Documentarians E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin are a little obsessed with the impossible. Documenting Chin’s own ascent up a brand-new route on Meru in the Himalayas. Capturing Alex Honnold’s free solo climb of El Capitan in Yosemite. Chronicling the daring rescue of 12 boys and their coach from a dangerously flooded cave in Thailand. It’s safe to say they have a knack for it. It makes sense, then, that they’d eventually team up with Jim Morrison and his wife and climbing partner, Hilaree Nelson. After all, they shared the crazy dream of not only ascending Mount Everest’s treacherous North Face, but skiing down it. A feat like that simply begs to be documented by Vaserhelyi and Chin.

That’s exactly what Everest: The Other Side was intended to be, but events took a shocking turn in 2022. While recording footage of a training climb and ski in Manaslu (the world’s eighth-highest peak), Nelson died in an avalanche. The question then became: should Morrison move forward, and if so, how? 

Battling his grief, Morrison made the only choice he felt he could. Keep going for his dreams, now with none other than Jimmy Chin as his climbing partner. The result is a three-year journey, expertly captured with deep empathy, understanding, and the kind of visuals literally made for IMAX. 

I sat down with Chin and Thompson to talk about everything from process and setup to putting their grief on film.

THE SPOOL: I want to start by diving into the actual process, because some of the footage on the mountain is completely insane. I think when people see it in IMAX, it’s going to be staggering. So can you walk me through what the camera setup is like? Who’s shooting and with what? How much are you trying to plan these shots out in advance, if that’s even possible?

JIMMY CHIN: Yeah, that’s absolutely possible. I mean, we’ve studied the route for years and years and years, but I think it’s important to understand that everybody on this production team is a world-class climber and also a cinematographer. So a lot of the things that might seem foreign to a normal cinematographer are second nature for our team like taping hand warmers around all the batteries and carrying them in your chest pocket. Everything’s trimmed down to the lightest version that you can carry.

THE SPOOL: What does that gear list look like?

JC: On the summit push, we had four cinematographers carrying cameras. We had a long lens from our advanced base camp. We had multiple drones and two operators. One would be flying up and filming. The other would take the controls when that drone was close to running out of batteries and swap controllers. The second drone operator has already flown the other one up, because it’s 9,000 feet to the summit, so it takes too much time to land a drone, put a battery in and fly another one up. So while one operator is filming, the other one’s already flying the other drone up, timing it to swap controllers, so the second operator can fly the first drone down while the other drone is in position. That way we had total coverage throughout.

And then we had operators at Camp 1 and at Advanced Base Camp just to shoot what was happening. We learned from Free Solo that that coverage is actually really critical, because the people filming are actually the eyes. And it’s a family affair. You get so close on a production like this, especially over six years, plus people we’ve known for even longer. They’re part of our community—they don’t only have an investment in the shooting. They have a deep investment in the safety of our team and in helping the team climb. You see that moment when Mikey’s helping direct the fixing team at the top, saying, oh, you know, if you step left and then cut right, you’ve got a clear line. Everyone’s a climber, so they all know how to help each other in those situations.

THE SPOOL: Yeah, I feel like you would have to be.

JC: You have to be hyper-efficient, because we always talk about how, as a team, we’re friends first, climbers second, and filmmakers third. And the film’s needs can never supersede the needs of the subject or the climb

THE SPOOL: That makes a lot of sense. So, kind of related to that—and Jim, I definitely want to hear your thoughts on this one—what were your biggest fears going into the project that weren’t really related to whether or not you’d succeed? Did you have anything cropping up for you that wasn’t related to, “Will I do it or not?”

JIM MORRISON: Oh, I mean, yes. I had all the fears. Of course I played out the worst-case scenario: the dramatic avalanche across the whole upper snowfield that cleans out the whole mountain, and we lose a whole bunch of people. I played that over and over in my head. I dreamt about it and visualized it, and you could say had nightmares about all the scenarios, night after night after night over the course of years, trying to think through every possible scenario. And then fast forward to when I’m actually there on the mountain. I had a deep knowing that I could do this, that all the work I’ve done and all the preparation I’ve done in my life had led me to this place, and that I could do this.

But there’s always a lot of self-doubt. There’s always a lot of: am I good enough? Am I strong enough? Am I going to be able to physically and mentally endure what it takes to get up there and get back down?

When I went there the first year, on the first expedition, Jimmy wasn’t there yet. My whole team looked at this mountain when you drive into base camp and it’s so powerful and so steep and so big and so scary-looking that everyone was basically like, “Okay, have you seen enough? Can we go home now? You’re not gonna do that, are you? You’re crazy!”

THE SPOOL: How did those feelings change over time?

JM: Over the years my team completely shifted. In the end, on the summit push, I was faced with the worst snow conditions of my life. I turned to Jimmy and said, what do you think? And he was like, oh, you got this, a hundred percent. That was consistent with him, but it was also consistent throughout the whole team. They all had so much faith in me. After seeing me ski part of the mountain and seeing me operate over the course of these three expeditions, they all had a lot of faith in what I could do. So even when I doubted myself, I had a community there that was lifting me up and helping me know that I could do this.

THE SPOOL: That seems really essential. It kind of segues into something I’m really interested in hearing both of your answers on, because there’s a moment in the film where I feel like this happened. As a hiker myself, I solo hike a lot. I’ve been in situations where the decision to turn back or end the trip is something I felt really viscerally, like in my body and my bones. And I’m just wondering, is that how you experience that feeling? What does that voice feel like for you? And how do you know when it’s not just, “Oh, I’m just nervous, it’s just fear,” and when it’s time to say, “I have to listen to this, we’re done”? How do both of you experience that?

JC: Yeah, I mean, I think that does happen. But you know, we’re professionals, we’re hyper-conscious of all the risks, and we’re constantly evaluating and assessing them. So it’s preferable for us to make that decision based on very objective observations and all the information we’re getting. What we’ve seen staring at the mountain for a month, comparing it to weather reports, looking at temperatures at each elevation, wind speeds. Everything. Sometimes it doesn’t follow what we’ve seen in other places, so we pay attention to those differences. So much of it is second nature to us. We can look at a mountain and make all kinds of assessments just by seeing it. So with that information, there’s usually a little more guidance for our decision-making than just an instinctual one.

But it’s interesting you say that, because oftentimes it’s gray. You’re not 100% sure. All the information you have is leading you to one place, but your instinct is saying, “I think we can actually push through this.” Or all the information is saying it’s a go, but something tells you it’s not right. So you also have to listen to your gut.

THE SPOOL: Jim, is that the same for you?

JM: Yeah. That visceral feeling you feel hiking, I think we’re always listening to it and always getting those signs. But we’ve learned that there are times when you don’t get that sign to turn around and you should be turning around. I think the avalanche we go through at the beginning of the film is one of those moments. We all felt good, we were all moving along. And then we had a meeting afterwards to talk about why and how we screwed up, why that wasn’t okay, and how we can’t let it happen again. I think that’s part of what you need to do when you go out in the mountains: pay attention to that sixth sense, but also not rely on it, because you need to take note of all the things Jimmy spoke about and make sure you get all the parts right.

THE SPOOL: Yeah. And that moment in the film you’re talking about, I think my jaw dropped when I saw it. Because she was your partner, and she was Jimmy’s friend. So you were both grieving this person and then choosing how to put this into the movie. Did you discuss together how you wanted to talk about it in the film, what to show or not show? Or, Jim, were you just trusting Jimmy and Chai to make the right call? How did you navigate that together? 

JM: I had a tremendous amount of support from Jimmy through the whole journey of losing Hilaree. From the first days, when he dropped everything and came to Nepal to help me, through the following weeks and the memorial, and the following years of beginning to figure out how to pick myself up and move forward in life. I shared my thoughts with him, and he echoed my feelings all the way through to the summit, and he filmed me doing it all. That was really the path. It was just: let’s talk about it, let’s figure out what feels right, let’s talk about what is right, let’s do it. And he would constantly say, “Stop, we’re going to film this.” And then we just did it all.

Then at the end of that whole endeavor, after we skied down and found success, he went back and started working on the edit with Chai. That’s where they said, “Jim, you’re gonna stay out of this part, we’ve got you from here.” Hilaree and I both had a tremendous amount of faith in him, and a tremendous amount of faith in their work and who they are as filmmakers, and we knew that’s what we were signing up for.

THE SPOOL: I think that’s really fortunate. The amount of trust between the two of you really helps create the best possible thing. I don’t know if it could exist if you didn’t have that.

JC: No, that trust is so critical.

JM: I don’t think we’d have the film we have. And I don’t think we would have made it to the top or back down without that trust. It came into play in a miraculous way so many times.

THE SPOOL: One thing really struck me, especially from the footage of Hilaree you include in the documentary. As an outsider who never got to meet her, it seems like there’s no question she would have absolutely wanted you to keep trying and supported you in doing this. But were there people you felt you needed to explain your decision to, who didn’t really understand? What were those conversations like? 

JM: Yeah. I have a lot of really strong relationships with loved ones, friends, community members, family. And I certainly revisited the decision with a lot of them over the course of years and did all my homework to help myself make the decision. Is this right? Is this okay? Am I really correct in that visceral knowing that Hilaree would want me to go do this and would want me to continue on? And I just felt a tremendous amount of support and love and push from everyone. And I think if you ask Jimmy, he’ll just chuckle and laugh and be like, yeah, of course I knew.

THE SPOOL: Is that your assessment, Jimmy?

JC: Yeah, I mean, the people who know you and actually know what it is, even peripherally, the people who matter to us the most, know that these endeavors are part of who we are and are our passions. They also trust us, because they know who we are and how we approach things. Those people never… at least on my side, at least the ones that mattered, they knew we were going to go back, and they trusted that we were going to make good decisions out there.

THE SPOOL: The other thing about the documentary that I thought was a really great choice, and also a really interesting one: there were more moments in this film where you show your families’ reactions. I would never say they’re unsupportive. But you show the moments where people are very clear, like, “I kind of wish you weren’t doing this.” How did you decide to include those moments in the movie? And did you feel a certain way watching them back?

JC: I think they’re important moments. I think the film’s job is to really try to look at it from a balanced point of view, and there’d be a lot of questions if we didn’t include it. So it’s really about trying to show a full picture of what the costs are to the people around you. But also the beauty and the awe and the wonder of the experience, and the courage it takes to pursue a dream. And the courage and fortitude and perseverance it takes to come through really serious loss, and then have the strength to move forward and choose a life that you can be proud of living, and that the people who really love you are going to be proud of.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.