Real-life survivor Ralston was opposed to 127 Hours film

But Ralston says he came around to supporting the film, 127 Hours, after being convinced that a feature would genuinely portray the horror he went through.

Boyle’s 90-minute account largely consists of star James Franco alone onscreen and employs a pulsating soundtrack, saturated colour palette and frenetic cuts to impart a heart-stopping race against time.

Franco says his performance was largely based on videos that Ralston made of himself while in the canyon, and that many of the scenes were shot in long improvised takes.

127 Hours is making its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival, which runs through Sept. 19. The film is expected to be released in Canada in November.

At a Sunday news conference, sitting alongside Boyle and cast members Franco, Amber Tamblyn and Kate Mara, Ralston recalled Boyle pitching the film to him years ago.

“I basically said, ‘Thanks but no thanks’ at that point,” Ralston said Sunday, admitting that it “was a process” of warming to the idea.

“And he went on to do Slumdog Millionaire and then very fortunately came (back) and was still interested to do the story. . . It was (about) giving it to them and then understanding and trusting, too, that there’s more than one way to get to this one goal and you can take this factual path and probably bore everybody to death (or) go about it in a very compelling storytelling manner and reach that same goal of conveying utterly the experience that I went through in a very genuine fashion.”

Franco, who noted that his biggest physical preparation involved losing weight for the role, said Ralston provided a detailed account of everything he went through and what he was thinking.

“He even acted it out for us, like just went through the physical motions of it,” said Franco, who juggled the intense shoot with graduate studies at New York University.

“The most valuable thing was Aron. The first time I met him in L.A., he brought a tape that had all the videos that he had made in the canyon. . . It was gold for an actor, because I got to see him in that situation, in the moment when he was in the middle of it not knowing that he was going to get out. You know, you can look back at the story in hindsight and say, ‘That was horrible but he got out.’ When I saw him on those videos, he had no idea that he was going to get out. It was incredibly powerful.”

Boyle said a big challenge was in conveying a sense of urgency and movement in the film.

“Obviously the film is incredibly inert in one sense, and I thought it’d be absolutely catastrophic if it remained inert, if it felt inert,” said Boyle.

“So we had this (idea) that we all talked to each other about — that it was an action movie about a guy who can’t move so we’d keep prompting and forcing ourselves. So we’d make James work, I tried to get him to work seven days a week. He’d work six days a week and then he had to go back to clock into his college and we’d force everybody to keep working, pushing, pushing, pushing, in the hope that that would bleed into the film. That sense of restlessness would bleed into the film and make it bearable to watch.”

Ralston, who got married just over a year ago and now has a son, said he cried for most of the film the first time he saw it.

“And not because of a pain that I felt but because in a lot of ways it reminds me so effectively of what was so important that I got out of that canyon for. It’s the scenes like where you watch the father take his little boy to the edge of this vast canyon landscape to watch the sunrise, which my dad did with me when I was 12 years old,” said Ralston, who met his wife after escaping the canyon.

“It’s not just this will to live that we have, it’s the will to love and that’s what I was questing for. . . Whenever the film touches on that it touches me in a very deep way.”