When Mr Warren made a documentary film about the rainforest mountains of Venezuela, he never imagined it would be turned into the Disney movie. Then, in 2005, he got a call from the movie's director Pete Docter, who had seen his documentary and wanted the mystical mountains he saw in it to be the setting for UP, a 3D epic about an old man named Carl, who ties thousands of balloons to his house and floats away to a mystical land of beauty and adventure.
Warren, 60, an Indiana Jones type character who has been back and forth to Venezuela since the sixties, had unwittingly found the real-life setting for Carl to land his balloon house. He took UP's production team on a ten-day adventure to the luxuriant rainforest of Venezuela to see the highest waterfall in the world, ride endless rapids and climb towering summits in a hidden world of cloud islands.
"Where I took them, more people had landed on the moon than had been to this place," Warren said, referring to a place on Kukenan, a remote 7421ft (2622m) high summit he took the film-makers to. "It's one of the last pristine unexplored areas of the world, in fact the plants and the animals are known no-where else. It's a real living laboratory as far as natural history is concerned."
Director Pete Docter was amazed by what he saw, first in Warren's film, 'The Lost World', and then first hand with Warren as his guide. This was the land where Conan Doyle set his 1912 novel about prehistoric animals, also called 'The Lost World'.
"As soon as I popped in the DVD [of Warren's film] my hair stood on end because I knew this was where we should set the movie," Docter said in the production notes.
"One of the biggest challenges on this film was to design a place that looked otherworldly and yet was still believable enough that audiences would feel like the characters are actually there. We knew we had to go there because there's something fundamentally different about experiencing a place versus just seeing pictures or film." The result of this 2006 adventure with Warren was the stunning landscapes in UP, the highest grossing 3D film of all time, based on the thousands of pictures, sketches and movies its creators took on their ten day expedition.
Their first major trip was to Mount Roraima, the highest and best known of the 115 plateaux, full of the kind of weird and wonderful sculptured rock formations that were the inspiration for two of the film's main characters: Dug, a loveable Dog with a special collar allowing him to talk to humans; and Kevin, a 13-foot tall flightless bird with bright feathers and a penchant for sweet things. Unlike the explorers of the 19h century, who took months to get to Roraima by canoe and foot, weighed down by heavy food packs and being bitten by poisonous snakes, the film makers went by helicopter from Santa Elena, a nearby town on the border of Venezuela and Brazil.
But rather than flying them straight to the top of the towering rock mountain, Warren dropped them at the bottom and made them trek all the way up.
"I wanted them to have the experience of climbing up these cliffs to reach the plateau to give them a true adventurous feeling and a sense of achievement." He admits this was not a popular decision at the time but says they thanked him for it later.
"It was like your worst nightmare," Bob Peterson, Co-director/screenwriter for the film, said, in the production notes. "It was about a six or seven hour climb to the top and I had on way too much gear...In the morning, when we awoke, literally 50ft from where we were camping was a drop one mile straight down."
After three days of trekking across the summit plateau to places like the rock filled Crystal Valley and Triple Point, where Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana meet, Warren took them to one of the most remote places on Earth, the towering summit of Kukenan, which very few people have ever stepped foot on. It is known as the 'place of the dead' by the local Pemon Indians.
"It was so pure, and had more aggressive shaped rocks," Ricky Nierva, UP's production designer, said, in the production notes. "It felt very eerie. You expected to turn a corner and see a dinosaur roaming around."
The team almost got stranded on this remote sky island, which is only reachable by helicopter or by experienced climbers.
"We were dropped there by the helicopter in this very remote spot and we very nearly didn't get off," said Warren. "A storm came in and the helicopter had a real struggle getting back to pick us up. I thought we were going to be faced with a very uncomfortable cold night." They were finally lifted off just before dark to fly back to the Amerindian village of Paraitepui, before making their way by jeep, boat and aircraft to Angel Falls, which plummets 3,212ft from the summit of Auyantepui.
Angel Falls is the real life inspiration for UP's 9,700ft Paradise Falls, which in the film is placed right next to a towering rock called Tewasen Pinnacle, also used in Conan Doyle's novel, but is in reality over 124 miles (200km) away.
Despite such intentional differences, the film remains remarkably close to reality, according to Warren, who is writing a book on the region called 'Islands in the Clouds', and is one of the world's authorities on the area.
"They captured not only the essence of the place but they got the rock shapes and they got the plants in wonderful detail," he said. "They got the atmospherics, the changing weather, the mists coming in. The whole thing was very much brought to life and very three dimensional thanks to that trip that they made."
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