On 21 March, CPH:DOX hosted a chat with Academy Award-winning American documentary filmmakers Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, who discussed their latest endeavour, Wild Life. The National Geographic Films doc tells the love story of North Face founders Kris McDivitt Tompkins and the late Douglas Tompkins, and their mission to create national parks throughout Chile and Argentina.
The conversation was moderated by Thom Powers, programmer at the Toronto International Film Festival and host of the podcast Pure Nonfiction. While the conversation touched at times on the pair’s Free Solo, winner of the Doc Oscar in 2019, and multi award-winning The Rescue (including three Critics Choice Doc Awards) their new doc Wild Life was the main focus. The discussion kicked off, however, with a brief account of their first collaboration, on the film Meru (2015).
Vasarhelyi and Chin had separate, accomplished careers – Vasarhelyi as a filmmaker, Chin as a photographer and climber – before embarking on Meru, host Powers reminded the audience.
When they first met, Chin had already been working on Meru “probably for five or six years.” He had submitted it to festivals, unsuccessfully. He then invited Vasarhelyi to attend a conference where he was giving a talk. He asked her if he could screen “what he had cut so far.”
Vasarhelyi didn’t get back to him for three months because she was working on another production in Senegal. When she got in touch with him again she asked: “What are you doing with this film?” That’s how they started working together. (The pair married in 2013, two year before Meru’s completion.)
Meru chronicles Chin, Conrad Anker and Renan Ozturk’s expedition to climb the eponymous mountain in order to conquer its peak – a 4,000 foot wall known as the Shark’s Fin. “It’s a notorious [feature of that mountain] because it requires to climb at high level in all the known climbing disciplines,” explained Chin.
Before their expedition, 35 teams had previously failed. Chin’s team also failed in 2008, just 100 metres away from the peak, but succeeded on their second attempt in 2011.
“It’s a film about friendship and loyalty and [all of these] ideas of the climbing world that many people don’t know or understand. […] Chai brought so much to the film and made it what it is today,” said Chin.
Vasarhelyi was particularly amazed by the DSLR-shot images, which were both innovative and astonishing at the same time. It was really impressive for her to see “the world from Jimmy’s lens,” and to access, for the first time, “such an incredibly remote place.”
Speaking about their collaboration, Chin said that he always knew what he wanted people to feel during their viewing experience, but the contribution of Vasarhelyi brought “objectivity to the material.”
Chin later spoke about how awareness about climbing and other similar disciplines has grown enormously over the last 5-10 years, also through social media such as TikTok and Instagram, and partly as a result of films such as their Free Solo. “Back in the days in the 1960s, things were more pure, and more authentic. There was a lot more stoicism. People [were more] proud and not necessarily [into] publicizing the things they did.”
“There was a culture of that when I came up in Yosemite [where Free Solo was shot] – it was always about downplaying what you’d done,” he added. “There were a lot of climbers who wouldn’t say anything about what they had done, and you would find out about it months or years later. People took pride in proving that they were just doing it for the love of the sport, and less about aggrandising themselves and making themselves heroic.”
Coming right up to date, their new joint effort Wild Life is the story of Doug Tompkins, the eco-activist who started the clothing brand North Face and dedicated much of his money to ecological concerns in Chile. The story is told by Tompkins’ life and business partner, Kris McDivitt Tompkins.
Chin revealed that they gained access to Kris and Doug through a common friend who introduced them to a very private circle of people committed to the ethos of living on the mountains and outdoors. “I was really moved by their life stories, but also by what they represented and what they had chosen to do with their lives,” he added.
When Powers asked them to talk through their creative process as a filmmaking duo, Vasarhelyi answered without mincing her words: “Basically our process is: ‘I don’t want to make a film.’ Period. I never want to make a film, I dread making a film and you keep on saying ‘no, no, no’ until you have to say ‘yes,’ [until] it’s so meaningful that you’ve absolutely to say ‘yes’.”
The death of Doug in 2015 was a significant impetus to embark on the project. Kris’ story became “pristine” and the two filmmakers followed her on “reinventing herself” while telling her husband’s story, at the same time turning her grief into motivation to continue the work she had started with him. Vasarhelyi said she was particularly happy to tell a story with a woman taking centre stage and finally finding her voice after being always “behind the scenes.”
One character, Malinda Pennoyer, was very reluctant to appear in the film. She is the wife of Yvon Chouinard, climber, philantropist and founder of clothing company Patagonia, a man who is very much present in Wild Life as a talking head.
Despite all of Vasarhelyi’s powers of persuasion to get her to appear on screen, Malinda refused, both out of shyness and, more seriously, kidnap concerns. But we do hear her voice. Chin explains how the episode was very atypical as Vasarhelyi is not one who easily takes ‘no’ for an answer – but Malinda was adamant.
“For The Rescue [about the recovery of a group of kids trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand], we needed the footage of the Thai Navy seals in the cave doing the rescue,” he explained. “We asked them probably 50 times and they said no 50 times. And then Chai flew to Thailand – this is during Covid. As soon as they opened up Thailand for travel she spent a week in quarantine [10 days in dry quarantine, Vasarhelyi corrected]…and convinces the wife of the admiral of the Thai Navy Seals to give us this footage, which they had refused over the course of like a year and a half. And then they flew with a military attaché carrying a briefcase with the drives to New York for us to edit. So [Chai] convinced the admiral of the Thai Navy Seals to give us this classified footage. And she couldn’t get Malinda to get on camera…”
The pair gave long and fascinating responses to a question about the emotional toll that making a film such as Wild Life can have. While Vasarhelyi could retain a sense of distance from the subject, for Chin these were characters he knew of very well, and held in high esteem.
“It was the first film I’ve ever made a film about someone I never met,” said Vasarhelyi. “So I think that kind of added a layer for me of separation that was helpful, but also triggering for both of us in some way…I think this one, it’s just very sad. I cry every single time I watch the film because I think about, you know, I’m very moved by this love that they had, and I’m very moved when I see other women who may be single at 45 and they see this film and they’re like, there’s still hope.”
“But I think there was less emotional toll on this film than there was on a film like Free Solo, where, I would say, we really [were] all traumatized,” Vasarhelyi continued. “Afterwards at the premiere, at Free Solo, the entire crew was sitting there sobbing and sobbing and sobbing because they remembered the risks. So, I don’t know, I feel like personally I’m a really emotional filmmaker, and so when I am moved by something that’s part of my process. And even if it’s painful or hard, I tend to refeel it and refeel it, refeel it, and that is working through something.”
Chin took the mic. “For me, on a lot of levels, on this film I felt more pressure than any other…I wanted to make sure we got it right for…Yvon and Doug and Kris and Rick [Ridgeway, conservationist and climber]. I felt the tremendous amount of pressure, but I would say the kind of impetus for this film though was really about this love story and this love that I saw between Kris and Doug, and I understood from being around them that it was that love that allowed them to do something this great…and I understood that.”
He further elaborated on how working with Vasarhelyi engendered a greater sense of objectivity in the work: “I will say that in all our films, it’s hugely important that I get to work with Chai because, as you can imagine, this is something that I might not be able to be objective about because they [the subjects of Wild Life] are obviously people that I’ve looked up to. And in this film I needed to lean particularly heavily on Chai to have that separation and to look critically at what everybody was doing. She never buys anything at face value, which is challenging sometimes, but obviously very useful. And that’s a big part of our process. And like Chai said, it, it can be triggering because she’ll say, ‘well I think they [subjects in films] are doing it for this reason’ and we’ll get into an argument about it…but that’s how we are able to kind of come to a consensus.”
