Name: How They Filmed the First El Capitan Climb With No Ropes in "Free Solo" | Vanity Fair
Uploaded: 2020-03-19T10:43:57.000Z
Duration: 7 min 21 s
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If you're free soloing, it is about perfect execution or certain death.

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.

So listen, the thing about El Cap is that it is huge.

It's 3000 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 imaginations.

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 than as a free Solis per se.

I mean, Alex began free soloing because as a kid it was scarier for him to speak to another person and ask him to be his partner than to go out by himself and without a partner and hence about a rope.

What Alex was doing really had to trust ourselves and how we would handle the material and how we would handle the story.

Understood of these 3000 feet that they were 45 pitches that were critical to the story.

The free blasts labs which were difficult for him, psychologically as well as physically the Boulder problem, which is the crux of the hardest part of the climb.

So we always had the climb coverage from a long lens.

But our manpower there 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 carrying, you know, £45 of equipment, sometimes £50 of equipment, and they're also carrying, you know, 500 to 1000 feet of rope.

You're moving up filming, but you're also pulling your lines out of the frame and clipping mawf.

Tear yourself so as you move up your gain, more power 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 on the belay device self locks so you can kind of like, oh, of the rope and not slide down the rope any further.

You know, we are also doing different moves where somebody else's kind of lowering out the cameramen and they're able to get kind of a moving shot on the wall.

Free Blast is a notorious section on the free rider route.

It's extremely slippery, and the holes are the width of 2/4 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 on the footholds because it's all about footwork there.

It's very technical footwork, and also it was important 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 Boulder problem.

Which waas one of, if not the biggest, concern for Alex.

People start to understand 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.

The 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 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 feared.

Trick actually, was that we needed to get the 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, touch karate kick.

And there's that moment when he looks to the camera smiles.

And we almost fell out of our chairs when we saw that the Darrow corner is an extraordinary looking pitch, and the difficulty is that the holes 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 very long pitch, meaning your arms get very, very tired very quickly.

That pitch, uh, Alex climbed, and probably less than 10 minutes, maybe even five minutes.

That was, Ah, 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, the tough of my film camera.

And while Alex is climbing the Enduro corner, I was also taking stills.

I couldn't see Alex because he was around the corner, probably 100 feet away.

I know that from the ground you all could says in the Valley floor, and I kept on one point.

I was like Alex, you cannot give Jimmy a heart attack.

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.

He's coming along and I say that, Alex, can you give me 60 seconds?

And he just looked at his phone and said, I'm about to break for hours and I knew what that meant.

Alex lives every day of his life with intention.

He's doing exactly what he wants to do with his life.

I think, where people like oh, he's a free soloist.

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 rial kind of existential issues lay and dangers involved in his courage. 

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How They Filmed the First El Capitan Climb With No Ropes in "Free Solo" | Vanity Fair

discipline

extraordinary

compromise

profound