From Tragedy to ‘Everest’: Inside Jimmy Chin and Chai Vasarhelyi’s Most Ambitious Film Yet

Oprah Winfrey doesn’t volunteer to moderate Q&As at the Telluride Film Festival, even though she’s a local with a vacation manse and occasionally attends a screening or two. But this year, she not only threw a party for “Everest: The Other Side” (NatGeo), but also did the Q&A honors with the documentary’s heroic subject, ski mountaineer Jim Morrison. “As extraordinary a feat as climbing Everest and then skiing down the direct North Face is,” said Winfrey, “I think the most extraordinary thing about this man, Jim Morrison, is that he was able to climb back into his life after losing his two children, his wife, learning to love again, and then losing Hilaree.” At the end of the conversation, she invited up the gang behind the movie, led by Oscar-winning directors Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin (“Free Solo”).

After its world premiere at Telluride, “Everest” is screening three times at the Toronto International Film Festival before hitting theaters on October 30.

I’ve been tracking Vasarhelyi and Chin since their first mountaineering movie “Meru” (2015), and through many ambitious outdoor film and TV projects since, including “Free Solo” (2019), Thailand cave thriller “The Rescue” (2021), and “Endurance,” which combined photography and diary entries from the historic Ernest Shackleton expedition with the discovery of the original ice-trapped ship 3,000 meters deep in the Antarctic where it had been hiding since 1915.

The filmmakers have mastered a mix of stunning outdoor photography, subjects in precarious situations, and heartfelt emotion. “Everest” ups the ante even more. We learn at the start that Morrison lost his first wife and two children in a tragic small plane crash in 2011. Four years later, he moves on to a new relationship with ski mountaineer Hilaree Nelson: they specialize in climbing the world’s highest mountains and making the first descent on skis. (She was raising two boys.) As they train for their planned climb up the North Face of Everest, the highest mountain in the world at 29,000 feet, we see Nelson ski into an avalanche and disappear. Cinematographer Pemba Sherpa captures the upsetting moment.

After tracking down her body and much grieving, Morrison decides to complete the original quest as Hilaree’s legacy. The movie is poignant and beautiful. It’s hard not to feel a sense of awe at what Morrison and Chin and their team of 12 accomplished: summiting the 9,000-foot North Face of Everest, which had only been scaled five times, and Morrison’s first descent of the mountain, which took him four hours and five minutes. But beyond that, Chin also climbed to the summit and supervised the filming of these feats. A team of Sherpas prepared the way, set up base camps, and three cinematographers made the climb. NatGeo footed the bill.

Vasarhelyi stayed behind in New York and masterminded the film’s edit. She and Chin separated in 2025, but continue to run their production company, Little Monster Films.

I interviewed Vasarhelyi first, then Chin and Morrison, at a Telluride condo.

Anne Thompson: How did the scope of this documentary compare to your past films?

Chai Vasarhelyi: Every movie is a miracle, right? But imagine doing that at 29,000 feet, where every single piece of equipment has to be hauled up there by a human. OK, that’s as high as airplanes fly. “Free Solo” is 3000 feet. This is 29,000 feet. It’s a totally different scale.

You started making one film and things changed.

‘Everest: The Other Side‘NatGeo

Chai Vasarhelyi: I was compelled by Hilaree. I’d never met an athlete who was as candid about both her passion and obsession with these achievements or these pursuits, as well as her conflict in terms of her dedication as a mother, and a down-to-earth awareness of the futility of the endeavor to begin with: “It’s just a mountain, but it’s everything to me. I’m a dog with a bone. I start dreaming about it.”

Did you do the interviews with her?

Chai Vasarhelyi: I did, and Jim too. But then the worst happened and it becomes something different. This film engaged a deeper examination of the questions that have been present in all of our work. it’s this fundamental part of the human predicament to have the audacity to have these crazy dreams, and then also the little bit of crazy, a great amount of diligence and grit to actually do the work to achieve that. I do believe that when Jimmy says Hilaree had also reckoned with her own mortality, he believes that, and she believed that. I think about the agency of those who are involved. I had agency. I knew what I was marrying. I pride myself in being a consummate professional, and especially with this story of our friends and trying to honor someone we deeply respected, it was important for us to put whatever was happening in our personal lives to the side in order to finish the film.

How challenging was the edit?

Chai Vasarhelyi: This is a complicated story to tell, not only because it ranges over six years, but the events are such that the logical place to start a story is not necessarily where you need to start the story because of what happens in the movie. Everything changed midway, and how do you structure that? How do you do justice to that story? It was a tricky one to put together. How do you recover from the worst happening, and how do you give meaning to the actual climb? I hope that audiences find inspiration or hope or strength in this real journey that Jim went on about learning how to live with grief, learning how to let that loss inform an intention, because as he says in the film, he always will have those people with him. It’s scary to imagine losing someone, and I’ve always been very moved by Jim’s strength and this idea of step by step. You just have to learn to live with something.

Jimmy Chin and Chai Vasarhelyi on location for ‘Free Solo’National Geographic/Chris Figens

Jim, how did you first meet Oprah Winfrey?

Jim Morrison: I met her this spring in Santa Barbara. I was at an event that I spoke at and met her there, and then went to her house and just fell in love with her, hit it off. She called to ask me to do a podcast with her.

How did you reach out to Jimmy and Chai?

Jim Morrison: I came to Jimmy in 2018 and pitched this idea to him. I waited until he had just come back from Ulvetanna in Antarctica and this great achievement he had with Conrad Anker. Hilaree and I told him we wanted to go do [the Everest summit] and wanted to make a story about the whole thing. Over time, we started talking about every single person that would be part of the production team and who the right climbers were, who the right filmers were, who the right sound people were. And in the beginning, I didn’t know who a lot of these people were, but I got to know the whole community, and we started to work together. And by the time we summited in ’25, these guys and girls were super close friends.

The movie looks expensive. Not just the climb; everything that was involved in making that climb.

Jimmy Chin: Expeditions, especially to Everest, are logistics-heavy, right? We had support from National Geographic throughout. They took a big swing with it because they had to believe that this was going to go somewhere.

There was an enormous operation going on behind the cameras. Can you walk me through what had to happen for this movie to exist?

Jimmy Chin: There’s two sides of it, right? There’s the athletic achievement, doing something that nobody’s ever done before, and then there’s the filmmaking side. Just to set the table, as professional athletes, especially a ski mountaineer, to do a first descent is the ultimate thing you can do? And Jim and Hilaree had been doing these first descents all over the world, and had done arguably the most challenging high-altitude first descents ever done. The Lhotse Couloir, which opens the film, is probably considered the most difficult that had not been done up to the time that they did it, and the last most coveted line in the world for high-altitude ski mountaineers is, of course, the North Face. It’s the ultimate line on the ultimate mountain, and it requires a lifetime of experience. You can’t even think about it unless… How old were you when you first skied?

Jim Morrison: Five and a half.

Jimmy Chin: Skiing is one thing, and steep skiing, and big mountain skiing, and it takes a lifetime to accrue all the skills and knowledge and calculus of risk and decision-making that’s required to even think about climbing and skiing a difficult line in the U.S., much less a big line in the Himalayas. So there’s that portion of it, and the logistics of a face on Everest that rarely gets climbed or even approached. And on the production side, it’s taken everything I’ve ever learned in the last 25 years of being a professional athlete and filmmaking.

But you went and climbed, too. You were both hitting 50. You were his partner.

Jim Morrison: A lot of special things happened for this to come together.

Jimmy Chin: If we were much younger, we wouldn’t actually have had the experience we needed to do it. Honestly, we’re also old enough to know when not to go. That’s a pretty critical one on this particular face.

How difficult was it to watch the footage of Hilaree in the avalanche?

Jim Morrison: We have the unfortunate situation where we had documented what happened. Watching it just a couple days ago, I almost regret having it, but that’s what happens when you work with Jimmy and Chai. We’re going to get it. We’re going to get all of it. We’re going to document it. I knew that’s what we were signing up for, and Hilaree did too; she was passionate about it. She always had her GoPro with her, and she was always trying to record it because sometimes afterward you’re happy that you have those moments. In this case, it was a little bit of a bittersweet, double-edged sword.

No, it’s a gasping moment. It hits you in the gut. Talk about Pemba.

Jimmy Chin: Pemba is someone that we’ve both known for quite some time. Pemba’s of this new generation of Sherpa climbers who have their own ambitions to climb. He had a gifted eye, and he had an interest in filmmaking and photography that’s been developed over many years, where we could trust to send Pemba on his own shoots. He was the same person that shot the summit footage on top of Everest because he was our main high-altitude climbing cinematographer along with Erich Roepke and Mark Fisher. Mark climbed partway up to almost not quite 8,000 meters. Erich climbed to the summit with us. We had Pemba up front to capture the moments of us getting there. We had prepped a shot list because you don’t have much time up there.

Jim Morrison: It’s not a lot of room to communicate, so everything was pre-planned.

Jimmy Chin: It’s also a very overwhelming moment, right? Because you’re still summiting the highest mountain on Earth. You have to know what you’re doing, and it’s not like you can script it either. So you know what you need to cover. But things are happening in real time. It’s also a very overwhelming moment, right? Because you’re still summiting the highest mountain on Earth. You have to know what you’re doing, and it’s not like you can script it either. So you know what you need to cover. But things are happening in real time.

Life and death is what we’re discussing.

Jimmy Chin: It’s a very dangerous route.

Jim Morrison: Every single person is our problem, and we feel responsible for that. I certainly felt responsible for every single Sherpa, every single production person, every part of the thing.

Jimmy Chin: We carry that together.

Jim Morrison: It was our expedition, and they were there because of this shared dream.

Jimmy Chin: You’re not even going to consider climbing the North Face or filming it unless you have a lifetime of experience, because even with our combined collective experience, that face is a huge test, even for the most seasoned, experienced climber out there. And then on top of that, ski mountaineering at that level, at that altitude, in those conditions, is equivalent to “Free Solo.” You cannot make a mistake. If you make a mistake, you go to the bottom, and you can’t really slip or blow an edge. You have to be entirely on top of it, without making any mistakes.

Jim, you went down on skis, and that looked arduous. How bad was it?

Jim Morrison: We spent a lot of time on the North side of Everest trying to find the right window to get to the top over the course of years, and in all the time we were there, I never saw the mountain in the condition it was in. At the very end, the wind had stripped all the snow away and had turned what, the rest of the time, was a mountain that looked wonderful to ski into this horrific, screwed up, icy, undulating snow.

And as I left advanced base camp, my team was so excited, and it was safe conditions to climb, but difficult conditions to ski. So I turned to Jimmy in camp too and was nervous and uncertain if I would be able to make any turns, and he was so confident, and the production team was so confident. It was such an interesting shift from when we first went there, and they all looked at me like I was crazy, and then in the end they all just said, “You have this. You’re fine. You got this.” And when I got to the summit and I put my skis on, everything changes when you step into your skis. Everything becomes focused. And all of a sudden, I felt like, “OK, I have this. I can do this.” And one turn after another, I built that confidence that I can now do what I want to do. I had an incredible time, and I took it one turn at a time, and it was precise and focused, and I was in the zone for four hours doing exactly what I wanted to do. I was right where I wanted to be, and I got to the bottom. I was in a perfect place for the whole descent. So it was special and ridiculous.

Jimmy Chin: In ski mountaineering, you know you have to be 100% on the top because you’re about to do the difficult thing, which is ski down. We literally trained for years, especially the last three years. Everything that we did was focused on being in the best possible shape. We always talk about: There’s variables you can control and variables you can’t control. Your fitness is one of the things you can control, so you have to take that to the absolute furthest that you can. Jim was pretty fresh. I remember I said to him right before he went, I said, “You’re about to ski the greatest line on planet Earth.”

How did you get that single take of him skiing down?

Jimmy Chin: Mikey Schaefer with a long-lens telephoto was operating from Camp One, Advanced Base Camp, which was at 20,000 feet. And Leo [Hoorn] was shooting aerials. Leo and I worked through how we wanted to shoot it, and he was practicing that line, figuring out what the best angles were, the lensing. We knew he was only going to have one take because we’re not going to be able to recreate anything, right? He’s sending two drones up. And handing the controls to his assistant as soon as he’s running the battery down and taking the next one off and handing off. They were flying simultaneously. Because he couldn’t miss anything, so as soon as he was running out of batteries, there was already another one, and then they would swap controllers and one person fly the other.

How did you get down the mountain?

Jimmy Chin: Well, the rest of us had to rappel down the ropes. It’s fair to say that was the hardest mountain day I’ve ever had. At the bottom, 1000 feet or so, there are these anchors where you rappel down to the anchor because there’s only so much rope, and then you have to tie another rope off. So, I don’t know, the last six, seven rappels, only one person can go at a time. So I would get to the anchor, and there would be another person waiting for the one below them to get to the next anchor. They’re rappelling down the line, and I would have to wake up that person because we’d clip into the anchor and fall asleep. Then I would rappel down, wake the next person up. I’d clip into the anchor. They would rappel down. I’d fall asleep.

Jim Morrison: It was exhaustion.

At the end of the Winfrey Q&A in Telluride, she asked Morrison what he felt when it was over. “Well, it certainly felt like Chomolungma, the mountain revealed herself to us and just granted us passage,” he said. “And it felt like all of Mother Nature and the universe aligned to let 12 of us get up this really difficult climb all at once and stand on the summit. And I felt like Hilaree was there. I felt like she was with me, and I felt a tremendous sense of pride that we pulled it off together.”