The ‘Endurance’ Filmmakers on Bringing Ernest Shackleton Back From the Dead With AI
Married filmmakers Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi specialize in stories about human tenacity against the forces of nature, putting them out at the indefatigable pace of about a film a year — a feat of endurance in itself.
Chin and Vasarhelyi have chronicled vertiginous, record-setting ascents in Meru and the Academy Award–winning documentary Free Solo; the daring mission to save the junior soccer team stranded in Thailand’s Tham Luang Nang Non cave system in The Rescue; and Diana Nyad’s real-life 110 mile swim from Cuba to Florida in last year’s Oscar-nominated scripted feature Nyad. And then there are Chin’s own death-defying expeditions, including his latest summiting of Everest in which his party happened to make a momentous discovery. (More on that below.)
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All of that has served as a prelude to their latest doc, Endurance (co-directed by Natalie Hewit) , about polar explorer Ernest Shackleton’s legendary 1914-1917 Trans-Antarctic expedition — what Vasarhelyi calls “the greatest survival story ever told.” The National Geographic film, which premieres on Nat Geo today and hits Hulu and Disney+ on Nov. 2, weaves together two startling stories: Shackleton’s heroic 800-mile journey to save his 28 men marooned at the bottom of the Earth, and the 2022 mission to find the wreck of their three-masted ship, the brigantine Endurance, crushed in the ice of the Weddell Sea before plummeting to the seabed, three thousand meters below.
In an exclusive conversation with The Hollywood Reporter, Chin and Vasarhelyi explain how they relied on stunning 110-year-old film footage of the expedition, on Chin’s extensive experience as an adventurer in his own right, and on the latest in artificial intelligence technology to retell the Shackleton legend for a contemporary audience.
Ernest Shackleton fascinates the English-speaking world like no other polar explorer, perhaps no other explorer period, and he’s inspired many books, several feature films and documentaries and countless leadership seminars. Yet he famously achieved none of the primary goals he set for his expeditions — in this case the crossing of the Antarctic continent. How do you account for his continued grip on our imaginations?
Vasarhelyi: I just think it’s the greatest survival story ever told, and it’s also such a splendid example of this fundamental human condition, this audacity to dream big and to have these crazy objectives, and then the paradox that you have to also have that grit, courage, determination and diligence to make it through. And so I think Ernest Shackleton was interesting, because also he was an outsider, right? He was Irish, he was in the Merchant Marines, he wasn’t the Royal Navy. Clearly, there was a force of character that enabled him to lead his men through survival, and also got him into trouble. It was this audacity that got him to try to do something when everyone else told him he can’t do it. But the ice wasn’t right and he found himself in that leadership quality through the failure.
Jimmy, as an explorer and expedition leader yourself, I’m sure you you can identify with what drives Shackleton. What do you make of his decision to turn back just 97 nautical miles short of the South Pole, his main objective, during the Nimrod expedition of 1907-1909?
Chin: I think that’s very telling of his character and his integrity and his intention. I was actually just in touch with a friend of mine who was in the Special Operations world for 10 to 15 years. And he knew I was going on [a climbing] expedition. He wrote, how’d it go? And I said, everybody’s home — we didn’t summit, but everybody’s home with their loved ones. And he had written back to me, and said, bringing the team home is the most important. I think there are different types of explorers, including some who will — for lack of a better metaphor — go for the summit at any cost. It just said a lot to me about Shackleton’s character, saying, Okay, we’re this close but we need to turn around, because otherwise I will lose a few people, and it’s not worth it. And to have that sort of perspective on these types of objectives, I have so much respect and admiration for it. It’s the same kind of mindset that he carried on the Endurance expedition. Hi first objective, above all else, is to bring everybody home. And it just shows his humanity.
I think that is maybe not necessarily how I first went into expeditions in my 20s. It was like, Oh, we’re going for it, you know. You just don’t necessarily have that perspective or experience. And over time, through hard lessons, through friends of mine, too, you learn that the first box you have to check, the most important one is that everybody comes home alive.
You have had to turn back very close to the summit before, no?
Chin: Many times, yeah. I also think that that’s much more relatable in a lot of ways. This is a story about failure, and everybody can relate to not achieving something. And how you handle a failure really says more about you than you know if you had succeeded.
What sets your film apart from previous tellings of the Shackleton journey is the parallel story of the 2022 search for the ship itself. At what point did you become involved with the project?
Vasarhelyi: We had cameras on board. That’s what Natalie Hewit was in charge of. Jimmy and I weren’t involved from the very beginning. We were shooting Nyad when National Geographic got the rights to [the search expedition footage]. They were planning a TV program. We were like, please let us make this into a feature — it’s much richer. It’s something Jimmy and I have been talking about for a long time: How to tell the Shackleton story in 2024 and bring a contemporary edge to it — and also bring authenticity that only a real explorer could. I was interested in Jimmy’s take on how you would retell the Shackleton story. Also we had this opportunity to use AI Respeecher to process recordings of the men and read Shackleton’s words in Shackleton’s own voice — the real way into the Shackleton stories through the diaries. And then we had the footage both from the men themselves 110 years ago and from the 2022 expedition. When you actually see the boat, the remains of the boat, it’s like — pinch me. This is 3,000 meters deep, and we’ve gone to a place technologically where you can actually see it.
A few years ago there was some controversy over the recreation of Anthony Bourdain’s for the documentary Roadrunner. What guardrails should there be around this use of AI in documentaries?
Vasarhelyi: I think there should be tons of guardrails. Everyone should be well educated. Everyone should disclose what they’re doing. [Note: Endurance doesn’t flag specific uses of A.I. throughout the film, but includes a blanket disclosure in the end credits.] But for us as historians, this was a really exciting new way of recounting history. Because we were using the words of Shackleton, but just in his own voice. Other films have included the words of Shackleton, or elaborated on his words using actors. [AI-assisted technologies] are interesting tools for craft, and you have to be quite considered and mindful and ethical about how you use it.
You mentioned the film footage shot at the time by the expedition’s photographer, Frank Hurley. It’s so unbelievably crisp, 110 years later. What condition did you did you find it? Did you have to do any work on it?
Vasarhelyi: We very lucky, because the British Film Institute lovingly preserved Frank Hurley’s footage, and they actually made a new scan of it several years ago. They had been very strict about their rules about color treatments. But once we made our case [to colorize it], they were like, Okay, we see why this would be interesting. And so even just adding that little drama through the color, like the slight color treatment of the footage, I think, also brings it to life. And then you add our traditional methods of sound mixing and sound design, and suddenly it’s like you can hear the boat cracking, and the dogs whimpering. I found it very exciting as a documentarian. It made this 110-year-old story that we were already fascinated with that much more vivid.
You also shot reenactments — in both Los Angeles and Iceland — that can be hard to distinguish from that footage. Why were they necessary?
Vasarhelyi: There’s a fundamental constraint in the original Shackleton story, where once they hit the water in the three boats [to head to Elephant Island in the Southern Ocean], there was no footage or photographs. So everyone who’s told the story has had to tackle that part of it. We had Burberry recreate the original outfits they made for the expedition, using the same patterns and the same samples of leather. They were able to make them for us.
I like words and editing, so I did most of the interviews and was very involved in the edit. But I wasn’t going to go to Iceland [to shoot the reenactments]. So Jimmy kindly went to Iceland.
Chin: We hired these Icelandic mountain guys, very hardy, and we didn’t have to do a lot of hair and makeup because they looked the part. [Laughs.] We shot a bunch on this point out in Iceland with dump tanks and spray hoses and giant fans. And it was so cold out — because we’re shooting at night — that all of that water was literally encased on their Burberry suits, solid ice. I was in a giant Himalayan down puffy, so the behind-the-scenes photos are pretty hilarious.
Jimmy, just as Endurance was about to premiere in London, Nat Geo posted images from your umpteenth expedition to Everest, where you happened to find the remains of Andrew Irvine, a long lost member of the 1924 Mallory party. What can you tell us about what brought you there and how this discovery happened?
Chin: We were working on a different documentary, which hasn’t been announced. I can’t share much about that, but we were traveling between two different camps up the glacier on the central Khumbu glacier, which sits below Everest on the north side. And we had found a couple artifacts. One in particular was a very old oxygen bottle that had a year stamped on it, 1933. And we were quite conscious of the fact that the 1933 British expedition was the first expedition that followed [British explorer George] Mallory and Irvine’s [fatal] 1924 attempt, and that indicated to us that that area of the glacier was clearly a place where debris and artifacts that had fallen off the North Ridge in that era had come to rest. Of course, we never expected to find Irvine, but we certainly talked about it. I specifically said to the team, If this is where the bottle landed — which is probably like a torpedo coming off of the north face and probably went a bit further than a human body would fall down the north face — that if Irvine had [also] fallen down the north face, he was probably a few 100 yards up closer towards the mountain. And it wasn’t really serious, but I had put it out into the universe. And so the next time we were traveling between those two places we spent a little bit of time, actively searching, and that’s when we actually found the foot. I had actually been at the Royal Geographic Society [in London] a few months before the expedition, and they had laid out a bunch of the artifacts from the 1924 trip, and they had Mallory’s boot there, and I had taken a photo of Mallory’s boot, so I grabbed my phone, scrolled through the phone, found the photo, matched it up with the boot, and they had an identical tread. We knew that it was from that era, and that very likely could be Andy’s boot. And it wasn’t until a few minutes later that I looked over the sock, saw a label in it, and it said, AC Irvine.
Jimmy, would you ever consider taking Chai on one of these expeditions? She’s shaking her head right now.
Chin: I don’t know how that would work out,
Vasarhelyi: We do go skiing together.
Chin: Although I do think you’d probably be surprised. I think she’d probably do pretty well out there if push came to shove.
Vasarhelyi: I am determined, and I’ve got great tenacity. I also believe that if, as we still have two smaller humans to take care of, maybe one of us needs to be on the ground.
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