As ski season rolls around at this time every year, one time-honored tradition, aside from hearing the sound of freshly fallen snow shushing under your board, is the ski movie premiere, an annual big-screen bacchanalia of powder and promise. It's not hard to find one at a local theater these days.
But whether the auteurs are DSLR-wielding privateers or established outfits like Matchstick Productions or Teton Gravity Research, the entire field owes a significant creative debt to Warren Miller, the godfather of the genre snowriders today call "ski porn." (Miller sold his company, Warren Miller Entertainment, more than 20 years ago and his relationship with the current owners has been very rocky.)
And even though Miller's involvement ended years ago, the company has endured and thrived, so much so that its 61st film, Wintervention, is touring theaters nationwide now. Like past works, it's a feature-length travelogue that spans people and locations both familiar – World Cup and Olympic champion Lindsey Vonn takes her talents to Vail, Colorado – and exotic, like Swiss snowboard phenom Stephan Maurer in Gudauri, Georgia.
But the keystone to Wintervention has to be the opening segment in Antarctica. WME has been there twice before, but as director and executive producer Max Bervy told Wired.com at the recent Denver premiere, what looks so effortless on film is anything but easy to capture.
"There are always concepts on the table, places far afield that we've been thinking about doing for months, or years even," Bervy said. "We go to seven continents, and that takes a lot of logistics and legwork."
For last year's film, Dynasty, WME had to secure Chinese visas for cast and crew, arrange travel to remote regions, and cross all available fingers for good snow. "We rely on weather and snow quality for our final product," producer Josh Haskins said. "So sometimes we have to put things together really fast."
Or really slow.
The Antarctica segment in Wintervention was originally supposed to be in Dynasty. WME worked with explorer Doug Stoup to arrange the segment, which involved a multiday, 750-mile ocean journey from Ushuaia, Argentina – the southern-most city in the world – to Antarctica via the Drake Passage, one of sailing's most feared stretches of ocean.
"One of Doug's dreams had always been to take a group of friends to ski in Antarctica," Bervy said. "So he hired the boat and invited around 80 skiers down, friends from all over the globe." But things soon went haywire, Bervy recalled. "We heard the Russian boat captain arguing with the Argentinean dockmaster, and they were in full-on fights with each other. 'The boat's fine.' 'The boat's not fine!'"
Turns out, the boat wasn't fine. In fact, it wasn't deemed seaworthy. "It's not like the cruise ship that broke down off of San Diego," Bervy said. "If you get stuck in the Drake Passage without power, you're kind of hosed."
Faced with a busted boat, Stoup and the WME crew decided to send everyone home. But nobody was willing to let the Antarctic dream go so easily, and last November, the crew convened again for a second try. This time, the boat worked and even the Drake cooperated, swapping unpredictable storms for calm, glassy seas.
The skiing itself in the Antarctic segment doesn't quite match the wow factor of some of the movie's other locales, like ski mountaineer Chris Davenport's powerful big-mountain lines in Girdwood, Alaska, or Zach and Reggie Crist and Lexi DuPont swapping Utah's northern resorts for red-cliff drops and snow-choked chutes in the state's southern backcountry.
But Stoup, John Morrison, Andrew McLean and Kip Garre, do notch a number of first descents in the last frontier on Earth, including a couple of faces steep enough that a fall means a long slide into 34-degree water below. And despite the cold temps and challenging conditions, WME's cameramen seem to capture every memorable moment of the trip. It's not a typical ski-movie segment, but it served a specific purpose for Bervy and his crew.
"The goal is to have everyone walk out of the theater with at least one segment that really touched or inspired them," he said. "What we do isn't a documentary. It's a way to celebrate skiing and snowboarding – all kinds."
After WME's 60 years in the industry, the obvious risk is that scenes and locales may start to seem formulaic, which Bervy and his crew combat by seeking out new terrain. For Wintervention, WME achieves a neat bit of symmetry from the opening Antarctic segment to the finale in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard (also home of the Global Seed Vault). In other words, Wintervention is literally a south-to-north circumnavigation of the world's skiable terrain.
Sure, it's exotic, but Bervy and crew have their eyes on more far-flung locales. They'd like to go back to Tehran, which WME visited for 2001's Cold Fusion.
But the real prize would be North Korea, which, after last week's events, is probably not going to open borders to outside filmmakers anytime soon.
"I'm waiting on that," Bervy told Wired.com, before the country's most recent hostilities. "There are some big mountains there."
And then his filmmaker mind starts working: "How cool would it be to go in there and film? Well, to get out, anyway. You can certain get in, but it would be good: Guys parachuting in with crew and then figuring out how to get out, all for a ski movie."
Image: Tom Evans
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