Not Your Average Sports Movie: Lucy Walker on The Crash Reel

When film journalists write about documentary, there’s no cliché banded about more than the phrase “truth is stranger than fiction.” Filmmaker Lucy Walker has a new idiom with more snap than that overused platitude: “Life is the best screenwriter,” she muses by phone from London, adding: “if you pay attention.”

Few documentarians have sharper instincts for these true-life screenplays than Walker. Her keen eye has taken her around the world, seeking out compelling human drama in the most unlikely of places. It took her to Tibet, where she followed a group of visually impaired children as they attempted to scale a Himalayan peak (Blindside); it also took her to a rubbish dump in Rio de Janeiro for a large scale art project that would make Art Attack’s Neil Buchanan green with envy (Waste Land); and now, with her compelling new film The Crash Reel, it's taken her to the high-octane world of professional snowboarding, where young men and women spend their days somersaulting down towering half-pipes of ice.

Walker’s focus is on one young man in particular: Kevin Pearce, a likable adrenaline junkie who was, in 2009, a favourite to take gold at the upcoming Winter Olympics. But one miscalculation during pre-Olympics training left Pearce in a coma: he woke six days later with his vision doubled, his memory scrambled, and his coordination shot. It was a sad but hardly unique tale of a promising sports career cut short. But when Walker met Pearce by chance while mentoring at a retreat for athletes she realised that his story was far richer than a mere sob-story:

“I started to realise what an amazing man Kevin was and that his story wasn’t over at all, it was just about to get interesting because he wanted to get back,” she says. But this comeback had a terrible twist: Pearce’s doctors were telling him that if he hit his head again, even very lightly, he could die. “And you can’t do the stuff Kevin does without hitting yourself a lot – and very hard.”

The Crash Reel takes the form of two acts. The first is Pearce’s charmed life leading up to his accident. “I heard that the crash itself had been filmed by a random passerby and that got me thinking,” Walker explains. She thought: “‘Boy, there’s a lot of this story that has been captured on film.’ There’s nobody that’s filmed more than action sports athletes because it’s not just the sports themselves, it’s also the lifestyle and the sponsors and the friends – they’re always filming themselves and each other.” Walker pieces together this treasure trove of archive footage much in the way that Asif Kapadia assembled the brilliant Senna, creating an exhilarating collage of Pearce’s career through home movies, interviews and clips from sports programmes.

The found footage Walker uncovers is golden, brimming with Pearce’s wit and exuberance. It’s thrilling watching this gregarious young man grow before our eyes to be one of the finest snowboarders in the world. We quickly understand why Pearce would want to get back on the slopes. But bang in the middle of the film Walker throws a curveball in the shape of a heart-in-mouth montage – the crash reel of the title – showing Kevin and other adrenaline sports-nuts (skiers, BMXers, dirt bike riders, snowmobile drivers) wiping out during gravity-defying stunts that makes clear how these young athletes are putting their lives on the line for our entertainment. “I like that,” says Walker regarding the conflicting emotions one feels while watching The Crash Reel. “I like things that you can’t make up your mind about. If it’s simple, or obvious, or if you already know what you think about something, then it’s not very interesting. That’s the fascinating thing about this [snowboarding] world: it’s awe-inspiring. When you watch Kevin and his friends in action you’re on top of the world and you want to do those things too, but there’s another part of you that knows if these kids make a mistake it’s life or death, and things go wrong sometimes. So how much is too much risk?”

“Life is the best screenwriter – if you pay attention” - Lucy Walker

The Crash Reel isn’t only a great sports movie, it’s also a deeply humane one. The film takes a change of gear once we start to follow the footage Walker shot of Pearce as he slowly recovers from his injuries and inches his way back to the slopes, much to the horror of his family. “I quickly realised [the Pearce family] were fantastic and that they would let me film everything,” says Walker. “Part of my skill [as a documentary filmmaker], I think, is choosing the people I film because you really need people who are going to open up and let you in, to even the difficult stuff.” And things don’t get more difficult than the Pearce family members pleading with their loved one not to get back on a snowboard. It becomes clear that the former athlete’s love for his sport is like a drug: he’s addicted to the thrill, even though he knows it will most likely kill him. The family dinners that Walker quietly observes become like interventions.

“What you want is for people to just open up honestly about how much they’re struggling, and I realised this family had this philosophy that if you have a disability, or if you have a struggle, you needn’t shut up about it or be ashamed of it,” says Walker. “This philosophy is of course really healthy, and everything about this family is very functional, and that’s partly why I think their story is so strong, but it also makes for a fantastically watchable film because the audience really feels like they’re really getting in there and walking in the same emotional shoes as the family are in. It’s raw and direct and you really feel like you’re understanding what they’re going through.”

Pearce’s almost suicidal ambition to return to snowboarding left Walker feeling like she was making a feature-length snuff movie: “I thought, ‘Oh no, I’m making a tragedy in slow motion about this amazing young man killing himself before our very eyes.’ And I was very worried about what might happen.”

This proves to be The Crash Reel’s chief strength: the audience (and at the time the filmmaker) can’t anticipate the outcome. If this was a Hollywood movie, Pearce would recover in time to make the US Olympic team and snatch gold. Real life, as Walker’s film shows, is rather more complex. "That is the expected plot, and it’s very sly,” says Walker. “We’re subverting that idea that you always have to get back: you always have to get back on top to be a winner. That discretion is the better part of valour is not usually your Hollywood plotline, and that’s why it’s kind of a great twist, because I don’t think anybody knows where the story’s going. Which is a bit like life, right?”