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

If you're free soloing, it is about perfect execution or certain death. Hello, I'm Chai 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 solo ascent of El Capitan. The thing about El 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 chose 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 was certainly the first person to consider it seriously. Well, we were always more interested in Alex as a character study than 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 what Alex was doing. We really had to trust ourselves in 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 the enduro 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 approached 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 carrying 45 pounds of equipment, sometimes 50 pounds of equipment. And they're also carrying 500 to 1,000 feet of rope. You're moving up, filming, but you're also pulling your lines out of the frame and clipping them off to 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 Freerider route. It's extremely slippery and the holds are the width of two quarters 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 Blast 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. Like Alex has 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 cameraman 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 enduro corner is an extraordinary looking pitch. And the difficulty is that the holds are 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 10 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 call down the barrel. So I had a still camera bolted to the top of my film camera. And while Alex is climbing the enduro corner, I was also taking stills, but I was filming him coming up. I couldn't see Alex because he was around the corner, probably 100 feet away. But I knew he was moving quickly. I know that from the ground, you all could see that. I was on the valley floor and I kept on one, like, I was like, Alex, you cannot give Jimmy a heart attack. Yeah. Jimmy's trying to move so fast. Alex is shooting up. And we're kind of paralleling. And at a certain point, the routes 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? And he just looked at his phone and he said, I'm about to break four 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 in the dangers involved. In his courage, he was connecting with people, which I think is one of the more moving parts of the film.