Clair Popkin: Filming the North Face for Everest: The Other Side
Clair Popkin joined Everest: The Other Side in 2022, after a climbing accident the year before kept him in the hospital for months. The film, directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, his collaborators since Free Solo, follows Jim Morrison’s attempt to climb and ski the North Face of Everest after the death of his partner, Hilaree Nelson. Popkin, one of three credited directors of photography with Chin and Christopher Murphy, made three expeditions of about two months each and oversaw the camera team from advanced base camp, watching dailies with producer Shannon Dill and sending notes up the mountain. Before the climb he tested every camera the team would carry, his ALEXA 35 down to the GoPros, on a balcony in Telluride facing sunlit snow over dark forest, bracketed two stops either way, graded the results at Company 3 and projected them at IMAX to get the small summit cameras approved. Their batteries would die in minutes at 20 below, so the crew built cables that ran from Anton/Bauer batteries kept warm inside the climbers’ suits. “Two batteries could power it all day,” he tells host Jared Levy.
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The summit day was mapped out for days: who could be where across 9,000 feet of climbing and 9,000 feet of skiing, with redundancy on a team that might not all make it. A DJI Inspire 3, flown by Leo Hoorn, could climb only as high as camp three in the thin, cold air, and a Mavic 4 Pro flew above it. Pemba Sherpa filmed much of the summit. Popkin and Jared also get into the avalanche footage, the moments he chose not to film, and his hardest days: Nelson’s memorial, and an expedition worked through giardia, 18 pounds lighter, still carrying the ALEXA. “We’ve gotta be friends to Jim first,” he says. “We’ve gotta be climbers after that, and then we’re filming.”
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This episode is made possible by Fujifilm — home of GFX ETERNA 55, the large format, IMAX®-Certified digital camera, and FUJINON cinema lenses.
Originally published at https://cinematographysalon.com on November 5, 2026.
