This new project is going to be your second film, right?
When the Ocean Met the Sky was my first feature-length film, but I’d written and directed a lot of short films before that. I can’t stress how small the budget was that we produced that film on. The shooting budget came from private investors, which was just a bit of cash to head out into the bush on Vancouver Island and film. We ran a Kickstarter campaign for the post-production costs. Now that it’s complete, I have some of my personal money tied up in it, and I’m hoping we can sell the licensing and break even on the film. I think that’s going to happen.
What’s the basic outline of this new film project?
The title is “AERIS,” which is like a play on words, as in “the heir to the thrown” and “hang time” [laughs]. Phil [Thomas] and I wrote an outline to the script over a few years. Phil is pretty grumpy about the snowboard world, but I don’t have any baggage with snowboarding and it’s what I know, so I wanted to write the script. Plus, I know some crazy stories and wild people from my time in the industry.
Is the lead character based off any real life individuals you know?
Yeah. The character is a scrappy, small-town person who snowboards. Very early on, I made the decision to make the lead character a female, so that’s been kind of set in stone.
Now that you’re shopping the project around to investors, has there been any resistance on the main character being a female snowboarder?
I’ve had the script pretty much written for a while now, but have not been able to get the funding for it. Then last winter, I pitched VICE Sports on doing a documentary series on the Too Hard crew, who are an all-girl film crew. Their whole image is basically like the Whiskey movies. We could go really deep into my opinion on how snowboarding has kind of lost that unapologetic feel, and how it’s basically held up by women these days.
We can go deep on that. Do you think snowboarding is soft these days?
Well, I pitched the idea to VICE Sports and I was chomping at the bit to tell some female snowboard stories. We went to Wisconsin and spent a week with the Too Hard girls. We went on the road, interviewed the girls, and filmed handrails. The series is called “Lady Shredders,” and it did really, really well for VICE Sports. That’s now a main part of the pitch for AERIS. It’s a cool story. None of the Too Hard girls are really making it, industry wise, and that’s part of the story. If you’re a fuck-it kind of person in snowboarding and you’re a girl, nobody wants to get behind you. But if you’re Danny Kass and a fuckin’ loose canon, people are just throwing money at you. It’s a bit of a double standard that those girls exemplify. And they rip, hard.