If instead of Barbie, Greta Gerwig had had to spend 2022 remaking Hot Dog… the Movie, after living and working a couple of seasons in a ski town, Weak Layers might be the result.
Luckily for us, mountain culture has its own Greta Gerwig and her name is Katie Burrell. Our very own ‘action sports’ cult antihero’, as she was crowned by the Mountain Culture jury of the 2023 Whistler Film Festival, where Weak Layers had its BC premiere and received Honorable Mention in the Best Mountain Culture Feature Film award. The film has been picked up for mainstream distribution and will be screening in theatres in the new year, as of January 5. Will it revive the ski comedy as a genre? Here’s hoping.
If you aren’t on social media, it might seem like she’s coming outta nowhere, but her legion fans on Instagram and tiktok have been laughing at her satirical skewerings of influencer culture and mountain culture, for 500 posts, and several short films and branded collabs, over the last 6 or 7 years. At screenings, Burrell has been catcalled by fans, “I love you!”, and met people who feel like they’re personally invested in her success, because the’ve been following her for so long.
At the Whistler Film Fest, she told the audience, that she thinks of Cleo Brown, the film’s heroine, who she plays, as “a bit of an everywoman. I don’t think feeling like an outsider, feeling like it’s scary to go after the things that matter to you the most, because it’s worse to fail at something you love more than it would be to fail at something you don’t care about… I don’t think that feeling is specific to her character. I think people, and women in particular, experience it all across many different areas of expertise. She was the vessel to bring some of the more universal themes to light – things like getting out of your own way, not being your own worst enemy anymore, making a focussed effort to level up your status in life or chase your dreams. I feel like those were some of the limitations we wanted to have Cleo’s arc break through. And from a personal perspective, there’s a lot of stuff I was able to pull from my own life and my own career.”
I interviewed Katie just after the film’s premiere at the Banff Mountain Film Festival, on the day the trailer launched. She shared that she left her screenwriting degree unfinished when she and her producer partner Colleen Gentemann got the funding to make Dream Job, and I loved the idea that she wasn’t going to wait until she was more ready, more formally qualified.
“A lot of people I really respect and have talked to in this industry and really look up to, are not necessarily highly educated perfectly trained individuals. They have done it their own way. I just felt like the position I had gotten myself into in life required the same thing. It’s been a lot of years of investing in myself and trying to prove to who-knows-who that I have something to offer an audience. And somewhere along the lines, I got the message that it’s more valuable to have an audience and people hungry for your style of entertainment, than it is to have polished things that nobody has seen. So I had to get really comfortable with being scrappy and shitty and making people LOL.
Because obviously I wish I was a Greta Gerwig, but if you look at Greta Gerwig where she started , she was making mumblecore. Her trajectory was exponential, but she did a lot here… along the flat. And then it went bump bump boom.
The idea of just making stuff to learn, and develop yourself, versus being very precious about your work, is huge for growth.
I also think there’s something to be said for failing publicly, because I think that’s one of the hardest things about this work, and it’s also one of the most endearing to your audience. People don’t mind an underdog. They can see their own journeys, their own careers, their own lives, whether they’re a realtor or a writer or a resident…
People that have been following me since I had 500 followers, feel like they’re along for a ride. I met someone in Banff who said, “I feel like I am invested in you.” So I’m like, great, nobody’s judging me for putting out shitty stuff. And if they are, fuck ‘em. I don’t care. I used to care. I don’t care anymore. You know what I mean? How the fuck else am I going to learn? How else? You got a better idea for me, let me know, because I don’t like failing publicly either, but it seems to be what I have to do. People aren’t handing me millions of dollars saying, ‘hey person that has no experience, go do this.’ You have to prove it. You prove it via your bodies of work that are public.”
Katie Burrell
The great story arc of Katie Burrell is that the risk she took, on herself, on Dream Job, landed her the attention of the team at Realization Films, who invested in her to level-up and make a feature film. Weak Layers is her feature writing and directorial debut and it showcases her as an actor and a romantic lead, not just as a social media caricature… and you can count me, for sure, amongst the fans who are rooting for her to keep levelling up and keep telling stories that make us all feel seen.
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