The scenery in High Ground is spectacular, but of course isn’t the focal point of the film. What did you do as a director to ensure that the scenery didn’t overshadow the veterans’ stories and in fact complimented them?

It comes down to the way the film is put together. We’re a team and worked on it together for a long time to make sure that there was a balance. It was a lot of fun behind the scenes putting together the story, because it looks and feels like this is just exactly what happens, boom, boom, boom, like we went to Nepal and got some stories. If you look at the structure of the story, we go deeper and deeper into each character’s background throughout the trek up the base camp so that you don’t get blasted right away with the deepest sort of intrigue of someone.

You get to know them for awhile so that by the time they tell the bigger story and the most meaningful and touching part of their own story, you’re well into understanding who they are and you’re close to getting to this mountain with them. The mountain provides a building level of interest in what’s going on in the story, because you are getting closer to this challenge, the ultimate goal of the summit. On the way you are getting to know these people really well by going back to war with them or their home life or other aspects of who they are.

“High Ground” director Micheal Brown sets up a shot high in the Himalayas. Photo courtesy of Serac Adventure Films

You’ve never done a film involving veterans or the military. What drew you to this project?

My contact with veterans was very limited. My stepfather was a pilot in World War II. He flew B-17s and he was of an era of veterans that bottled everything up. In World War II, it was the case that veterans went and fought and they must have felt the same things and dealt with the same issues when coming home. It was a very different welcome; they came home to a very strong economy and a lot of hope in our country and so they had an advantage in that sense, but at the same time they were still people and probably suffering from a lot of post-traumatic stress and loss. At that time they were very stoic about it and suffered without ever really being able to tell their stories about it. I know my stepfather and other people I talked to, they just didn’t really want to talk about the things that happened in the service.

Going back to my contact with veterans, it was limited pretty much … like most Americans. With less than 1 percent of our general population in the military, chances are most people don’t have a lot of contact with active-duty military or veterans. It is a misunderstood group and we get a lot of misconceptions about things, because we see the news reports of war, and think: ‘Oh, wow, I bet they can’t wait to get out of there and come back and have a job and a life like ours,’ but in fact that is an incorrect assumption. It’s an all-volunteer army and people go and have a really exciting, interesting experience there. That’s not always the case, but I’m a person who climbs mountains and people wonder why I would go and put myself in danger on purpose. It’s because it is great fun and there is great community there, and everything that we do when we are in the mountains, even though we suffer a little bit, we do it because we love it and a lot of the aspects of it. That’s a really hard thing for people to get their head around with war, because it is so horrendous. It’s also exciting and we have community there, so when you are taken out of that environment it’s tough. While their contemporaries are going to college and learning how to get ahead in this society we’ve created for ourselves, if you are in the military you’re not necessarily learning the nuances of getting ahead and making money.

In the military, it seems that everyone is looking out for each other, and they come home and it’s not like that anymore. Everything is completely different than anything they’ve been prepared for, and so it’s a tough way to get back. There is a need for a transition and there is a need for a lot of thought toward that. We often talk about how in Vietnam we thought we’ve learned all these lessons and I don’t know if we did in fact. It’s something that really needs to be addressed and that’s what I would love to see happen if policy makers see this film. To say; ‘Wow, we need to rethink the way that we transition and build that bridge back home again.’