Who is 127 days based on

On April 26, , Ralston, a year-old mountaineer and outdoorsman, set out on a day of adventure in remote southeast Utah, alone and without telling anyone where he'd gone. What happened at on that Saturday afternoon - and in the five-and-a-half days that followed - is the directed by Academy Award-winner Danny Boyle "Slumdog Millionaire". Kind of like being stuck in the bottom of a well, essentially, but in the middle of a very remote wilderness," Ralston said.

But he was out overnight - five nights in all - hours between a rock and a hard place the name of his book. You have to keep it together. Don't lose it. You're gonna have to cut your arm off, Aron. The vision that Ralston had during his final night in the canyon has come true.

Earlier this year, Ralston's wife, Jessica, gave birth to a baby boy, Leo. Ralston admits to moments of frustration with his prosthetic arm but sees it as his "salvation. It was me getting my life back," he says. After the exhilaration of the rescue, you might expect Ralston to suffer depression. He did not; at least, not immediately.

Fearing the loss of "my identity as a self-reliant individual, as an outdoorsman" he "regained all of that": he completed his mission to conquer "the Fourteeners", rowed a boat through the Grand Canyon and is a better climber now than when he had a right hand.

Many people would find this adaptation to disability as inspiring as his escape. But Ralston is honest enough to admit the downside of the fact that this supposedly life-changing experience did not actually change his life as perhaps it should. In the years following my amputation I thought, I won't let it change me, I just want to be the guy I was before and prove that I am still this hard hero. It's almost pathetic to the extent that what I really needed was a humbling and what happened?

I just got reinforced — I'm a fucking badass, I just got out of that. Nothing's gonna stop me! It was not the loss of his right arm but this breakup, in , that caused a "really deep depression". He felt "crushed to the core," he says, and began questioning whether he was worth anything if he was not lovable.

Belatedly, he realised that it was love and relationships that "leads you to strength and confidence and courage and perseverance and everything that people attribute to this story". In the aftermath of his depression, he met his wife and she challenged him "to implement what I'd learned, that relationships are really very important in life and this is how to transform from being this ego-driven twentysomething into being, if possible, on a path at least to becoming a more mature guy.

Ralston still likes solitude but when he goes out rafting and climbing now he almost always takes his friends. In Bluejohn Canyon, he also has a literal touch-stone, the rock that crushed and trapped him. He still visits it. Watch the trailer here. The extraordinary story behind Danny Boyle's Hours. Danny Boyle's new film, Hours, tells how climber Aron Ralston found himself trapped alone in a canyon and had to perform DIY surgery to save his life.

Patrick Barkham talks to him. Aron Ralston prepares to chop off his own arm to free himself, 48 hours into his ordeal in a Utah canyon. A graduate of the prestigious Carnegie Mellon University, Ralston always had an affinity for outdoor activities, especially mountaineering and canyoneering.

During this journey, his hand got caught under a boulder that got dislodged, trapping him inside a slot canyon. Ralston had embarked on the hike alone without informing anyone. He also had no way to call for help. After surviving for 5 days, Ralston performed an amputation on his hand. He then climbed out of the slot, rappeled down a canyon wall nearly 20 meters tall, and hiked for miles.

Eventually, Ralston was rescued nearly four hours after his amputation. Beaufoy believes it is not the physical crisis, but the emotional transformation that makes Hours such compelling drama. It's about someone who has turned his back on his friends and his family and society and goes through this extraordinary change," notes Beaufoy.

It was a delivery to life again …a doorway, a portal to being reborn, really. Aron describes it as an ecstasy of feeling that he is driven through and you have to try to capture that in cinema. It is exhilarating. It is disturbing and overwhelming, but exhilarating as well. I love them; but this is a much more profound feeling of euphoria that you arrive at, because you've also been through a great deal to get there.

Not as much as he has, obviously, but you've participated in it in some way. Aron, do not give up. Now wearing a prosthetic arm, Aron Ralston still climbs mountains and explores canyons.