How "Free Solo" Filmed The First El Capitan Climb With No Ropes | Vanity Fair

if your free soloing it is about perfect execution or certain death hello i'm choi Vasarely I'm a documentarian my name is Jimmy chin and I'm a National Geographic photographer and filmmaker we made free solo together and we are going to talk a little bit about how we captured the first free solisten ll captain the thing about L cap is that it is huge it's 3,000 feet tall and it's almost hard for the mind to comprehend the idea of climbing it without a rope was just really beyond most people's imagination Alex shows free-rider on El Cap because even as a professional climber if you are to be able to climb free-rider what we call clean which is without falling that would be a lifetime achievement I think alex is certainly the first person to consider it seriously well we were always more interested in Alex as a character study then as a free soloist per se I mean Alex began free soloing because as a kid it was scarier for him to speak to another person and ask them to be his partner than to go out by himself and without a partner and hence without a rope it was very dangerous but alex was doing we really had to trust ourselves and how we would handle the material and how we would handle the story and I think Alex did trust us with that we understood of these 3,000 feet that there were four or five pitches that were critical to the story the free blast slabs which were difficult for him psychologically as well as physically the boulder problem which is the crux or the hardest part of the climb and then then dura corner so we always had the climb covered from a long lens but our manpower they're kind of running in between these five places the way we approach the film which was critically important was building the team we needed elite professional climbers that were also incredible filmmakers and cinematographers meaning there's only about three or four people in the world you can call each one of our cameramen was you know 45 pounds of equipment sometimes 50 pounds of equipment and they're also carrying you know 500 to a thousand feet of rope you are moving up filming but you're also pulling your lines out of the frame and clipping them off to hear yourself so as you move up you're gaining more and more weight and trying to manage more and more equipment and rope you know we use very specific equipment that allow us to let go of the brake hand and the belay device self locks so you can kind of let go of the rope and not slide down the Rope any further you know we are also doing different moves where somebody else is kind of lowering out the cameraman and they're able to get kind of a moving shot on the wall the free blast is a notorious section on the free rider route it's extremely slippery and the holes are the width of two quarters on their on their edge it's the kind of climbing what we call friction climbing where you don't really have real footholds it's just the friction of the rubber on the wall and it's very very insecure climbing the way that we shot it was to emphasize the friction climbing and the footholds because it's all about footwork there it's very technical footwork and also it was important to our story because it was on the free blasts that he fell so the free blast was like psychologically as well as physically quite challenging for Alex the boulder problem pitch was one of if not the biggest concern for Alex people start to understand you know how choreographed all of his moves are and I think that was something we really wanted to get across to people and that there was a psychological situation there too with Alex my galaxy's thought deeply about his own mortality but he did not he was not interested in dying in front of his friends and also he was acutely aware that any camera man would feel I mean would feel profound fear in that moment and that there's a reflection that happens where Alex would feel his fear so the compromise was remote cameras the trick actually was that we needed to get them firing and we weren't sure how long the batteries would last we weren't sure if we actually got it until we came down downloaded everything and watched and it was maybe one of the highlights of the entire production when we were sitting there waiting and waiting and watching and then you see this person coming up into the frame and then you know we get to see him do the boulder problem pitch the karate kick and there's that moment when he looks to the camera and smiles and we all almost fell out of our chairs when we saw that the derry-o Corner is an extraordinary looking pitch and the difficulty is that the holes are vit not very good so they're kind of rounded the only way that you can stay on the climb is by pulling with your arms and pushing with your feet it's also a very long pitch meaning your arms get very very tired very quickly that pitch alex climbed in probably less than ten minutes maybe even five minutes people often take an hour that was a pitch that we really wanted to cover well because of its difficulty and because of the aesthetics the way we covered that is I was off to the side and then we had another cameraman above that pitch shooting what we called down the barrel so I had a still camera both to the tough of my film camera and while alex is climbing the Enduro corner I was also taking stills that I was filming him coming up I couldn't see Alex because he was around the corner probably a hundred feet away but I knew he was moving quickly I know that from the ground you you all could see the valley floor and I kept on one point I was like Alex you cannot give Jimmy a heart attack yeah he's trying to move so fast alex is shooting up and we're kind of paralleling and at a certain point the roots intersect again and I see Alex coming up he's got this huge smile on his face because he's through all the most technical difficulties and he's coming along and I say to Alex can you give me 60 seconds he just looked at his phone and said I'm about to break for hours and I knew what that meant he was not going to wait he's so happy he's alive Alex lives every day of his life with intention he's doing exactly what he wants to do with his life but there's also this misperception I think where people think oh he's a free soloist he has a death wish that's not who he is if he was a daredevil or a maverick we wouldn't have been interested in making the film it was actually his process and his discipline it was kind of the perfect storm for a documentary film but the real kind of existential issues lay and the dangers involved in his courage he was connecting with people which i think is one of the more moving parts of the film

Channel: Vanity Fair

Views: 8,865,013

Keywords: climbing, el capitan, notes on a scene, jimmy chin, free solo movie, free solo documentary, free solo climbing, el capitan climbing, climbing el capitan, elizabeth chai vasarhelyi, alex honnold, free solo climbing el capitan, el capitan climbing documentary, free solo oscar, free solo best doc, free solo 2019, free solo oscar winner, alex honnold free solo, 2019 oscars documentary, rock climbing, alex honnold climb, oscar best doc, climb el capitan, doc, docs, vanity fair

Id: dtnjRoDa71Y

Length: 7min 21sec (441 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 11 2019