When did you first meet Alex Honnold?
Jimmy Chin: It was around 2009. Alex was this up-and-coming climber. No one really knew much about him but then all of a sudden he pulled off some of the most daring climbs the climbing world had ever seen. He free soloed a route called Moonlight Buttress in Zion National Park and then he free soloed a very iconic climb, the Regular Northwest route at Half Dome. Before Alex, there were a few really great free soloists, probably the most famous of whom were John Bachar and Peter Croft. Free soloing is extraordinary and takes a lot of commitment because you’re climbing without a safety system to catch you if you fall or make a mistake.
Normally when you’re climbing and you get scared or tired, your technique starts to suffer. Your breathing increases, your heart starts to pound. Essentially, your capacity to climb falls apart. If you’re climbing with a rope, you have the option of letting it fall apart and the rope will catch you. When you’re free soloing, obviously that’s not an option. You have to have a different level of mastery over your physical and mental capacity. You have to be able to completely control fear, which is a very difficult thing to manage. And what Alex did that’s extraordinary is he climbed reallybig walls. It required a great mastery on a very high level. When people found out that he did it… Well, it’s not like anybody has to brag about free soloing Half Dome. It tells you everything you need to know about that person’s ability as a climber. At the time free soloing Half Dome wasn’t even something that climbers were talking or thinking about. It wasn’t even in the consciousness. So when he did it, it was like, “Wow. Okay. The bar just got moved.”
When did you first learn that Alex wanted to free solo El Capitan and what did you think when you heard about that?
JC: Yosemite is kind of the proving grounds for climbers, especially in the big wall world. If you’re a serious surfer, you move to the North Shore of O‘ahu and put your time in surfing Pipeline—that’s where you cut your teeth and make your name. If you’re a climber, you go to Yosemite and you climb Half Dome and El Capitan. They’re the two iconic formations and climbing them is a rite of passage. So after Alex climbed Half Dome if you even dared to think about it, El Cap was the next logical step. But people weren’t talking about it. Knowing Alex all of these years, I let myself think about it, but I never considered it a possibility. We were friends and I didn’t talk about it in case putting it out in the ether would in some way make it something that hewould think about. I didn’t wantto talk with him about it.
How did you become friends?
JC: I’ve been on the North Face team since 2001. Part of what we do on the team is look at new talent and get to know different athletes and see if they’d be a good fit for the team. Alex signed around 2008 or 2009, and we took him on his first international expedition to Borneo. We were there to climb a big wall. That expedition was the first time I really got to spend time with him. He was the new guy, the youngest. It was fun to see him out of his element—this kid from Sacramento. He’d done a lot of impressive climbing but hadn’t really been on a big expedition before. And then over the years, being a photographer and a filmmaker, I shot quite a bit of Alex. We developed a rapport and a lot of trust. Working in an environment like that can be pretty intense: You’re photographing someone, you’re pushing the edges. Alex doesn’t do anything on a small scale. As a photographer, you need to be efficient and move together and work together and make decisions together. You get a good sense of person’s decision-making and to be successful you really have to trust each other.
How did the film about his ascent of El Capitan come to be? Did Alex come to you about the climb?
JC: After the success of our film Meruat Sundance, Chai and I were getting calls from studios and producers about what was next for us. Chai and I had talked about a few different ideas. In the back of my mind I thought of making a feature film about Alex, but I was conflicted because free soloing is dangerous and a film about Alex would obviously involve a lot of free soloing. I knew exactly what such a film would entail, the kind of pressure it would put on myself and Chai and our crew because there’s not a lot of room for error and the stakes would be extraordinarily high. I said to Chai, “I need you to think about it.” Like me, Chai believed that the film could be very interesting because the choices you have to make in life to be a free soloist really point to some very hard decisions—in a way, to the essence of some of the hardest decisions that a person has to make in life. How does one make those decisions? That’s interesting.
At this point, we were only talking about a film about Alex because he had never said to me that he wanted to free solo El Cap. So Chai had a conversation with Alex. She just wanted to get a sense of whether he would be an interesting character to make a film about. And in the conversation, he told her that he was thinking about free soloing El Cap. So when I talked to Chai after and asked, “How was your conversation with Alex?” she said, “It was great, and he told me that he would love to free solo El Cap.”
I just stopped in my tracks. At that moment I thought, “I don’t think I can handle that, I don’t think I can make that film.” As a climber and a filmmaker, your mind just goes to one place: imagining Alex falling and the fact that I would probably be there and we’re talking about a good friend of mine. And of course in my field of work you’re very conscious of “Kodak courage,” when people do something they wouldn’t normally do because they’re being filmed. I specifically don’t work with athletes I feel make decisions that way. In a lot of ways that’s what being a professional is: being able to make good decisions, not to feel the pressure. But honestly it’s impossible not to feel the pressure if there’s a film happening and a lot of people working on it and money involved and everybody’s spent weeks getting in position. That said, if there’s one person that I trust more than anybody I’ve ever worked with to make the right decision, it’s Alex. He’s just wired in a way where he manages external pressure very well. He doesn’t let it affect his decisions… but we’re all human.
How did you get on the other side of that and decide that you did want to go forward with making the film?
JC: I said, “Let me take some time to think about this before I commit to it.” I went to some of my mentors: I talked to my friend Conrad Anker, to my friend Jon Krakauer. I wasn’t even sure if the overall idea was okay: I was also thinking about how people would perceive the film, conscious that in some way it could be conceived of as a stunt. But Alex doesn’t climb that way. He prepares meticulously and he has a specific talent that allows him to perform at a level that nobody has ever seen before. They’ve seen glimpses of it in athletes in other sports but to be able to maintain that composure and execute perfectly for hours at a time when the stakes are life and death the entire time… that’s extraordinary.
I talked to Alex. And understand, it wasn’t about his capacity to do it. If there’s anybody who’s ever lived who could do it, he’s probably the one. But I wasn’t betting on that. I was betting on him to make the decision that he wouldn’t do it unless he felt that he was 100 percent ready. And the issue there was… I’m a professional climber and have been in the industry for twenty years and it’s impossible for me even now to imagine that someone could feel that they were 100 percent ready to free solo El Cap. The technical difficulties are such that even if you’re a professional climber, with a rope, on a good day, you could fall. It’s such insecure climbing. There are sections where it’s purely friction. Your feet are standing on nothing and there are no handholds so that if your foot slips, you can catch yourself. You have to be perfect.
Jon Krakauer, who I really respect and who’s a journalist, said to me, “Well, if Alex said that he wants to do it, he’s going to do it with or without you guys. And if someone is going to tell that story, you’re probably the right person to do it.” He never said, “I think you should do it,” he just said, “I would watch the movie.” And you know, in a way it’s the cryptic mentor: I’m not going to tell you what you should or shouldn’t do. But for me, it was a green light. I thought, “Fair enough.” I went back to Chai and we talked about it quite a bit and came to the decision together that we were going to do it.
So many people who see footage of Alex’s climbs can barely stand to watch—even when they know the outcome of the climb and that he made it safely! What was it like to be filming the climb in real time as it was actually happening?
JC: Before you start, you have to check your basic assumptions: Do I trust Alex to make the right decisions? And remind yourself: Yes, I do. Once you’ve done that, you have to put it away and go on to autopilot and focus on what you’re doing because there’s a lot going on. You can’t make any mistakes either. You can’t drop a lens cap that could fall eighty feet, a hundred feet, a thousand feet and hit him. You could kill him. There’s plenty to think about. And of course you’re hanging off a huge wall yourself so you have to be focused on your own personal safety as well. And you have to keep your camera equipment dialed in and know what lenses you’re going to use. And you have to have enough water and food for the day. Things are happening for you as a climber and as a filmmaker. I say to my crew all the time: No mistakes and stay focused on the task at hand and don’t get distracted. It’s really easy to get distracted when someone’s free soloing a thousand feet off the ground in front of you.
Let’s talk about the logistics of filming the El Cap free solo ascent. How many cameras did you use? Where were you as Alex was climbing?
JC: There were four cameramen on the wall, including myself. Most of us were up high. There were two remote triggered cameras above the Crux. Alex didn’t want anybody there because if he was going to fall that would be a very likely place and he didn’t want to fall in front of a friend. We had one long lens camera on the ground and we had a cameraman on top for when he popped over.
What did you feel when Alex made it over the top and finished the climb?
JC: You really have to be neutral as a filmmaker when you’re working with someone like Alex. A big part of my process is truly finding that neutral space. You can’t want him to do it because you’re close enough to him that he will know. And that’s hard when there’s a lot of pressure and a lot of money involved but you really have to focus on the right things. For me it became all about preserving Alex’s experience. We were going to film it but whatever he did, it had to be about him. As his friend of course you wanted him to do it but that’s different. And even as a friend you can’t say, “Gosh Alex, I really hope you do it.” You can’t say things like that. But that’s a hard space to hold. So when he finished of course it was hugely emotional and such a huge relief. We were so happy for him.
You’re someone who’s accomplished all kinds of extraordinary climbing feats yourself so you understand climbing in a very specific and intimate way. How do you deal with fear when you’re climbing?
JC: You have to be rational about fear and examine where it’s coming from. Is the risk real or perceived? You have to start delineating and hopefully shrinking that fear down. You try and calm yourself down all the time. A lot of it is about relying on experience. Experience is how you start to learn to manage fear.