Exclusive: Watch the First Trailer for Freediver, an Epic Doc About a Record-Shattering Adventurer

Back in 2021, GQ’s Daniel Riley went down to the Bahamas to trail the world champion freediver Alexey Molchanov. He spent time with Molchanov and a daring crew of freedivers from around the world, all of whom were united in their passion for a pursuit that Riley summed up as follows: “Go as deep as you can go on one breath and return to the surface without passing out or dying.”

Sounds simple enough. But as Riley’s feature “The Secrets of The World’s Greatest Freediver” made clear, it’s far more complicated, and the results far more sublime—for Molchanov, especially, whose legacy is entwined with his mother Natalia's, once the greatest freediver in the world herself.

For anyone who read Riley’s story and wished they could actually see the wonder of freediving in action, you’re in luck: Paramount Pictures is releasing Freediver, an epic documentary based on the GQ feature. Freediver is a production from Skydance Sports, Picturestart, GQ Studios and Boardwalk Pictures, and is directed, written, and produced by Michael John Warren (Lolla: The Story of Lollapalooza, Spring Awakening: Those You’ve Known).

"Alexey is not your typical athlete, and this is not your typical film,” Warren tells us. “While it’s based on a true story, I have no doubt that audiences will be left in awe, experiencing freediving in a way they’ve never seen before."

Today, GQ is giving you an exclusive look at the first trailer for Freediver, which follows Molchanov as he attempts to reclaim all of his world records:

And while you wait for Freediver's December 7th digital release, read our interview with Riley about getting his story to film.

GQ: I realize I’ve never asked you how this story came about in the first place. How’d you encounter Alexey and what made you want to pursue a feature on him?

Daniel Riley: I had read a story in March 2021. He had broken the record of freediving in freezing water—he had been at some lake in Russia and had shattered this record. Just, I don't know, one of the more insane things. The Times had written it up. In fact, it was the writer who is the other journalist voice in the movie [Adam Skolnick]. He's the true expert. Anyway, I had been really interested in freediving for a while as a kind of compelling narrative zone, just because of the risk and the death element. Alexey was sort of emerging as the definitive best in the world. He had a super compelling personal story, which is that his mother got into freediving very late and became the best female diver in the world and kind of the torchbearer for the whole sport, and then died on a kind of routine dive. Her body was never recovered, and he had to decide whether he would continue diving or not, and ultimately did. But then through her, he had acquired these very special breathwork and meditative techniques that had come down through lots of different warrior classes in Japan and Russia. There were just so many interesting elements about the sort of physical and mental stuff going on, besides just going deep. He just seemed like the ultimate character to get into all that stuff.

Rereading your story, I was struck by all the vivid descriptions—of the natural beauty of the Bahamas, of the actual process of the dives. What were you most looking forward to seeing rendered and come to life on film?

Okay, so when you're at a dive, even if you're in the water, you watch the person descend and then at about 10 meters they sort of disappear and it's on faith that they're going to go all the way down and come back. And it's a very, very tense two, three, four minutes when you're just like, “Oh my gosh, what's going on down there?” There are a couple moments in the film where you're really living and breathing in the drama of a given dive. And that was pretty exceptional.

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.

One thing that I love that he really insisted on when he agreed to do the documentary was he wanted to have the sort of emphasis on diving as a way to commune with nature and be with animals and be with sea life. And there's an incredible kind of side quest in the film of diving with whales.

Loved the whales.

He comes to this not as, “I must be the best”—although he has that—but with this sort of communing with this entire other side of the world, which is just a very cool metaphysical idea.

You’ve described Alexey’s story as “Free Solo, but down.” Who else will this movie appeal to?

I think that it's just a very good sports movie. If you are a sports fan who easily gets hooked on new sports, as I am, you just get the thrust into this world and it becomes extremely interesting. You're interested in the different people from different countries and why they're doing this and what brought them to freediving and the kind of incremental pursuits that each of them are doing at these competitions. I think that you have, in William Trubridge, a great sort of antagonist in the film and who represents something very different. You have a nice rivalry. Beautiful locations. It is just a great sports movie.

I have to know: in the course of reporting this, did you find out how long you could hold your breath for?

In the film, he does an eight and a half minute run or something like that. I don't think I ever officially did it, but I'm pretty sure I'd tap out at about 30 seconds. There's just a way in which, at ten meters into a dive, the buoyancy shifts. You go from positive to negative buoyancy, and then you free fall to the bottom of the ocean. I remember when I was waiting around between dives, I had a snorkel and was going down. I maxed out at three meters before I would pop back up.