Two locals, David Peacock and Andre Nutini, will be screening their latest film, Passenger, at the Royal Theatre in Trail on Thursday night.
Passenger is Nutini’s fourth film and Peacock’s first full film with Legs of Steel, a close-knit group of professional freeskiers who make movies together. The original members of Legs of Steel who star in the film are Paddy Graham, Bene Mayr, and Thomas Hlawitschka.
The film took two years to make, and is 65 minutes long.
“It’s a good day if you’re out there from sunrise to sunset and you get two or three shots,” said Nutini. “So with the amount of days that are actually good for filming, with snow conditions and weather and everything, … you only get a good film day maybe once a week, and you only get two or three shots that are worthy of the film, and that’s why we decided to take two years with this project.”
Nutini and Peacock started filming in December 2013, and were based in Innsbruck, Austria for the duration of the film. They travelled all over the world to shoot the film on diverse mountain terrain: Revelstoke, BC; Haines, Alaska; Queenstown, New Zealand; Hokkaido, Japan; and all over the Alps.
The crew was also supposed to stop in Whistler, but there was no snow and the trip had to be cancelled.
“We’ve just been chasing winter really,” said Nutini.
The film is narrated by old man winter, and Nutini and Peacock, along with the skiers in the movie, are passengers of winter as he carries them from place to place.
Nutini and Peacock didn’t ski in the movie, they were there to film and direct, but they still had to be able to cover a lot of the same terrain as the skiers.
“We need to be able to get into all the places that you see the skiers skiing, so 90 per cent of what you see, we need to have the skill-level to access that terrain, and do it safely,” said Nutini, “because if there’s one person on the crew that can’t do something safely then they’re a hazard to everybody else, so that’s why we’ve always been such a small group.”
Given some of the dangerous terrain the crew was covering, trust was very important.
“Amongst the group we have a lot of trust in each other and we rely on each other’s skills to make sure we come home at the end of the day and make decisions together that
we all trust,” said Nutini.
Passenger will premiere at the Royal Theatre on Thursday night at 7:30 p.m. Doors will open at 6:30 p.m. and it is a licensed event, but still an all ages event.
