You mentioned misconceptions about the military. Did you have any of those misconceptions or preconceptions before you filmed?
Absolutely. Here I am making a film without that much experience. In a way it was good because I came into it without any ideas about what it was other than the incorrect assumptions that I had. I didn’t have really strong feelings about it, so in a way I was able to come into it with an open mind, and say, ‘OK, what is this?’
Obviously I have affinity to the characters in the film, because we climbed together and I honestly really liked everyone that we worked with. I really cared about their outcome. I didn’t come into it saying, I had all the answers for this. I came into it saying; ‘Well I don’t know what the answers are, but I’m going to find out in the process of making the film.’
The Soldiers to the Summit team at the top of Mt. Lobuche in “High Ground.” The film follows 11 veterans on their journey. Photo courtesy of Serac Adventure Films
Certainly there were surprises throughout. I didn’t realize until I was partway into the project, just how much excitement and fun it is to be in the military. It’s like climbing mountains is for those who do it. From the outside it might look scary because of combat or in the case of mountains it’s cold and avalanches and things like that, but in fact you feel so alive and part of something important. I came to understand that when veterans come home they’re not necessarily relieved, they’re in fact feeling a little bit lost. They’re just not sure what to do next. It is hard to follow a tour of duty with something in the civilian world that’s as interesting, exciting, or fulfilling as being at war.
What did the story of the veterans and the Gold Star mother teach you about yourself?
As a filmmaker I get very deeply involved in the stories and I feel them. This film was extraordinary in the way that it helped me understand a lot about why any one of us would like to do things that are really challenging and risk our lives to be extraordinary in some way. To experience things in life that are more than just working really hard to understand a field and than working in a job. Ultimately you might achieve some of your goals, but it’s not as fulfilling as some of these really extraordinary experiences that happen when you are having an adventure or going to combat. Those really rich experiences that happen are so valuable and they only last for half of a second, but the aftermath and everything about them is part of being human. It’s really important.
Something that may be lost on viewers is the challenge of bringing 11 veterans with an array of injuries ranging from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to blindness to the summit of a 20,000-foot mountain. What were some of the challenges that you faced as a filmmaker?
Because I do a lot of mountain films the mountaineering part of it was not a huge concern. I was watching the veterans very closely. I had a sense of responsibility. I didn’t want anyone to get hurt even more because they were climbing the side of a mountain. Our team had really accomplished guides. There were ten of us, of the original 13 that had climbed Everest in 2001 with Erik Weihenmayer, so it’s a very competent and tight-knit group of guides who were doing this.
From left to right: Producer Don Hahn, Lori Korngueverl, and Director Michael Brown mixing the final film version of High Ground on the stage of Skywalker Sound, Nicasio, Calif. Photo by Scott R. Watts
The crew that was on the mountain was Rex Pemperton and myself, who have both been up Everest and done a lot of this kind of thing, and Didrik Johnck, our still photographer, who called the shots. We had a really solid on-mountain team, not a big group of people, because obviously the ropes are confining and you can’t fit that many more people on.
One of the real challenges was that we had so many characters and we made a decision early on alongside Don Hahn, analyzing the story. Typically with movies you wouldn’t have so many characters. You would try to thin it out and pare it down to just the essential characters, but in this case it was a group of people who all had slightly different experiences in war and we wanted to allow them to tell their stories. In the links of the film you get to know them pretty well, and each one of them represents different ideas, at least partially in some stage of their own journey.
Most veterans will identify with somebody in the film, whether it’s someone who is stoic and doesn’t express their emotions very often, to someone who is very expressive and maybe joined the military when they were really young and had no idea what they were getting into.