EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH That's It That's All Director Curt Morgan

How did you get started in film making?

My father introduced me to taking still photos when I was really young... I was a professional snowboarder for a little while, and I broke my back. I'd known Travis Rice and Danny Kass for a while - it was kind of a bummer, I didn't want to quit snowboarding but I kind of had to... I ended up going to going to film school, cause I really loved film and I'd been shooting for fun ever since I was a kid. So I ended up going to Iceland right after film school working on a documentary for a while and it was really fun. Danny Kass, who started Grenade called me up and was like "why don't you come and work for us"; so I went out and helped them trying to get that whole thing going, and got started working with Travis and those guys on a whole different level - instead of riding with them I was filming them.

Did you ever dream that you’d have the kind of resources you had to make That's It That's All?

No, never in a million years - a lot of people really bent over backwards to help us make that movie, and we just fought as hard as we could from the beginning to make something that was different looking on a really low budget, and that was our goal - we were hopeful that it would be cool and different but we never thought it would go that far. It was kind of a snowball effect - one person saw one thing that we did and they were like "oh, you should try this, you should try that" and then we ended up getting to use a whole bunch of different camera systems that shaped the whole movie. It was really, really epic talent with really, really epic camera equipment, so it was just a fun project.


What’s a heligimble, and how did it come about that you guys used it to make That's It That's All?

Well from the very beginning of the film I really wanted to shoot big wide aerials, it was very expensive and I didn't know enough about it at the time. I contacted a company called Wescam in LA and begged them to give me a deal and try out a camera; and then we got lucky enough to use a system called the Cineflex. The Cineflex heligimble aerial system is a highly stable camera attached to a helicopter that captures distant objects and creatures in close-up, it's an HD system but much smaller and lighter, so you use a lot less fuel while you're flying and it's a lot easier to manipulate. So we were in New Zealand and we met a guy named Peter Thompson who owned a Cineflex system and he gave us a pretty good deal and we went out and and it was like "ok, this is a gamechanger". Not that we could afford to bring it out every day but we brought it out maybe 40 days of shooting during the movie and it really complemented snowboarding; it really helped push the story along. Until that point I felt like Travis's snowboarding couldn't be touched by a camera; and after that it was like Travis's snowboarding met its match with the Cineflex. Now we've got two of them, and all these other crazy cameras and we've come a long way but that thing was a total gamechanger for us.

Is it fair to say that TITA is as much about landscapes as it is about the runs/tricks?

Yeah I think so - the thing for me is that I'm so bored with seeing just snowboarding, and I think in a way Travis is too - we were flying around all these amazing locations and it would be like "oh my  god, look at that" or "check out that animal, or check out that mountain" - all these things that I've wanted to film since I was a little kid; it was like oh man, Travis you should see that... I just spent a lot of time translating what comes with snowboarding. A few people were like "what's with all the landscapes, where's all the snowboarding" but there is a lot of snowboarding dude. We're just working on a new film now, tentatively called  "Slate" - it's half about the places we go and half about the snowboarding, its got even less than "That's It That's All".
We finally got access to resources to shoot this (landscape) stuff - Travis would always be like "dude, what are you doing" because helicopters cost $2,000 an hour - I'd fly around to just get a couple more shots of mountains; but then I'd get so into it I end up shooting an extra 20 hours - and have to edit that down to 85 minutes or something.

There's footage on your Brain Farm website where you actually drop an explosive charge into the side of a mountain - is that what causes the massive avalanche in TITA?

(sheepishly) Ummm - in New Zealand, yeah that was triggered by an explosive but I led people to believe it wasn't ...

So should we leave that out?

No I don't really care - I mean I've never told anyone that before but then we've just released that footage of it happening on our website so it is what it is... But obviously the avalanche with Travis in Alaska was real, we didn't bomb anything in Alaska. In New Zealand we were just testing to see how the snow would respond, and it obviously wasn't very safe. So that's that... for our new film we were just up in Canada and it was like the most obnoxious amount of avalanches we've ever seen, just one after another after another, it was pretty intense.

What kind of injuries did the guys get during filming?

Fortunately not too many - Travis twisted his ankle, but nothing too bad. Travis tends to not get hurt, he does a pretty good job of keeping himself really strong, he spends so much time stretching and building up core strength so that when he hits that tree, or flips over twenty times his body's already prepared for that. A lot of other athletes just don't prep for that and they get hurt, but he's a pretty smart snowboarder, he's very on his game.

You filmed parts of the latest Nitro Circus movie Country Fried - how was it different working with those guys after Travis Rice and the snowboarders?

Working with Jeremy and Godfrey and those guys was awesome - it was kind of a fun experience for us. We did some slow mo explosions with bikes and stuff like that; it really was fun working with them, it was a whole different scene... I'm not going to say to much else apart from that on the record...

Which brings us to the fact that you're currently shooting Jackass 3D - what's your involvement in that?

I don't think I can say too much about that just yet... I was shooting phantom camera stuff for them - crazy stunts at 1000 frames per second. We've been busy, shooting stuff for the Marines, Quiksilver, the Visa Black card commercial, National Geographic; and then heaps on our new snow film. It's been the hugest challenge, out of anything we've made so far - mostly weather conditions but it's been fun. I think if it wasn't a challenge I don't think I'd do it.
 
Just one more, to get us back to That's It That's all - how much better does it look on Blu Ray?

One hundred and fifty million times better on Blu Ray. It looks like crap on DVD, don't buy it. Just kidding... but it's a totally completely different experience on Blu Ray, I mean Blu Ray has changed the whole game - there's 3D and all this gimmicky stuff coming out but Blu Ray is here to stay. It's just an amazing format, the images are just awesome. When I saw the compression on standard def, I was like "it's ok, it's not that bad" but I felt sad because we'd worked in HD the whole way through in our edit. It's sad to see something go down to DVD but obviously Blu Ray is not as popular with the public as DVD so we had to do both.

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