Travis Rice and Curt Morgan interview
Travis Rice and Curt Morgan, executive producers of monumental new snowboarding film That's it, That's All take time out before their London premiere to talk to HUCK.
Your film focuses a lot on celebrating nature. How do you reconcile that with flying around in a helicopter when filming?
Curt Morgan: Well, you wouldn't have seen those shots if we weren't using a helicopter.
Travis Rice: After a lot of research, we found out that after an entire year of us using a helicopter equates to one person flying from USA to Europe and back. As crazy as that might sound, us flying for around 60hrs has the same offset. What we were trying to do was more about raising awareness of these magical places we go out in the middle of frickin' nowhere! We need to show they exist.
CM: It's all about being able to show that part of it.
TR: Realistically, we are all kind of hypocrites, but with more consciousness, these goals can be achieved.
A lot of the film is about raising the bar; new places, new experiences, new shots. Are you concerned that you have set the bar too high? Where do you go from that?
TR: Isn't that just the natural progression of snowboarding? You don't ever think, I'm going to hold back this year so next year, I can do this.
CM: You get that fear every year, but it's natural. If you are thinking about doing something, you just want to do it right now! We are young and we are having fun so there's no other time to do it besides right now! If we can't do it sicker next year, then fuck it! We had a sick year this year and that's it. You need diversity; you need a fun film, and then you need an epic film. But our next film is not going to get worse!
TR: We haven't got any funding for the next film (named Flight) yet but we have every intention of following our plans through.
What was the biggest challenge for you?
CM: There weren't any huge challenges. It was just things like using new cameras. I saw that BBC documentary Planet Earth and they did such a great job with aerials and everything. I tried to mimic that quite a lot. They used these cameras called Cineflex. We just went to the people who owned one of those cameras. We would say ‘look, we don't have a huge budget but here's our trailer, we would love some help on this.' The learning process was hard but it was fun!
TR: Another challenge was like going from New Zealand to Alaska and using the same camera but having different pilots and different cameramen. It was very inconsistent.
CM: We went to Canada once and had a great shoot. So we decided to go again and it was like the camera's broken, the rider's hurt and so we had to spend a huge amount of our budget re-filming.
Was the film a product of one artistic vision or was it more of a compromise when it came down to editing?
TR: There was no real compromise, in a lot of films out there, there is though. The one thing that really helped us is that Curt is really good at saying ‘No'.
CM: I wrote an idea on a piece of paper, took that idea and went around it. Thinking how are we going to take this to theatres, how are we going to do this bigger and better and how are we going to add a big story into it. But it all came back to this one bit of paper. That's one thing I learned - stick to your original idea. It always could be better still and there's always going to be people who won't like it, and that's just the nature of the beast.
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Travis Rice and Curt Morgan interview (text) by Ed Andrews is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK License.
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