National Post (National Edition)
ONCE UPON A CLIMB
Watching Alex Honnold’s ascent up the 3,000-foot El Capitan rock formation is to sit in fear for his life Chris Knight
Meeting rock climber Alex Honnold at the Toronto International Film Festival, I am compelled to offer a strange introduction: “I’m glad to see you alive!” Honnold is the subject of Free Solo, a new documentary by the husband-and-wife team of Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi. And while the film shows him successfully becoming the first person to “free solo” California’s 3,000-foot El Capitan rock formation – i.e., climb it alone with no safety gear – it is such a nerve-wracking accomplishment that to watch it is to sit in fear for his life.
“I’m no longer allowed to do introductions for the film because it lowers the suspense,” says Honnold, though even seeing him prior to the lights going down probably won’t stop your heart skipping a beat during the screening.
Honnold says he wasn’t particularly scared while making the climb – a stint in an MRI machine has shown that his brain’s fear centre, the amygdala, is particularly resilient to getting overexcited. But watching the film now, he says: “There are moments where I cringe.”
That’s because, in addition to documenting Honnold climbing El Capitan, Free Solo also records him meeting and falling in love with fellow climber Sanni McCandless. And some of the things he says in the early days of the relationship are, in his own words, “grossly insensitive.”
But Honnold is, in life as on film, a pretty open book. “In general I find it much easier to be like that,” he says. “It’s just so much work trying to keep track of what you said or what you should have said. It’s better just to be honest all the time, and it’s just easy. Just say everything, and try to live in line with your actual values. I think the film is an honest reflection of who I am and the last two years of my life, for better or worse.”
Honnold had to have great trust in the filmmakers to let them into his life, both emotionally and physically. When you’re making an ascent and someone has a rope-mounted camera above you or to the side, it’s easy for them to “floss somebody off the wall”; a mountaineering term that needs no explanation. But he’s known Chin, Vasarhelyi and their team for years. “Had it been a random crew it wouldn’t have worked.”
Honnold’s climb wasn’t continuous, he explains. There are lots of ledges on the way up where one can stop and rest, and if he ever decided he didn’t want to continue, he could have phoned someone to ask for equipment to be brought up or lowered down to him. That said: “If you slip anywhere you’re still going to fall to your death.”
As to that death, he has no belief in anything after it. (One of his few non-climbing film credits is as an interview subject in the 2015 doc A Better Life: An Exploration of Joy & Meaning in a World Without God.) As he sees it: “No matter what, when it’s over we’re going to wish we had a little more time; might as well do the things we want to do.”