Brian Sisselman Story

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE LENS

If someone were to make a movie about Brian Sisselman’s life, the film might open with an aerial shot of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, circa mid-1950s. The panorama might include a long shot of snow-draped mountains, with the lens lingering on a small slope called Bosquets. The camera would then capture a dark-haired three-year-old boy, sliding down a novice slope on shiny new skis.

A close-up of the child’s face would reveal brown eyes lit by an inner fire. The boy seems to belong on the snow. At the bottom of the hill he slows, points his skis inward, then glides to a stop, agile and steady, even at the age of three. 

The young boy gazes at a distant mountain—sizeable to competent skiers, colossal to this toddler—and the camera follows his gaze. Wiping melting snowflakes off his long eyelashes, he shades his eyes to capture the sight of skiers gliding down the far-off slopes like birds in flight. The boy’s brow furrows momentarily before his small face breaks into a broad grin. Plunging his tiny poles in the snow, he pushes off towards the rope tow to do it all over again. 

Cut to a crowded middle school auditorium. It’s nighttime, and there’s a performance about to begin. People are talking and laughing kids dart in and out; men, women, and children of all ages congregate, milling about, waiting. The auditorium lights flash and someone yells, “It’s time! Take your seats! The movie’s about to start!” Still chattering, people migrate to their chairs. The sounds of jackets rustling, chairs scraping the floor, and mothers shushing their children slowly quiets the auditorium as it darkens and a 16-mm movie projector begins its noisy hum. 

The camera focuses on the boy, now eight, perched in between his parents on a folding chair in the crowded room. Music from the film comes up. The boy’s eyes are riveted to the screen in anticipation. Even before the voice on the projector can say the familiar words, “Hi, I’m Warren Miller,” the crowd erupts into frenzied hoots and applause. The room is electric with the energy and excitement of a rock concert. 

The scene moves to a close-up shot of the boy. Light from the movie projector flickers on his face. People around him blur into the shadows. It’s just the boy, the skiers on the screen and the voice from the projector. 

A Day of Reckoning

Brian Sisselman—the three-year-old on the slopes, the schoolboy in the auditorium—might have grown up to become an Olympian, a racer, a jumper, a freestyler, a title holder, or a champion. Instead, he became a filmmaker who has made films about…skiing. 

It’s a variation of the old adage, Those who can’t, teach. In this case, it’s Those who can’t, make movies. Brian does admit to a day of reckoning when his dreams of competing in the Olympics were brought to earth with the realization that being a great high school ski racer doesn’t necessarily equate to an Olympic athlete. Brian had wowed the locals while growing up, winning local and regional ski races not only in Millbrook School, but at the University of Vermont, as well. Speed and talent notwithstanding, however, Brian couldn’t quite measure up against national-level skiers. 

Academics and skiing swapped places and Brian began to focus more intently on his studies. During his final year of college, he made a decision that, as it turned out, was pivotal, though at the time he didn’t know how important it would be. He was selecting his coursework and needed a fine arts class. Scanning the choices in the schedule, his eyes landed on a film class. Why not? He took the course, liked it—and was hooked. Though the fire in his soul for skiing still burned, a new fire was lit that blazes vividly to this day. 

Stumbling onto filmmaking during his senior year in college opened up a whole new world to Brian, yet here he was at the end—not the beginning—of his college career. He had fallen in love with cinematography, but he knew next to nothing about it. Brian knew he had a lot to learn and a long way to go before he could feel confident, let alone adept, at making films, so he made another pivotal decision. Brian applied to and was accepted at UCLA film school. 

Brian is standing beside a Ford Pinto. With him is one of his former professors. The car is packed and overflowing. Brian has just graduated from UCLA Film School.

PROFESSOR: Hey, Brian, before you head back east, why don’t you stop off in Hermosa Beach and talk to a guy named Warren Miller? Maybe show him your thesis film.

BRIAN: Warren Miller. Whoa. Now that’s a name I haven’t heard for years. 

PROFESSOR: He’s still around. Makes ski movies. Right up your alley. 

BRIAN: Warren Miller. Gee, why not?

Brian still remembers how he felt the day he walked into Warren Miller’s office that Friday afternoon in June. He was instantly transported to his boyhood, sitting in auditoriums or museums on crisp fall evenings with scores of other ski aficionados, participating in the annual rite of passage from fall into winter. If you’re a skier, then you know that ski season doesn’t officially begin until you’ve watched the latest Warren Miller ski film.

Brian speaks reverently of “the man behind the voice”, as if he is still in awe at what happened that day. He was meeting one of the great icons of skiing, truly a living legend. “His world renowned voice was actually conversing with me. It was the voice behind the magic of the movies, the incarnation of all my boyhood dreams.” 

It’s hard to picture Brian Sisselman uttering these words. Now fifty-one and looking for all the world like the respectable corporate type he is, with cropped and curly salt-and-pepper hair, Brian has a couple of kids of his own waiting for him at home. Yet here he sits in his office in Portland, Maine, sipping coffee and talking about dreams and fantasies and boyhood idols and the time he first met Warren Miller in the ski cinematographer’s office in Southern California. 

After following Warren into the screening room, Brian sat while the ski maestro threaded up Brian’s graduate thesis film, “Ski America.” While they viewed the film, Brian became acutely conscious of all the mistakes he’d failed to notice during the editing process. He wished he could sink into his chair, slide to the floor, and slither out the door. If he had, though, he would’ve missed Warren’s “critique” as the credits rolled. 

 “First he accused me of stealing his ideas,” Brian recalls, “but then he said the film wasn’t bad. But then I was really taken when he asked, ‘Do you think you might like working in a place like this? Why don’t you give me a call on Monday, and we’ll talk again.’”

That was a Friday. Monday morning, Brian was back in his office, and Warren Miller spoke the words that would catapult Brian into a career he considers the “ultimate ski bum fantasy”—Can you start today?

“That was the beginning of a long history of making ski films,” says Brian, who not only began working for Warren Miller the following Monday, but he continued his association with Warren Miller Productions for the next twenty-five years. “I knew the stars had lined up for me. I was at the right place at the right time with the right film in my hand. It was like a dream, and the dream hasn’t stopped.” 

Brian’s dream career took him to places that can only be described as extreme. He has literally crossed the globe and back (“I’ve skied all seven continents,” he says), filming the superstars of winter: snowboarders, freestyle skiers, mogul skiers, racers, jumpers, and speed skiers. All of these Brian has captured on film as they skied steep descents and carved fresh tracks through virgin terrain, performing aerials off rocky ledges, sometimes landing, sometimes careening, always (somehow) emerging triumphant. He filmed extreme skiers dropping from helicopters and attacking fifty-degree couloirs before carving up waist-deep powder in the trees. 

Watching these ski gods and goddesses soar in logic-defying aerobatics, flouting the laws of physics and treating with utter contempt the gravitational laws by which most of us live, it’s easy to forget the man behind the lens. Yet for each rocky ledge from which a snowboarder launched into space or for every glacier an extreme skier descended, there was a cameraman nearby, precariously perched on an adjacent ridge, bearing the weight not only of his own ski gear but thousands of dollars of filming equipment as well. 

If it sounds treacherous, it is. Nevertheless, in spite of the inherently risky nature of this business, the name of the game is safety. “The fewer people we bring out, the better,” Brian says. “You don’t want to put that many people in extreme environments. I usually go out with myself and three skiers.” Depending on where a particular shot will take place, Brian and his crew of skiers will either hike to the location, occasionally roping in together, or fly in by helicopter. “Heli-skiing is an amazing tool for gaining access to impossible spots,” he explains. “The helicopter can toe-in while the crew jumps out on the ridge. You’re literally straddling the mountain, and when you begin your descent, it’s almost like standing next to a wall, with your shoulder brushing the side of the mountain. That’s how steep it is.” 

Of course, getting to those slopes is only half the risk. In remote conditions such as these, the wintertime weather can change unexpectedly and dramatically. “Sometimes we’re shooting hours from civilization in an extreme location that has no mercy for anyone. If you’re an hour away from camp and bad weather comes in, you run the risk of not being able to find your way back.”

Then there’s the ever-present peril of avalanches. “No school can tell you how to survive an avalanche. If you get caught in one, it’s just bad luck. Once I was filming five of the best skiers in the world in Canada. I remember at one point telling the crew, because the light was bad, ‘Let’s stop now and go back down for some lunch.’ While we were down the mountain, we heard about a massive avalanche that killed nine guests from our lodge. They had been in the same area that we had been filming.”

It goes without saying that in an outdoor business like Brian’s, which requires a hearty dose of both artistic vision and physical stamina, good health is a prerequisite. And for many years, good health was a given for Brian. He claims, in fact, that he never had any physical problems growing up. That all changed dramatically when Brian turned thirty-one years old. 

“I was living in Colorado at the time,” Brian recalls. “I was married to Jenna by then, and I began to get bouts of severe diarrhea that would strike randomly and without notice. I couldn’t figure out what was causing it. There was no connection between what I ate and when I would have these attacks.”

Brian told nobody about these episodes, even when they began to interfere with his work. “One time when filming I knew I was going to have to leave immediately,” he recalls. “I made up some excuse—like a piece of camera equipment broke—and I raced down the mountain to find a toilet. It was definitely getting to be a problem.”

The defining moment came while filming in the backcountry of Colorado. Brian, who by then had lost a significant amount of weight, knew that the situation was out of control. He checked himself into the hospital, and for the first time in his life heard the term “ulcerative colitis.” The doctor examining him even mentioned the possibility of surgery. 

Brian remembers being overwhelmed with disbelief when he heard the news. “I’d had no warm up,” he says. “I was angry and determined that this was not going to happen to me.” At that point, he says, he went into serious denial. He began Prednisone treatments, which helped get the symptoms under control—so much so that he assumed he was a cured man. He convinced himself that none of this was happening to him. 

For nearly two years he fooled himself into believing he was well. When his symptoms returned, he pretended to be already booked when freelance assignments came up, rather than admit he was too sick to take the job. Like a man stranded on the side of a mountain, bracing himself against the avalanche that would rip him from his perch and send him plummeting into a heap below, Brain felt desperate, despondent and vulnerable. Only then did he begin to consider surgery. 

Making the decision to have the surgery was overwhelming for Brian. The thought of changing his body so dramatically did not seem like a good choice. He would also be giving up the hope that the medication would permanently control his disease. Brian and Jenna recall sitting in their home in Vail, Colorado, knowing their world had been invaded by this uncontrollable disease. Going over the options—or lack of options—they knew that the surgical route would be frightening and final. Brian would need a lot of luck to continue his filming career. 

With great reluctance, Brian submitted to ostomy surgery. Recovery was slow and painful—physically (“I guess I have a low pain threshold,” he confesses) and emotionally (“It was overwhelming to deal with the changes.”). There was also the dramatic change in self-image. 

“I think what happened scared him,” Jenna says. In the beginning, she was the one who changed Brian’s bags for him. Her early attempts were awkward. “The first time took two hours!” she recalls, shaking her head. In his early funk, Brian remembers telling his wife, “Honey, you’re going to have to help me with this for the rest of my life!”

But, as Brian says now, eventually human nature takes over. “You take one step, then the next, and slowly you get better.” It wasn’t long before he began to manage the pouch himself, a task he can now accomplish in three to seven minutes. He spent the summer recuperating, taking walks, and sitting in the sunshine. By August, he felt good enough to accept a job filming in the Colorado Sand Dunes, with surgical tubes still hanging out of his stomach. The following winter, Brian found himself in a Twin Otter seaplane, skimming over the waves of Drake Passage, en route to perhaps the most dangerous filming expedition of his career: Antartica, one of the most hostile and desolate regions in the world. 

He felt great.

He was back where he belonged.

The dream was alive.