Directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi are never impulsive when selecting their next documentary subject. “It has to become such an important issue to us that we have to make the movie,” Vasarhelyi said on Variety’s Doc Dreams, presented by National Geographic. “We made this film for our kids because it’s a hopeful, environmental call-to-action film. It’s also a big love story with a big heart.
“Wild Life” chronicles the close relationship of conservationist Kris Tompkins, the first CEO of Patagonia, and her husband Douglas Tompkins, an outdoorsman and entrepreneur who founded The North Face brand. Spanning decades of their work, the reveals their love story and how together they created national parks throughout Chile and Argentina making the largest private land donation in history.
Chin and Vasarhelyi, who are married and share two children, have made their careers out of their kinship on film projects. Shown with their features such as “Meru” (2015), which won the U.S. Audience Documentary Award at Sundance, and cemented with the rock-climbing epic “Free Solo” (2018), which won the Oscar for documentary feature and the Tham Luang cave mission flick “The Rescue” (2021), which made the Oscar shortlist. Now with “Wild Life,” the two capture how love is a force of nature.
When setting out to make a movie, whether narrative or nonfiction, filmmakers often talk about stripping it down and rebuilding it multiple times. Vasarhelyi calls it “breaking a movie.” And yes there was a point where the producers said to them, “It’s time to stop breaking the movie.”
However, if lucky, you find the film. Such a moment came when Chin and Vasarhelyi decided to open the movie with Doug dying. Vasarhelyi said, “It changed the whole movie. It was our commitment that this film is actually about Kris and how she finds her voice.”
This doesn’t mean directors are always on the same page. On the contrary, each person has a connection to a particular scene or footage. For example, Chin revealed, “I’m always sentimental when she cuts something, and it takes me a little time to recover, but that’s how we work.”
A scene that didn’t make the cut was centered around one of Doug’s most effective marketing campaigns, which protested what would have been the world’s biggest clearcutting in Chile to build a dam. “It still pains me because it says a lot of things about Doug. But, even watching it now, I don’t know where it would go.”
“Visually, we had the goal of expressing the beauty of this place that Doug and Kris worked so hard to save,” Chin said. “Our films really lean in on the human aspects of the story. Of course, we love vérité, but there were some interview moments where you know you’re capturing something real, authentic and a real sense of emotion. I’ve never cried more doing interviews on a movie than this one.”
From inception to finish, it took about seven years for Chin and Vasarhelyi to complete the documentary after spending almost four months in total filming in South America, hiking more than 100 miles, watching over 150 hours of archival footage, and utilizing a crew that ranged from two to eight people at a time.
The two auteurs are still busy. First, they’ll make their narrative feature directorial debut with the Netflix drama “Nyad” about 64-year-old marathon swimmer Diana Nyad, who attempts to become the first person ever to swim from Cuba to Florida. It stars Oscar-nominee Annette Bening in the titular role alongside Jodie Foster.
When asked about the movie and what audiences can expect, Vasarhelyi says: “It’s amazing in your forties to have a creative challenge where you grow again. Being a married couple who worked together, it’s also interesting to see our relationship grow through a creative process.”
Chin added: “What she [Vasarhelyi] is really saying is it kicked our ass, and we had to throw down to make it happen. So we hope you all get to see it.”
