WEAK LAYERS REVIVES THE SKI COMEDY GENRE WITH A ROWDY TROUPE OF SHEROES
Among a crowd devoted to looking cool in all conditions, Revelstoke’s Katie Burrell has made her name doing the opposite. On her Instagram channel, @katieburrelltv, she spent six years playing for laughs, celebrating the flailer who tries to keep up with gnarcore companions.
Burrell’s cringey takes from deep within mountain culture are an outlet for anyone who has ever had to be (trigger alert) the weakest skier in a group. It’s garnered her a growing and devoted audience of people who love where they live and play, identify strongly with the culture, but rarely see their own experiences reflected back at them in the movies, ads or events.
Now Burrell has gone Hollywood with Weak Layers, a full-length feature filmthat debuted at mountain film festivals last fall. Set in Tahoe, the birthplace of the cult ‘80s ski movie, it’s a full-length feature film paying homage to the crazy cocktail of characters that make a ski town—wealthy outsiders intrigued by the impenetrably cool culture, the everyday debauchery of the party scene, the icy glamour of the pros, and the “nobodies” who power the entire machine. “We wanted it to feel like the ski industry made a movie for Hollywood, not Hollywood making a movie for the ski industry,” Burrell says.
Taking place during a fictional 72-hour filmmaking contest that brings the biggest names in ski films to town, Weak Layers centres on Cleo Brown (Burrell) and her two newly homeless roommates who enter the contest as a Hail Mary to win their next month’s rent. Co-written with L.A. screenwriter Andrew Ladd, it’s a premise that lets Burrell take aim at almost every ski comedy cliché there is. (Screenings should come with a Ski Movie Inside Baseball Bingo sheet.) “There were definitely tropes we wanted to hit,” she admits. “And there was definitely an intention around resurrecting the ski comedy drama but doing a more progressive take on it without being overtly woke or tokenist. And I really wanted the characters to feel as authentically steeped in ski culture as possible.”
Apart from a cameo role for KC Deane, the cast is made up of professional actors, not skiers. Burrell was constantly “futzing” her co-star, Evan Jonigkeit, between takes. “There was a whole scene I had to cut because he looked like a gorby, and I cannot sell that he’s the hottest, coolest guy in skiing if he has a fricking goggle gap because he’s an actor from Florida.”
Burrell sees the film as a coming-of-age story. The whole genre is about laughing at the seriousness with which we take ourselves, but the central joke is that coming of age doesn’t happen until you’re in your thirties if you’re in a ski town.” Burrell also takes aim at what ski movies have become, having trended so far away from the playful silly ethos of the Shane McConkey, GNAR, Saucerboy, Gaffney brothers era. “They say we make the art we need to see. I needed to see something that teased back this hyper-dramatic-serious over-the-top icons-building culture that has become really exclusionary and toxic, and frankly, boring.” For Burrell, if you’re having fun, you’re winning.
Weak Layers went “full send” to mainstream theatres in early January, signalling a new era for the ski movie, and Burrell’s coming-of-age moment too.
_Lisa Richardson
