Colorado’s famed Red Rocks Amphitheater hosted the U.S. premiere of Burton’s One World on Friday, on the 2020 Film On The Rocks drive-in movie screen. Despite the pandemic restrictions, it was a fairly raucous affair, with Red Gerard, Danny Davis, Brock Crouch, Ben Ferguson, Luke Winklemann, and Jake Canter on hand to introduce the film, and car horns blasting for all of the film’s biggest moments.
One World is the first Burton team video in several years and the first since team founder Jake Burton Carpenter’s death from cancer in November 2019.
For Red Gerard, getting to film for One World was all about balance. Ever since before his Olympic gold medal in 2016, he’s been striving to find a yin-yang equilibrium between competition and making more personal snowboard film projects like Joy, his 2019 film that won Video of the Year at the 2020 Snowboarder Awards. Filming for One World helped him follow that trajectory.
“Getting on the podium at every major contest last year, and winning Dew Tour, was really a dream come true, especially since I was also able to do this project with my team, and for Jake, in between those contests,” Gerard said, in an interview with DewTour.com before the screening.
Danny Davis echoed the sentiment. Properly honoring the Burton founder’s memory was paramount, even as the encroaching pandemic cut filming for the project short.
“Jake signed off on this project while he was still alive, so – oh, hell yeah – we wanted to do it up right for him,” Davis told DewTour.com. “Making movies is always fun and you always want to pour your all into any project, but having Jake pass after he’d signed off on the project, then being able to continue on and finish it for him despite a lot of external challenges last year, it does feel a bit more special, like he willed it somehow.”
The team got just 72 days of filming for the project, which features 39 Burton team riders.
“We got cut short because of the pandemic,” said Davis, who was in Alaska waiting for ideal heliboarding conditions when the project, and pretty much everything else in the world, was shut down in March. “Thank God we have such a big, talented team because we made a really nice movie anyway. It’s fun to have a little bit of a team vibe to give everyone, like, this is what we’re about. This is what Burton’s about. And the riders are just so fucking good, from turns to double corks to rails, it’s a really nice gel of everything.”
COVID-19 shutdowns aside, Davis said he’ll remember the 2020 season fondly. For one, there was Dew Tour at Copper Mountain, where he rode some of the deepest resort powder of his life with all of his contest peers, then drove straight to Jackson Hole for a 20-day filming mission for One World with Red Gerard, Mark McMorris, Brock Crouch, Alex Andrews, and a high-profile backcountry newcomer, Anna Gasser.
“Jackson was awesome,” Davis said. “We were there straight through from Dew Tour in February to the Burton U.S. Open in March. It was really fun, and really humbling, to be hitting backcountry kickers with some of the biggest jumpers in the world. They’re so consistent in contests, then you take them to the backcountry and nothing really changes. Any trick they can do, they can do on a pow kicker. Anna showed up and we got her stoked on snowmobiling – it was her first time on a snowmobile, which is always tricky, especially when the snow is neck-deep – and it was pretty rad to get her into the backcountry a little bit since her career was really straight into the contest scene.”
Luke Winkelmann filmed for One World in the streets of Minneapolis for seven days, between Dew Tour and the U.S. Open, with a crew that included Ethan Deiss, Niels Schack, and 2020 Dew Tour Streetstyle champion Maria Thomsen. Among his triumphs that made it into the film is a half Cab tail press backside 180 on the famed Harding kink, a down-flat-down rail.
“I battled that one for a minute so that was sick to get it in there,” Winkelmann said. “It’s hard to even put into words what being in this film means to me: doing this for Jake and even just being in a Burton movie in the first place. It was one of my biggest dreams as a kid, growing up snowboarding, like, ‘I want to be one of those dudes doing that.’ I know it’s what Jake would want us to do: stay on snow, stay up, have fun.”
For Ben Ferguson, One World represents the next step in a move away from the contest scene in recent years, to focus almost solely on backcountry riding. He spent much of his season in Canada and Alaska with a crew that included Mikey Rencz, Mark Sollors, and Mikkel Bang.
“Those dudes are veterans at what they do and they have Canada kinda dialed, so it was a real learning experience,” Ferguson said. “Being in Canada, riding super steep, tight, featured zones was different for me, and I had to fall and fail a bunch, but any time you’re doing something that you want to be worth filming, you’re getting outside your comfort zone. That’s the feeling that we’re chasing.”
Addressing the crowd of cars lined up for the drive-in movie premiere, Red Gerard said that with a lot of question marks hanging over the coming season, he hopes One World inspires his fellow snowboarders to take the opportunity to similarly explore some other sides of snowboarding.
“Surround yourself with some good people that you know have the right awareness and the right avalanche training, which is going to be big this year with all the restrictions and reservation systems at the resorts,” Gerard said. “Get your avy training!”
Burton’s One World – presented by Mountain Dew, Toyota, Polartec, New Belgium Fat Tire, Bank of the West, and Anon – will be available for streaming on Amazon Prime beginning November 17.
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