FREE SOLO | SHOOT STORY
Climber Alex Honnold rehearsed his moves for a year before taking on the mighty El Capitan rock face – without ropes
WORDS PH I L RHODES / PICTURES NATIONAL GEOGRAPH IC
F ree Solo is a production that could hardly have been designed for anything but the big screen. The documentary, directed by Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, depicts climber Alex Honnold’s ascent of the El Capitan rock formation in Yosemite national park. Made on June 3, 2017, Honnold’s climb was the first ever without the use of safety equipment – the ‘free solo’ of the title. El Capitan is 3000 feet high, so in some ways no screen could ever be quite big enough to capture this achievement. Jimmy is himself a hugely experienced mountain sportsman, having both climbed
HONNOLD Given the sheer risks involved in a production like Free Solo , it ’ s no surprise to find that Jimmy, Alex and the rest of their team have climbed and filmed together for years. “The upper echelon of the climbing community is pretty small,” Jimmy says. “I met [Alex] through the climbing community. He joined the North Face athletes team a little over ten years ago, and I ’ ve been a member of that for over 20 years. I was with him on his first international expedition to Borneo – that was the first time I shot with him.” Although Alex made his ascent of El Capitan ’ s Freerider route in a hair
and skied on Mount Everest and a host of other imposing terrain features across Africa, Asia and South America. His credits include cinematography on the 2010 documentary 180° South and direction on Everest: Shooting the Impossible and Meru , which covers an ascent of the eponymous Himalayan peak. Jimmy is, in his own words, a climber who became a filmmaker, not the other way around. “I was a climber first. I just started to shoot a lot of climbers in my peer group... I was a photographer, then I became a filmmaker. When I first started shooting it was on transparencies – I was filming before the digital SLRs came onto the scene.”
OCTOBER 20 1 8 | DEF I N I T ION 31
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