78 FOR SCALING CINEMATIC MOUNTAINS

immy Chin didn’t set out to make movie history. When he was dangling off Yosemite’s 3,200-foot El Capitan rock face, filming climber Alex Honnold’s attempt at the site’s first ropeless ascent for, he was just hoping Honnold made it up alive. But when the film debuted, in September 2018, it earned the highest opening per-screen box office of any documentary ever—and then became the most-watched National Geographic Documentary Films premiere in the history of the NatGeo Channel when it premiered in March, drawing 1.45 million viewers. It also won an Oscar. , which Chin codirected with his wife, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, embodies Chin’s human-first approach to nature photography, which he’s honed over almost 20 years capturing images for National Geographic and such brands as Apple, Chase, and the North Face.