Oscar-winning filmmakers Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin on love stories – their own stories and they tell them in “Wild Life” – CPH:DOX

World-class rock climber Jimmy Chin met his future wife, filmmaker Chai Vasarhelyi, over a mountain of images.

He worked on the documentary that would later become meru, the story of an attempt by Chin and fellow alpinists and friends Conrad Anker and Renan Ozturk to become the first to climb the dangerous Shark’s Fin peak in the Himalayas. Perhaps because it was so close to the subject, the film was not entirely coherent.

“I submitted it to a couple of film festivals and it got rejected,” Chin explained during an artist and writer talk at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen. He told host Thom Powers, TIFF’s documentary programmer and host of the Pure Nonfiction podcast, that he met Vasarhelyi at a conference while he was wrestling with the film.

“I knew she had a pretty successful career as a filmmaker,” Chin said. “So I asked them to show what I had cut so far. She didn’t call me back for three months, but that was because she was in Senegal shooting another film. But then she came back, she showed it, she called me and said what are you doing with this film?

They bonded over a project filled with beautiful visuals created by Chin and Ozturk.

“Just seeing the world through Jimmy’s lens was amazing and inspiring,” said Vasarhelyi. “And just to understand this very deep connection with the outside world, and also [it was] It was the first time as a viewer I had access to these incredibly remote places in such a visceral way.

Deeper feelings quickly developed between the cameramen.

“Jimmy and I kind of fell in love in the process,” said Vasarhelyi. “But the most important thing for me was that I loved and fell in love with Jimmy, and I wanted to help tell the absolute best version of his story.”

When Chin literally elevated the story to 20,000 feet, Vasarhelyi added depth and turned what could have been a niche mountaineering story into a story about characters, three men and their emotional journey, not just their climb.

“The question was whether these three climbers would show themselves emotionally. And I think the idea of ​​Jimmy and I forming a lasting bond was magical, like the likelihood of getting married, having a child,” she said. “Conrad and Renan really showed up. I remember Conrad sitting and cried before a seven-hour interview. Everything came [out] and that’s how we knew we had a movie because they could reflect and speak in a way that the citizens could understand.

The latest documentary by Vasarhelyi and Chin, wild life, which brought them to CPH:DOX, is also located in beautiful mountainous terrain in remote parts of Chile and Argentina. But it’s also essentially a love story between Doug Tompkins and Kris Tompkins, both extremely talented people who later became a couple.

“Doug Tompkins ran this very successful business and created two of the biggest brands in the world, The North Face and then Esprit,” Vasarahelyi told Deadline at SXSW, where wild life played before going to Copenhagen. “But then he woke up and said: ‘It’s not enough. That’s not what I want to do.’ And then he leaves everything behind to go to Patagonia [Chile]. And just like Kris, she was the founding CEO of the Patagonia company and ran it for 20 years. And then she also thought: “This is not my life. It cannot end here. I don’t want it to end here.’” And she found the love of her life [Doug Tompkins] in his forties. So I think there’s something about this recovery that really moved me.

The Tompkins built a life together in Chile. They could have followed the example of other rich people and devoured a lot of land for private enjoyment, but instead, as the film shows, they acquired millions of hectares of wilderness in Chile and Argentina with the express intention of giving back to these countries, and thus national parks.

“This love story is about falling in love with this landscape of Patagonia and how far they were willing to go to save this place they loved,” Chin told us at SXSW. “This story was very personal for me and also very inspiring. So that’s a big part of why we wanted to make this film, why we think it’s important, why we think it’s timely, because we’re in a moment where climate change is one of our biggest existential crises, and here’s ‘ a few people who could make such a big difference in environmental protection.”

Chin added: “What they have achieved in terms of conservation is something we have never seen before, the largest private donation of land in human history.”

Chin and Vasarhelyi won an Oscar for their 2018 film Only freeabout rock climber Alex Honnold, who dragged, scraped and scraped across the steep 900-foot granite face of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park without ropes. The rescuefrom 2021 documented the miraculous rescue of Thai children trapped in a flooded cave (The rescue, Only free And wild life are all National Geographic films; meru was distributed by Music Box Films).

“It’s very satisfying to have this wonderful material that allows you to access this kind of intangible human potential, like warts and things,” Vasarhelyi said during the artist and writer talk. “In Only free, Alex had a big dream to climb El Capitan without a rope, but what scared him more was talking to other people. And then he suddenly falls in love in the film and develops emotionally, which has little to do with his rise itself. So these are adventure films, but I think they’re also lenses to look at that intriguing edge, which is also quite hopeful in the sense that most of these stories we tell are about people who dare to, with determination and perseverance be. dream and a little help from her friends… to make her dreams come true.”

wild life will hit theaters on April 14 from Picturehouse, with a broadcast debut on the National Geographic Channel on May 25, followed by a launch on Disney+ the following day.

As Deadline exclusively reported earlier this week, Vasarhelyi and Chin are already working on their next project, also for National Geographic, which will see them direct a documentary with the working title endurance. Directed by Natalie Hewit, the film tells the remarkable story of how a team of oceanographers found the wreck of Sir Ernest Shackelton’s ship Endurance at the bottom of the Wadden Sea near Antarctica. The ship sank after being trapped in sea ice in 1915 and was only discovered intact on the seabed last March.

A few years ago, Vasarhelyi and Chin embarked on a different kind of adventure: parenthood. The couple took their two children to Copenhagen, where they decided to take part in a hearty Danish tradition: jumping into the icy river for a refreshing dip. This freezing jump may seem tame compared to the expeditions Chin continues to undertake in mountain regions around the world as a professional climber and skier for The North Face Athlete Team.

For Vasarhelyi, who describes herself as a lot not As a climber, she never worries about the dangers her husband faces on such extreme adventures.

“There is an argument that can be made in between Only free, The rescue self wild lifeI tried to negotiate my feelings of risk and understand them as best I could because we are committed to this life together. We have two wonderful children,” she says. “I have an active, I don’t know, struggle in me. And we’ve talked a lot about those questions, because you’re more likely to die above 8,000 meters than below 8,000 meters. For example, it is a risky business even if you are the best. But I’m not one to say, “It can’t be done,” because certain individuals live for it. And we looked at that question for some time.”