Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
FINGERS CROSSED FOR AN OSCAR WIN
As the who’s who of Hollywood prepare for the Academy Awards, the makers of ‘Free Solo’ are keeping their fingers crossed for an Oscar win, writes
THE day all of Hollywood has been waiting for is almost here – the glitzy Oscars take place at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles tomorrow night.
Aside from the unprecedented decision to go host-less this year, all eyes are naturally on the firm favourites – Roma, The Favourite, Black Panther, BlacKkKlansman, Bohemian Rhapsody, A Star Is Born, Vice and Green Book – to win. This brings us to the hidden gems like Free Solo, which is up against Hale County This Morning, This Evening; Minding the Gap, Of
Fathers and Sons and RBG, in the Best Documentary Feature category.
Free Solo won Best Documentary honours at the Baftas, held earlier this month. The National Geographic documentary by E Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin explores the magnificent artistry behind Alex Honnold’s death-defying climb of the world’s most famous vertical rock formation – the 2 307m El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. And he does it sans a rope, of course.
On her choice of subject matter, Vasarhelyi said: “Alex is fascinating. And he is a good friend of ours.
And it was clear that a film like this should be made. Before we knew that he was planning to free solo El Capitan, we were flirting with the idea of a character study. Alex and I set up a time to meet, and he came to stay with me in New York. It was there that he told me that he was working on free soloing El Cap. And that changed the game a little bit.
“What drew me to the story was the very, very simple fact that when he was a young boy, it was easier for Alex to go climbing by himself without a rope than it was for him to talk to somebody else and ask them to go climbing with him. That little kernel was something that I could empathise with, that I felt like a lot of people would empathise with. It was so unlikely for someone like him – given his talent. You could never really imagine that he came from that place. There was also the story’s aspirational quality: If he can do this with his fear, what can I do with my fear?”
When asked about the first time he climbed El Capitan, Honnold said: “My partner and I had the big goal for the season to climb El Capitan in a day – by any means, not free climbing; just doing anything we could to get to the top. We built up for it the whole season. It was a big adventure, a big challenge. We climbed the easiest route in 23 hours. Doing it represented a whole other world of climbing.”
The ultimate goal, which has been captured in the documentary, was to free solo it.
He explained: “The whole point of all the preparation was to ensure that on the day I was not thinking anything through. I had been doing a ton of thinking beforehand. The morning of the climb, I was just on auto-pilot, executing. I did park in a slightly different parking place because I didn’t want to see anybody .... I knew that I was ready and that it was all happening.”
Taking on this gigantic structure requires nerves of steel and total focus. “A big part of going up on big walls like that is to have the exposure, to have the experience of being way up off the ground. That is definitely a big part of the appeal to me. In terms of ‘Do I look down?’ – of course I look down. But in the actual movement of climbing, you are constantly looking down at your feet and your hands .... Primarily, I’m just climbing,” said Honnold.
He added: “I see it all rooted in rationalism, in a basic evaluation of objective reality: ‘Can I do this? And if I can, then I must just do it.’ If I have done something on a rope over and over and over, then obviously I can physically do it, so there is no real reason why I should not be able to do it without the rope.”
The Oscars air live on M-Net Movies Premiere (DStv channel 104) on Monday at 3am. You can also catch them later on M-Net at 9pm. And Anele Mdoda’s Red
Carpet Special airs on M-Net Movies Premiere at 8.30pm on Monday, too.