But also, you can only do these exceptionally deep dives in a handful of places on earth because you need an uninterrupted kind of chute of water to dive into. And those places happen to be some of the most spectacularly beautiful places on earth—not just the Bahamas but parts of Southeast Asia and right off the coast of Nice. That’s another thing that draws people to the world of freediving.
With any magazine story, you have certain prescribed limits in place: there’s space, and deadlines, and so on. And sometimes there can be a sense that even though you’ve finished and published the story, there’s still stuff happening off the page. The story’s still continuing. What were the threads that you were looking forward to seeing getting picked up in the documentary?
Probably the number one thing is that basically the magazine story centers on Alexey breaking a world record and he’s sort of clearly the best. You don’t have the arc, though, of being able to see what’s happening over time.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, he, like many athletes from Russia, was not allowed to compete in the sport. So all during 2022, all of his world records were taken from him by other divers. And so we begin 2023, as he’s permitted to start competing again, with this built-in goal of reclaiming all of those world records and then also trying to get the one world record he had never had—which was the no-fin diving, the natural, pure, no-assistance go down. So the documentary has this incredible built-in plot engine of, You were the best, global geopolitical circumstances meant that you had to lose all those records, and now you’re going to go try to reclaim them one by one.
Something that hit me both while reading your article and watching the film is that you expect someone like Alexey, who’s competing in this kind of sport at this kind of level, to possess this almost single-minded psychosis. But, by all accounts, he just seems like a lovely, normal guy. Is that accurate?
It is accurate. I think that another way to say it is that he almost has that thing of, Oh, you’re so calm that you can’t even express the intensity and insanity of what you’re doing. You have lots of voices in the film questioning some of his decisions and where the limit is. It reminds me of racecar driving a little bit, where sometimes those guys don’t interpret the limit of racing as dangerous or on the edge of death and are just pretty chill about it.
