Alex Honnold probably wasn’t preparing an acceptance speech for the Academy Awards, or imagining himself ever holding a little golden statue when he completed his free solo of El Cap in 2017. But that’s a possibility now after Free Solo, the documentary featuring his historic ascent of the 3,000-foot wall, was announced as a nominee in the Acedamy’s Best Documentary Feature category for 2019.
“What a crazy ride!” Honnold wrote on Facebook Tuesday morning when the nomination was announced. He’s definitely not wrong, especially from a filmmaking perspective. A look into what it actually took to document the climb is enough justification for E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s first Oscar nominations after 35 combined years of filmmaking experience.
“We probably had six people on the wall and a bunch of remote-triggered cameras and several filming from the ground,” Vasarhelyi said about pulling off some of the most challenging shots you could imagine, taking into account that the crew’s biggest concern was making sure none of their documenting interfered with or distracted Honnold from the task at hand. “Helicopters were not permitted in the park but they were flying 3,000 feet above the valley rim and we were shooting a red dragon with a 1,000 mm lens.”
While an Academy Award would be the granddaddy of them all, the film has already collected 44 nominations and 14 awards from festivals and critics around the world since its release in late September, making $13.9 million in the box office by the time the Oscar nomination was announced.
“There is a story about Alex as a kid as he began to climb without rope,” Vasarhelyi explains. “This was a kid who was scared of so many things — of eating vegetables, of hugs — but who pushed himself to overcome it. He shows in the way he lives that with determination and hard work that anything is possible. He set out to better himself in every way.”
When the awards are presented on February 24, Free Solo will be up against four other documentaries. And it won’t even be the only film with an outdoor or action sports focus. Minding the Gap is another film nominated for the same award, which documents the lives of three young men growing up in Rockford, Illinois, brought together by skateboarding in America’s Rust Belt. The other nominees include, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, about an African American community in Hale County, Alabama, examining race and community in America; Of Fathers and Sons, which follows a radical Islamist family in day-to-day life; and RBG,” Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s biography highlighting her profound cultural influence.
A win wouldn’t make Free Solo the first outdoor sports film to receive an Oscar, for anybody wondering. But it’s been more than 40 years since a film featuring an outdoor athlete won: F.R. “Budge” Crawley’s The Man Who Skied Down Everest in 1975, about Japanese alpinist Yuichiro Muira’s descent down Everest using skis and a parachute, was the last film to get the nod.
