“Freediver” starts out with the question that the vast majority of people watching it will be asking themselves as Alexey Molchanov is hooked up to a machine to track his breathing. A Swedish physiologist, Erika Schagatay, awaits the results, having started studying Molchanov for the past 16 years when he entered the sport that requires […]
“Freediver” starts out with the question that the vast majority of people watching it will be asking themselves as Alexey Molchanov is hooked up to a machine to track his breathing. A Swedish physiologist, Erika Schagatay, awaits the results, having started studying Molchanov for the past 16 years when he entered the sport that requires one to hold their breath as they reach unfathomable depths in the water without any oxygen tank to assist them. Michael John Warren’s documentary eventually becomes a biography of Molchanov when the season ahead of him becomes too intriguing to stray from, but it leads with the science to make his achievements all the more impressive when rather than suggesting he’s superhuman, you come to understand how deep he must reach within himself to achieve what he does.
After leaving the lab, Warren follows Molchanov on a series of dives across the globe where the world record holder in three events sets his sights on all five he can be known as the greatest to have ever done it, having the extra motivation of an unplanned hiatus from the sport when his native Russia’s invasion of Ukraine leads to a ban on all its athletes in international competition. Molchanov uses the time to train for all five speciality dives – monofin, bi-fins, free immersion, no fins and variable weight – as his records are ecplised by others without having the chance to defend them, as well as teach younger divers as his mother Natalia once taught him when she held the mantel of being one of the greatest in the sport. As he eventually travels to far-flung locales from Mauritius to the Philippines to Vertical Blue in the Bahamas, developed by world record holder William Trubridge as the ultimate destination for free diving when pesky environmental conditions are eliminated from the equation as a man-made diving spot, Molchanov carries her memory with him as pushes himself to places no one else on earth has gone before.
It’s easy to forget that as Molchanov is making these remarkable physical demands of himself that similar feats of strength are required by a camera crew to capture them and Warren, who is used to the pressure of capturing live events as a go-to filmmaker for concert films such as “Jay-Z: Fade to Black” and behind-the-scenes chronicles of Broadway shows including “Spring Awakening” and “Oh Hello,” doesn’t ever show signs of strain, diving into the water with abandon and following Molchanov stride for stride as he makes his way back to the top. “Freediver” recently premiered on Prime Video and the director spoke about the globe-trotting adventure entailed by accompanying Molchanov, entering a new world in terms of the sport that’s underground in a number of different ways and creating a compelling structure to tell a story beyond its main subject.
How’d you get interested in this?
Well, I’m really lucky as a director where I get to work in sports. I get to work in music. I get to work with Broadway. And I get to do these single camera documentaries where you’re in verite mode and you’re getting these really deep interviews with people, but I also get to do these huge concert films with 15, 20, 30 cameras as well. I’m very lucky to have a lot of people who believed in me early in my career and they let me get in a lot of different lanes.
For this project, there was an article in GQ that came out a few years back and some friends of mine in Hollywood over at Boardwalk Pictures sent me the article and said, “Do you want to make a movie about this?” And I said, “That sounds really, really hard… yes, let’s go do it.” And 22 flights, eight countries, and an impossible number of boats, three years of my life in one super typhoon later, here we are releasing the film to the world.
Before we get into the logistical difficulties of this, a lot of these extreme sports documentaries end up being filmed by people that are very active in the community already. Was it difficult finding a way in?
I do that for a living, right? I’m always touching down into some community, hopefully winning their trust and respecting what they’re about and presenting them realistically and truthfully through a film. So it’s something I’m very versed in at this point in my career and the freediving community is really small and really insular and in some ways might be one of the smallest communities I’ve ever approached. It took a while to earn all the trust and I’m not sure I ever earned all the trust, but we got incredible access to the greatest free divers in the world. And it was exciting because you look at the list of places and you [think], “Oh, that must’ve been beautiful.” We’re in the Bahamas on an island called Long Island, which has almost no infrastructure. There’s no hospital, and maybe there’s one coffee shop, but no restaurants. So you’re in a beautiful place, but you’re there because there’s a geological anomaly just off the coast that makes freediving really work and there’s not an infrastructure for our film crew, so we were in these really remote places with this really tight knit community and eventually we just made friends with just about everybody. Now we have this incredible film to show from all those efforts.
Was Alexey in mind as a central figure from the start or did he emerge as you were working on it?
It’s a little bit of both. That GQ article that triggered it from a few years ago was about Alexey, but I was looking at William Trubridge, who plays a big role in the film, and several other people. As I dug into it, it really felt like I wanted to focus it on one person and not have this be like a broad conversation about freediving and there really isn’t anybody with a more interesting story than Alexey and certainly anybody who was going to do more within a season than Alexey the season I was filming. Alexey is the greatest living free diver in the world, and in this season that we were about to film with him, he was banned from the sport he dedicated his life to because he’s Russian and Russia had invaded Ukraine, so Alexey suddenly can’t compete and at the top of that season, he had three world records. By the end of that season, he had lost two, he only had one left, so Alexey goes, “I’m coming back to the sport next year. I’m going to take back my two world records and I’m going to add to that. I’m going to do five world records in one year. It’ll be the most dominant season in the history of the sport.” That’s a near suicidal mission that he’s on, and what our film is about on some level. There’s a lot of other elements that are in the film as well.
When you had five dives – and this is obviously an experienced crew already you’re getting into the water with, but could you improve over time?
It’s about as hard as it gets on a technical level, filming underwater. There’s a reason why there’s not a lot of people doing it. Shout out to my director of photography, Jeffrey Peterman and my whole camera team, who did incredible work on this. I had some really, really talented people working with me here. There’s a scene in one of the first big dives early in the movie where Alexey is setting a world record and he goes to 512 feet underwater and that’s only going to happen one time. I cannot miss that shot, so I have to film it in a way that is cinema ready. I’m not doing this on GoPros. So we really had tremendous amounts of planning, [working out] safety issues because you don’t want him getting stuck on one of my cables down there because I don’t even want to talk about what could happen if that happened. You’re balancing a lot of technical issues with the art. I believe in that first dive of the film, my film crew sets a world record for the deepest image of a human being in the open water ever captured. Even the great James Cameron, who I love, has not done that.
And you get better at everything as you keep doing it. We got really good about getting on and off boats. You’re always dealing with captains and there are points where I am talking to three different captains on three different boats all at the same time and I’m talking to safety divers. So of course, I got better at all of this as well. But we set that world record of underwater cinematography the first time out and then later on, we were facing a super typhoon while we’re filming, so the challenges kept coming. The new locations kept coming. Of course, I’m working with a core crew, but you’re hiring local when you go to the Philippines, so I’ve got my main unit, but a lot of people are suddenly speaking a language we don’t speak. And then you’re going to France and then you’re going to Honduras and you’re just constantly picking up new crew members. But it was a really exciting process. I am so grateful to have one of the best crews in the world and I’m really glad we were able to capture what was about the hardest thing you can think to capture in this documentary.
It’s great how this isn’t set up as a biography, but eventually becomes one. Was it difficult to structure?
Always. No documentary is structurally easy to figure out. They are all really, really, really hard. I’m a writer on this film, but I’m writing it live, so I had what I thought was going to happen and then you go out and suddenly things start changing. Part of being a documentarian is staying open to new things coming in and knowing that, “Okay, I had this plan, but something just happened over there and that triggers this whole other thing” and we didn’t know [Alexey] was going to be banned from the sport when we started this film. He got banned from the sport. We actually had a gut check for ourselves where we’re like, “Are we still going to make this film?” And I said to my partners who were putting up the money to make this film, “I think the film just got better. Now he’s really good at free diving, but the greatest free diver in the world isn’t allowed to do what he does, so how is he going to respond?” That was the big shift in the narrative of this film and it was like, “Let’s start over, here we go.” So you’re always writing it and the structure was really challenging, but at the same time, there is a season of a sport in which to hang your story and how to exactly weave in all those elements about his mother and his past and his wife and his son and the rivalry with William Truebridge.
We spent countless hours doing that, and editing looks easy. But it’s like good service at a five-star restaurant. They’re all back there rushing, rushing, rushing, and then they’re like, “…And here’s your meal, sir.” That’s good editing because you don’t understand how many times we made something we thought was great and then chucked it in the garbage and started over. And then finally you get the version where you’re like, “Okay, this is it.”
I wouldn’t want to spoil the story of Alexey’s mother Natalia, but what was it like to bring her in as a presence?
I probably spent more time thinking about that than anything else in this film because she’s an incredible person with an incredible story and deeply, deeply loved by everyone who utters her name. They say it with reverence. So I wanted to make sure to respect that legacy, but she’s also a looming figure in Alexey’s life. She put the sport on the map, not single-handedly, and we brought him into the sport, so he’s in this weird place where he’s trying to honor her legacy, but also be better than her and at the same time, it’s his mom, so it’s a really complicated equation. I really knew that that complexity would be some of the magic of this film. And I tried really hard to make sure that that resonated and I hope it did.
“Freediver” is now streaming on Prime Video and available to buy or rent on digital.
