What if He Falls? The Terrifying Reality Behind Filming “Free Solo” | Op-Docs

Alex Honnold is the foremost free soloist in the world. He has free soloed routes that no one else can. To free solo means to climb without ropes or safety equipment. One false move, one slip, and it's over. The risk in free soloing is always to fall off and fall to your death. I mean, that's pretty straightforward. My directing partner and husband, Jimmy Chin, is a professional climber and we were interested in making a feature-length documentary about his friend Alex. When Chai and I first talked about making a film about him, we were talking about the character study, a general portrait of Alex, why he was extraordinary. But we realized Alex was dreaming of doing something much bigger, much more dangerous. The only thing that would justify making a movie with me is doing something that I'm, like, truly proud of. To me, the big dream has always been free soloing El Cap. That is the culmination of anything I can imagine. El Cap is monumental, 3,000 feet of sheer granite. Free soloing it would be one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of climbing. But is it ethical to film someone as he risks his life? When I found out Alex was thinking about free soloing El Cap, Chai and I needed to step back and take some time to really think if this was something we wanted to take on. Every journalist and documentary filmmaker goes into situations without knowing what happens next. This is the truth of nonfiction. You can be mindful not to put the needs of a film before those of your subject, but how much precaution is enough? We had this ethical question. Is he more likely to fall when we were there because we can be a distraction than if he's by himself? I'm aware that a camera changes the dynamic in some small way. And when the margins of success and failure are very, very thin, you just don't know what it's going to be that might tip the scale. Yeah, buddy. Hey, guys. Crest of the mountain. That was perfect. I was like, that was pretty sick. Mike, you look traumatized, dude. Are you OK? Yeah, it's a little stressful. I won't lie. Alex was going to do the climb with or without us, but we decided that to be able to live with ourselves filming it, we needed to set certain guidelines. First, Alex's safety was always going to be the priority. And second, we needed to protect the integrity of his experience. To be able to move forward on this film, the makeup of the crew was critical. They had to be elite professional climbers who understood what Alex was doing. Their interactions with Alex had to be carefully managed, and they had to remain completely neutral about Alex's decision to make or not make the attempt to free-sail El Cap. Even though we thought through every scenario carefully, it was still difficult to film Alex. Do you ever get nervous before wrapping? Do I ever get nervous? Yeah. I get nervous every time I step to the edge. You want to be nervous. If you stop being nervous at all... See you on the other side. The people we chose for the crew had to be not only great at shooting, but also very strong climbers, and able to work under incredibly stressful situations and not make any mistakes. It also helped that the crew was made up of Alex's friends. That added a layer of comfort, camaraderie, and trust. But I also understand the reality of when something unexpected happens that's outside of your control. And then it doesn't matter how good you are. It doesn't matter how talented you are. Put my foot on this what looked like part of the wall, and a piece about the size of a small backpack launched. And Jim is below me. Dave is below me. That flew like right here. And then another one went like right here. Part of being a professional climber is identifying and acknowledging the risks. Assessing them, minimizing them, and then moving on. Got real down there. Why are we up here again? We're up here because practice makes perfect. And I am far from perfect. Essentially over the course of two years in the process of Alex training to free solo El Cap, our process was to film them on the route and refine our choreography for the big day. One thing we knew was that in certain instances we needed to give him more space. A good example was the boulder problem, the hardest part of the climb. Alex's issue is not that he could possibly die. It was that he didn't want to die in front of his friends. So ultimately we decided to film that section remotely to minimize our presence. Remote cameras because we want to stay out of Alex's line of sight. It was very technical filming the climbing. It was dangerous. It was extreme. And at the same time we had to capture Alex's most intimate moments and try to get to know this person who is very, very uncomfortable with intimacy. As he's preparing for the most difficult thing he's ever done in his life. So you're kind of tinkering in his head and is that even a good idea? When the guys were still coming down from the wall, you know, Claire Popkin and I would be on the ground and start this, you know, second wave of Alex and filming where he had to explore ideas that were very, very personal. The most challenging thing about all the Verite filmmaking was that a lot of it we spend six or eight hours on the wall doing very physically toiling work. And then I get down and then there's another camera with a different crew that's all fresh and ready to hang out for the whole evening. And I'm like, I'm so pooped. I just want to lay down. But those are kind of the key moments in which to film. And, you know, I get that, but it's still, you know, hard sometimes. More, more pressing questions of any kind? We followed him for two years as he practiced and weighed whether to attempt the solo climb. It's early June, 2017. I can tell that Alex is kind of peaking in terms of his training and everything he's doing. We had everybody dialing in our plans. We knew exactly where everybody needed to be, what their shots were. But I refuse as a personal line that I'm not willing to cross to ask Alex when he thinks he's going to do it. The directive was to stay out of his sight unless you were filming with him. Our goal was to reduce any sort of external pressure and really focus on giving him the purest experience that he could have. Oh, yeah. On June 3rd, 2017, he decided he was ready to do it. Well, he's definitely not going back down. He's coming up. He's only going one way. I'm running through all the different scenarios. You know, if he fell, like, what it would sound like. What I would say to people after it. What, I don't know, like, what the footage would be like. You know, I'm just like, in my mind, I just, I almost couldn't control it. For almost four hours, we were on the edge of our seats, watching Alex make his way up El Cap, achieving something no human had ever done before. Jimmy, how do you feel? Like a gigantic weight up on my shoulders, dude. A lot of stress for everybody.