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!’”

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Authors: Joe Lindsey

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