMAGIRE: They said that less than probably 100 people
have ever visited there.
WARREN: It's an extremely dangerous mountain.
But it's such a labyrinth of rocks it's easy to get lost,
and several people have disappeared without a trace.
DOCTER: And these rock shapes are just very hostile
and it's almost like you have the feeling you're being watched.
WARREN: Kukenan, for the Indians,
always seemed to have the edge on Roraima
as being the home of evil spirits,
or mischievous spirits, actually, they prefer to say.
They'll catch you unawares.
NIERVA: So, it's raining on Kukenan
and we found this little alcove here.
Here's Nat.
We're waiting for the helicopter.
There's Bryn in her trash bag skirt.
Very effective for rain.
(IMAGIRE LAUGHS)
NIELSEN: After a few hours,
the helicopter began coming up to shuttle people off the mountain.
After the first two groups, a storm started to close in around Kukenan,
and the helicopter is unable to get up there in the middle of a storm,
it's just not safe.
PETERSON: So six of us were actually able to get down from the mountain,
but another six were stuck up there as a storm closed in.
McLAUGHLIN: And it rained harder
than I've ever seen it rain ever in my entire life, I swear.
So you're 5,000, 6,000 feet up, freezing cold rain,
40-mile-per-hour winds, you know...
NIELSEN: And there's very little shelter to be found on Kukenan.
There was about two places that we were able to find
where someone could stand underneath a rock,
the biggest of which we had been referring to that afternoon as The Lou.
I had to use the bathroom, and, you know,
when you're in those environments you just go where you can.
It just ended up that that was where everyone then went to huddle
when it was raining.
So they called it The Lou,
because loo is toilet in England,
and my name's Lou, so...
And this cave was like the size of a phone booth.
We were just all squeezed in there together, standing on rocks,
'cause it was even wet around the rocks inside this little cave.
NIELSEN: We literally saw ponds and lakes forming
as far out as we could see
that weren't there before.
All these rock shapes turned into these amazing water sculptures
where everything, it's just one big waterfall.
Sometimes the storm doesn't last long,
but that day the storm went round and round in circles
and got worse and worse.
Then the longer we waited the more I thought,
"We're going to be stuck here overnight and it's gonna suck."
NIELSEN: There was no place on this tepui to pitch a tent
so we would have just been standing or sitting in The Lou,
in our sleeping bags all night.
We're getting desperate, we started looking for more shelter
and then we heard the helicopter.
NIELSEN: Thankfully, with 15 minutes of daylight remaining,
the helicopter returned
and we were able to get off the mountain before nightfall.
And we were very grateful.
McLAUGHLIN: I did a couple of paintings
to try and capture what it felt like being stuck in a rainstorm on top of Kukenan.
(MUTTERING)
it was a real relief to get off of Kukenan,
but we knew the next day that we had to kind of continue our journey.
So the next morning we took a very small plane,
went to a small town called Canaima,
and from Canaima we took motorized canoes
up a river all day to get to Angel Falls.
There was this beautiful open vista where we could look up at Angel Falls.
It was always cloudy. It's hard to draw when it's cloudy.
And we woke up really early, it was still dark,
you could hear it but you couldn't see it,
and then, slowly, the play of light,
the way it changed as the light came up,
and then it would become completely in clouds
and then it would peek out again.
That was a cool morning,
just sitting and watching and trying to capture that on paper.
MAY: We climbed to the base of the waterfall.
The scale of it is just... It's amazing.
Angel Falls is the tallest waterfall in the world.
It's so tall that the water actually vaporizes before it hits the bottom.
So, it doesn't really have this kind of crashing Niagara Falls at the bottom,
it just vaporizes into this mist
that collects and forms these kind of more gentle falls.
Our waterfall is actually three times taller than Angel Falls.
Just to make it beautiful
and have enormous scale for Carl when he goes to see it.
DOCTER: That seems about right.
When we got back we were like, "if we could survive this trip,
"the movie will seem so easy after this."
DOCTER: We have this catalog
of all these great plants and rocks and things,
and we could kind of put them together
in whatever way we wanted to make the ultimate tepui.
What was really cool was it started being less about
how does it look, what does it look like, what's it literally made of,
and more about what does it feel like.
DEL CARMEN: There's shorthands that happen.
There are certain words and experiences
that people say, "Yes, exactly. I know what that means."
MAY: When we make those images on the computer
and they look and feel like that place felt,
that's when we know we've kind of done our job.
It felt like we sort of earned the idea of using a tepui in our film.
NIELSEN: Is that our hiking start point, right there?
NIERVA: Yeah, that's it.
DOCTER: And beyond all of the amazing things we saw
and the photographs and the detail that we were able to observe
and hopefully capture in the film,
I think what we walked away with
was the feeling that we'd been on the same journey as Carl had.
We had experienced this amazing place,
seen things no one's ever seen,
and in doing so, it was really kind of a wild adventure for us.