Many had tried to make a documentary about New York Times photographer Lynsey Addario —but Addario had turned all of them down. “It felt a bit narcissistic. Why would I be the person that they follow?” the Pulitzer Prize–winning photojournalist tells Vanity Fair. After seeing several films about war correspondents, though, she started to change her mind. “They were always men, and no one ever really got it right.”

So when Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, the Oscar winners behind Free Solo, approached Addario about a film, she said yes. “I’m a big fan of their work, and I love the fact that they came at it from having done these great documentaries, always focusing on people with a passion,” she says. It helped, too, to have a female filmmaker chronicling her story.

Vasarhelyi

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