The most astonishing free solo climb in human history, rescuing the Thai youth soccer team from a cave, swimming from Cuba to Florida—these are all stories that the world got to know through Elizabeth Chai Vásárhelyi’s films. At the graduation ceremony of Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, we had a conversation with the Academy Award-winning director about art, translating reality, and the extremes of human existence.
This article originally appeared in issue no. 8 of the Hype&Hyper print magazine, in 2023.

Every name has a story and yours—Elizabeth Chai Vásárhelyi—promises a particularly exciting one. Could you tell us about your origins?
I’m very proud to say that I am half Hungarian and half Chinese. My father was born in Budapest and my mother was born in Hong Kong; I was the child of two immigrants to America. As both my parents were working, I was sent every summer to Rio de Janeiro to spend time with my Hungarian grandmother, who I was named after. She had always been surrounded by formidable immigrant women fluently switching between European languages as they talked to each other and I was this English-speaking half-Chinese, half-Hungarian kid from New York who got a window into their remarkable lives. Even then, at this young age, it made me realise how fascinating it can be to be an outsider looking in. Which is kind of the definition of an artist, isn’t it?
You started your studies in a completely different field, which does not presuppose this kind of career. How did you get closer to filming?
I was on a Math and Science track my whole life, I’d been brought up as a good Hungarian and Chinese kid, I needed to study science and become a doctor. Right before I got into university, I won a scholarship to spend the summer in The Weizmann Institute of Science where I realised that my peers loved what they did so much more than I did. I just didn’t have that passion. I got very depressed when I started studying at Princeton, I wanted to leave and pursue writing and literature. Again, I grew up speaking many different languages at home, so comparative literature was an easy slip. It explores different genres and the idea of translation which has always been kind of who I am as a person. I believe my films are all translations. Translating reality to others is a very specific subject, but I’m particularly good at being a chameleon.
In a recent interview, you said you dread making films.
It’s an actual existential dread. I cannot even begin to tell you. It consumes my chest, my body, my sleep. I am obsessive, passionate and a perfectionist—I know the work it entails. I say no to everything until it becomes something that just needs to be made. That was the case with Meru, the first film that Jimmy, my husband, and I created together. I knew the material was strong, but they just didn’t know what they were doing. I loved this man, the film had to be better, I knew it could be better. So, I had to make it. But if you’re going to do the work and you’re going to do the work at the highest level, you must be incredibly committed to it. So committed that you know you won’t stop, and you’ll fight all the horrible fights with studios, with participants, everyone. But you need to find that energy and passion to do it and that’s why I don’t like making movies, but I make movies.

The characters in your films are often in grave, even life-threatening danger. Are you magically surrounded by these stories or are you actively looking for them?
I’m interested in the edge of human existence. There is this fundamentally human thing that we can have an outrageous dream and do the work. It’s epitomised by Free Solo. Then explored again in Rescue in a non-mountain context. In Meru, it’s friendship that motivates this extraordinary achievement. It always comes down to the character, and it just happens that you find some pretty crazy characters at these fringes. But it’s also quite universal. I was a nerd like Alex and like those divers. I understood what it meant to be an outsider. I understood what it’s like to find your voice and your comfort level and some niche things like documentary filmmaking or caving or climbing. I think it’s all kind of related. It’s about character.
You are co-creators on many films with Jimmy Chin, your husband, who is a professional mountain climber, photographer, and skier. What is it like working together? What are the steps in your creative process?
Good films are made by access and authentic knowledge. We have our own roles. I’m much more interested in text: words, characters, emotion, and arc. Jimmy is a National Geographic photographer and the best at what he does—he brings beautiful, audacious visual storytelling to our projects. Together we are synergistic. Like Free Solo—it’s a climbing film, but we could never have made it separately. This movie is a love story, and it is about mental discipline. But it’s also very articulate visually.
Our greatest creative endeavours however are our two kids.

How do you see the future of creativity? As an artist, do you think AI will transform what creatives, artists and designers do?
My father, who is Hungarian, was a professor of artificial intelligence and accounting systems, he worked at MIT in the ‘70s, so I grew up around the potential of technology. That said, I don’t think art is made. I think that artists will always have a really important role in society. The question we are asking is who are we as humans and what do we do to express that? AI provides some amazing tools, but should Chat GPT write your essay? If you want to be a good writer, you’ve got to have the discipline to write your own essay. No matter what innovation you use, you must know what you want to say. And that’s what art does. It expresses something uniquely human.
With your experience, what advice would you give to a young generation of artists?
It’s really, really important to be able to advocate for your own work. Just making the work isn’t enough, you must learn to speak about it, and it’s as essential as actually making the work itself. It’s scary, hard, and very painful to talk about your own work. But no one else is going to celebrate it unless you do.
Photos: Renan Ozturk, BOX FILMS and Máté Lakatos, MOME
You can listen to the podcast interview with Elizabeth Chai Vásárhelyi on Brain Bar’s Spotify channel.