Outside Magazine

“Today I was replacing swear words. I had to do it myself. No one else can do it,” documentary filmmaker Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi says over a nouvelle Indian lunch at bohemian-cool Pondicheri in Manhattan. She appears every bit the sophisticated New Yorker: elegant and slender, with an expensive-looking black leather jacket slung over her shoulder. It’s 98 degrees in the shade outside, yet she orders a spicy aviyal (a robust coconut vegetable stew) and a bowl of hot turmeric soup. And she enthusiastically accepts my offer to share my paneer dish and naan. She may look delicate, but I suspect she knows something about voraciousness.

Vasarhelyi and her husband, climber and filmmaker Jimmy Chin, codirected 2015’s narratively rich and visually jaw-dropping Meru, which chronicles the first ascent of the Shark’s Fin, a treacherous spire atop 20,702-foot Mount Meru in the Indian Himalayas. But the f-bombs to be replaced today occur in a not-quite-final cut of her latest collaboration with Chin, Free Solo. The film, in theaters in late September, is about climber Alex Honnold’s pioneering 2017 ropes-free ascent of Yosemite’s El Capitan, a feat he accomplished in three hours and 56 minutes.