Mikey Schaefer: Let's hope for a low-gravity day.
Alex Honnold: I think it's the best thing in life to be able to take the one thing you love the most and have it, like, work out that you can make a living that way.
Dierdre Wolownick: [On how Alex's climbing affects her as a parent] I think when he's free soloing is when he feels the most alive, the most everything. How could you even think about taking that away from somebody?
Alex Honnold: Anyone can be happy and cosy. Nothing good happens in the world by being happy and cosy.
Mark Synnott: That's the most magnificent crack on planet Earth.
Alex Honnold: Having the girlfriend in the van is awesome. I mean, she's cute and small and, like, livens the place up a bit, doesn't take up too much room. I mean, it's, pretty much makes life better in every way.
Alex Honnold: The big challenge is controlling your mind, I guess. Because you're not, you're not controlling your fear, you're sort of just trying to step outside of it.
Alex Honnold: I try to expand my comfort zone by practicing the moves over and over again. I work through the fear, until it's just not scary anymore.
Alex Honnold: You're standing on tiny edges, small variations in the texture of the rock. If you slip, your hands can't hold you. It's just the two tiny points of contact that keep you from falling, and when you step up, there's only one.
Alex Honnold: My Mom's favorite sayings are, Presque ne compte pas, Almost doesn't count, or, uh, Good enough isn't. No matter how well I ever do at anything, it's not that good. The bottomless pit of self-loathing. I mean, that's definitely the motivation for some soloing.
Alex Honnold: My friends are like, Oh, that'd be terrible, but if I kill myself in an accident, they'll be like, Oh, that was too bad, but like life goes on, you know, like they'll be fine. I mean, and I've had this problem with girls a lot, you know. They're like, Oh, I really care about you, I'm like, No you don't. Like if I perish, like, it doesn't matter, like you'll find somebody else, like, that's not, that's not that big a deal.
Tommy Caldwell: Having that romantic relationship around is detrimental to that armor. You have to focus and inherently a close romantic relationship removes that armor.
Alex Honnold: So I could just, like, not do certain things, but then you have, like, weird simmering resentment because it's things that you love most in life have now been squashed.
Tommy Caldwell: Imagine an Olympic-gold-medal-level athletic achievement that, if you don't get that gold medal, you're gonna die. That's pretty much what free soloing El Cap is like.
Alex Honnold: I like having fun when I have fun. I don't like being told that it's time to have fun.

Free Solo Quotes

Extended Reading

Free Solo short comments

Mollie 2022-03-26 09:01:09

Alex Honnold: Everyone dies one day, and free climbing just makes that day go faster. ——Jin Guowei: I have always felt conflicted about making a film about free-hand rock climbing, because it is too dangerous, it is hard not to imagine, your friend Alex, when climbing in some extremely dangerous situations, You're filming him, so he's overstressed, and your footage brings him to life as he dies. We had to get over it all and understand that even if the worst happened, we could shoot with peace of mind. ——The movies most often associated with watching movies are "127 Hours" and "Mission Impossible". Some of the climbing cliffs and cliffs in the documentary feel more thrilling and exciting to me than the live-action movie, especially when I climbed the El Capitan with bare hands at the end. I was really afraid that he would fall down accidentally, without knowing the fate of the protagonist. The staff who participated in the shooting at the scene were even more frightened and apprehensive (the photographer sometimes dared not look at the monitor)…. - Muse's sound near the end creditsThe prelude took me by surprise.
Ashtyn 2022-03-30 09:01:06

The predicament of D+/"Freehand Rock Climbing" is obviously not the dilemma of the protagonist's "Freehand Rock Climbing" movement itself, but a set of "character" documentary filming methods that describe almost no gaps and a "personal" documentary completely exposed to the unknown abyss of death. The contradiction between the representation of sexual images of the body. Only in the last ten minutes or so, the audience could feel this huge gap a little. Especially when the protagonist is finally able to face the camera directly on the cliff, the "reality" that suddenly flows out completes the most bitter mockery of the camera that tries to be invisible but has nowhere to hide. In this mockery, they achieved a rare two-way fulfillment in the whole film: a resonance with the flexible "posture" that completely fits the natural as if distorted and the rigid "situation" of the camera - which is also "shooting". The process has to go into the meaning of this documentary. But beyond that, all that the film exposes is the arrogant, flat omnipotence of the camera, and the shriveled ideological mold to match.