How the Oscar-Winning Directors of ‘Free Solo’ Confronted Tragedy — And Their Own Filmmaking — in ‘Everest: The Other Side’

[The following story contains spoilers from Everest: The Other Side.]

Over their career, directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin have made films about people physically and spiritually pushing themselves to the limit, ascending the mountains of Free Solo and Meru and swimming Nyad’s Straits of Florida. Yet when it came to making their next movie, the documentary Everest: The Other Side, the Oscar-winning pair confronted not only the cost and risks of pursuing these kinds of feats but also the nature of depicting them — which is to say, their roles as filmmakers.

“It was very hard to have to pivot from a story we desperately wanted to tell to a story that was more personal and difficult — harder, in many ways,” Vasarhelyi told The Hollywood Reporter from the SCAD Savannah Film Festival, where she took part in a live post-screening Q&A. (You can watch the full conversation below.)

Before the pandemic, Vasarhelyi and Chin sought to make a film about mountaineers Jim Morrison and Hilaree Nelson, who fell in love and decided to jointly embark on their dream of climbing the North Face of Mount Everest, and then skiing down it. The movie chronicles their sweet romance and the early stages of the ascent — until the camera crew captures Nelson dying in an avalanche, at which point everything about the project and its future had to be called into question.

Vasarhelyi was initially drawn to this story for Nelson, whose approach to mountaineering contrasted with the predominantly male subjects she and Chin had depicted in past nonfiction work. “She didn’t romanticize it,” Vasarhelyi says. “She was a really good parent, but she also had this calling. I never imagined that she would die. When she did, not only did we have to reevaluate whether this was a film we wanted to make, but [ask]: What is the film about?”

The movie ultimately follows Morrison embarking on the mission solo, to fulfill his late partner’s dream, and also sees Chin joining him in the perilous expedition. The conflict between the director-subject and Vasarhelyi as to whether to move forward in such a way plays out onscreen. “We fell on different sides. We always have — that was always the power of the storytelling, that we had such different visions and it was synergistic,” Vasarhelyi says. “My professional ambitions were in direct conflict with my personal interests. It just became a lot more personal and intimate, which is true of the original story too.”

The film, in turn, plays like a meta exploration of the films that Vasarhelyi and Chin have spent their careers together making, built around the effort to honor Nelson in the best way they knew how. This included the controversial decision to show her death, as caught on camera, in the avalanche.

“Including her death was a really, really difficult decision,” Vasarhelyi says. “But I was like, ‘You kind of have to see it to understand the loss.’”

Everest: The Other Side is currently playing in select theaters.