Visionaries: Teton Gravity Research
Dec 07 2006 / Los Angeles, CA
It’s been ten years since Dirk Collins, Corey Gavitt, and brothers Steve and Todd Jones released Continuum, the video that kick-started the ailing ski industry and revolutionized the way action sports are filmed.
After skiing as pros on the other side of the camera and realizing that the existing film crews could no longer keep pace with the most adventurous skiers, the four founding fathers of new school skiing took matters into their own hands in serious old school fashion: busting their butts as commercial fishermen in Alaska one summer, then pooling their savings to invest in camera equipment and finance their winter dreams in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
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In just one decade, the founders of Teton Gravity Research have turned those dreams into nearly two dozen of the biggest and baddest ski and snowboard films ever made, each surpassing the last as the team pursues bigger mountains with increasingly insane pros out to push each other and progress their sports: Anomaly, the most recent, features insanity like Jamie Pierre hucking himself off a 25-story cliff and Chris Collins landing a triple backflip, with the action going down all over the globe.
Keeping with their mantra – “bigger… bigger… bigger…” – the TGR team also put out the surf film Shack Therapy – this year and will release The Big One this month, a documentary compiling the company’s history and best footage from ten years in Jackson Hole. As if that weren’t enough, TGR has also launched the Showtime HD series Re:Evolution of Sports, uncorked another season of Untracked for Fuel TV, is busy working on scores of commercials and TV productions, and is cashing in on the most extreme archive of action sports stock footage ever assembled.
Lat34 spoke with TGR co-founder Dirk Collins in an exclusive interview during a rare moment of downtime while he drove to work to sign off on the final edit of The Big One.
Lat34: I love the back story of how your company came together, and how clearly it parallels the classic mountain scene of some guys standing at the edge, egging each other on to go big. Does that do it justice?
Dirk Collins: That’s it in a nutshell. We were all living here in Jackson Hole, skiing every day, and sometimes being on the other side of the camera working on that side of things, and we were getting really frustrated with what was going on in the industry. We’d be in some great place with a film crew that couldn’t get to where we wanted to go and couldn’t keep up in a way that would let us film the kind of skiing we wanted to show. That’s how TGR started: we all went and worked commercial fishing in Alaska in the summer and pitched in that money and bought a camera. We knew we could do so much better if we did it our way.
Lat34: What was the original vision, and how has it evolved as everything has grown?
DC: We wanted to see lines from top to bottom. We didn’t want to just see the glory moment of a line in slow motion, somebody hitting a cliff and then cutting the landing and leaving you wondering if they made it, or a lot of tight shots where you can’t tell what’s happening. That wasn’t really cutting it for us. We wanted to see a long shot of somebody going big from top to bottom in a big environment. We come from a big environment, skiing in places lake Jackson Hole and Alaska, and we’ve always wanted people who see our films to be able see the speed, see the size, see everything that goes into it. We want everything to be massive, and we’ve always set the bar very high for ourselves.
Lat34: Let’s talk about “progression” in action sports. It seems to me that TGR very quickly went from documenting something that was happening to partly driving it, pushing it forward.
DC: For sure. I think just because of the films we’ve made and what we’ve done, we’ve become a driving force to some extent because we’re the ones out capturing the progression as it happens. Each year the kids and the pros are seeing what’s been done in these films and saying, “I could probably push my game a little bit more.” When we’re in the field, we’re not consciously trying to push everybody to do something crazy: We’re there to shoot what the athletes are doing. It’s the athletes working with the filmmakers and the guides to build it up. And then it gets crazy.
Lat34: Can you explain your role in “building it up”?
DC: When we go to Alaska, for example, we’ll go for a month, usually in April, and we’ll start on smaller terrain – what we call mini golf – and then start pushing it up, a little bigger, a little steeper, as everyone gets comfortable and the lines get bigger and bigger. By the time we’re ready to wrap things up and really go large, the guides, athletes, and filmmakers have all been working together in that environment. When all the stars align, the snow is right, the weather is right, everybody is ready, we go out and knock off some of the big trophy lines that are going to push the game forward for the next year. Our role is that we’re out there with our cameras, working with the athletes who want to do bigger and better things.
Lat34: Tell me about something you’ve filmed recently that even you would never have dreamed was possible ten years ago.
DC: That happens on almost every shoot! The one that sticks out the most to me from last winter was the step-up-step-down we built in Aspen. The thing was massive. The actual platform that you stepped up to was about 30 feet tall and about 10 feet wide, and then it was about 30 feet long with a completely flat deck, so if you fell off you were falling onto hard flat ice. Coming into it there was a ramp that was almost 25 feet tall with a 30 foot gap, so you’d have to clear this big giant gap, hit the step-up, and then shoot like 60 feet off of that to the landing. That was really a video game style jump. That was really cool. We pushed a lot of stuff last year in that part of our film! It’s all about progress.
Lat34: Speaking of progress… How much has the company and the way you do business changed as everything has gotten bigger?
DC: The ethos and the atmosphere and the way everybody behaves and lives the lifestyle is really very similar to what it was when we first started TGR. It’s still a fairly rowdy bunch, we still party pretty hard, we travel, and we live the lifestyle. We started TGR to live the lifestyle we wanted to live, and I’m happy to report we still live the life and believe in the same things we believed in when we first started it. Where we’ve changed and grown is that we’ve come a long way as far as trying to run the business side of things. That’s really been our challenge the whole time, the part about actually running the business!
Lat34: Most people reading this are probably envious of your job, and would gladly trade their problems for yours! Can you tell me a little bit more about those challenges, just to make us all feel better?
DC: Making a great product is the easy part and the fun part for us, but actually being able to find the sponsors and raise the business and deliver on all the things you’ve promised? That’s always been the challenge. We’re still four guys running around the world with cameras making the films we want to make, but we’ve also come a long way as a business. We’ve had to grow up, just a little bit, in that respect.
Lat34: Whatever happened to that old orange truck of yours? Is the Tangerine Dream still in action?
DC: Oh yeah, it’s still in action, still lurking around. It makes a big appearance three or four times a year, but it’s more of a film prop at this point. We still break it out and cruise around town every once in a while, because everyone loves to see it.
Lat34: Sometimes I see your work described as “ski porn” and sometimes I see it described as the antidote to “ski porn.” Either way, ski films have come a long way! Do you have a preferred way to describe your work?
DC: “Ski porn” is not my favorite terminology, but that’s what we make, to some extent: We’re out there filming these epic, climactic moments that most people only fantasize about. It is what it is.
Lat34: I once read an interview where you said the reason you got into this was because you thought skiing needed some new heroes. Who are your newest personal heroes?
DC: On the ski side, I’m really inspired by Ian Macintosh, Sage Cattabriga-Alosa, Dana Flair, Erik Roner, Peter Olenick, Candide Thovex. I know I’m going to get in trouble for not naming somebody. On the snowboard side there’s Jeremy Jones, of course, Travis Rice, Mark Carter. Now it’s always evolving, but when we first started, skiing was in kind of in a bad place. There was a period of time when there was no real hero, no one for the kids to look up to and aspire to. We thought that was wrong: our contribution all along has been to bring that back, to play a role in bringing some heroics back to it.
Lat34: I like that you name skiers and snowboarders almost in the same breath. TGR has never really even made a distinction or made much of any rivalry there, like it’s all just part of the same thing,
DC: That’s absolutely true and to some extent that’s a product of Jackson Hole. Ever since I’ve been here there’s been no real skier/snowboarder rivalry. We’re all riders, we’re all in the mountains, and we’re all hiking around riding pretty big mountain lines together, pretty much just doing it. At TGR we all snowboard and we all ski, so to us there was no difference other than what tool is better for what particular day. We’d end up filming in California or some place where the skiers hate the snowboarders and the snowboarders hate the skiers, and we were sort of blown away by that at first. There’s still a little bit of that going on, but now it seems like it’s more like 50-50 skiers and snowboarders and there’s more respect from each sport for the other.
Lat34: Are all four founders still involved in every aspect of the company?
DC: The four of us still shoot the majority of the films. We have other film operators that shoot with us a lot and are on salary, but the four of us are pretty much on every major trip, shooting as much as we ever have before, even with everything else going on with the business.
Lat34: The company is named Teton Gravity Research. You could probably keep making great films without even leaving home! That didn’t stop you from going all over the place for Anomaly.
DC: I’ve probably traveled something like 160 days so far this year. I’ve been to Japan, Aspen, Chile, Alaska twice, Canada twice. It’s ridiculous: All over the place. My favorite thing to do is to go out and be with the athletes and be shooting. There are other filmmakers that work with us and are really good, but I think our passion of being in the field with the athletes is what makes our films what they are. TGR is our baby. Every one of our films is one of our babies.
Lat34: I would never ask anyone to choose a favorite between his babies, but clearly The Big One is something special. To close this out, can you talk about why this one so big?
DC:I’m watching the final version of it today for the first time: It’s just about done! This one is really close to us: It’s the story of the last 10 years of TGR in Jackson Hole, from the roots of where we started and the first stuff we ever shot to all the best segments we’ve shot in Jackson Hole over the last ten years. Then we have the actual athletes from those segments talking about the lines, talking about how Jackson Hole has changed and where TGR came from. We also have some of the ski patrol guys and some of the resort owners talking about TGR when we first got here, ducking ropes and breaking all the roles, getting chased by the ski patrol.
Lat34: Does that still happen?
DC: In the 90s things were starting to really clamp down and the ski patrol was really stuck playing cops and robbers trying to enforce these policies even though everybody on every side was really over it. Then a beautiful thing happened in 2000: The boundaries opened in Jackson Hole. All this pressure and conflict lifted and we were able to get out and get what we wanted. Now we work super closely with the ski patrol! It’s been epic here ever since. Taking the lead on opening the boundaries took Jackson Hole from being a really big resort to… there’s not even a way to describe the size. It goes on forever and ever and ever. As far as you want to walk to find a line, it’s that big in all directions. Jackson Hole the big one, and it’s our home.
