Movie Spotlight: Uphill

The car hit. Three days in the NICU, then a flight home to Anchorage to recover, and somewhere in the middle of all that a film started forming about people who come back to Alaska and realize they can’t remember who they were there.

That’s where Uphill began for writer-director Adam D. Boyer. He’d moved to Los Angeles to work in film and felt, by his own account, adrift. The near-death experience cracked something open. He was 27 when he wrote the first draft, and the film carries that specific feeling: being on a path that might not be the right one, with enough life behind you to know it but not quite enough to change it.

The mountain as the only room

Boyer could have set his reunion story in a bar or an apartment. He put it on a mountain because of what a mountain does to a conversation: nobody can leave. There’s no signal. Three people who used to know each other and now barely do are stuck together for hours with nothing to do but talk. The isolation, Boyer says, is what makes honesty possible between characters who would never choose it in an ordinary social context. The title is literal, but it’s also everything else the film is about.

Who you were at sixteen

A lot of Uphill is about the gap between who you expected to become and who you actually are. Boyer isn’t shy about where that came from. “I think all of us are still the person we were when we were 16, no matter how much we don’t want to admit it,” he says. “I was a very awkward, baby-faced kid who was terrified of everything and a decade plus later I’m still an awkward, baby-faced kid who’s terrified of everything. Only now I have a beard and student loan debt.”

Eagle River in July: moose, rain, and a 10pm mountaintop

Production shot in Eagle River in July and it rained almost every day. Continuity was a problem because the weather changed every few minutes. Victoria Summer Felix, who plays Annie, was shivering every time Boyer called cut. On the other side of the ledger: Alaskan summer daylight runs from 4am to 11:30 at night, which opened the schedule considerably. The film’s climactic mountaintop scene was shot at 10pm. You can’t tell. Two moose walked onto the set during production; they made the cut. So did a marmot. The crew also encountered a black bear in the parking lot, which did not.

Directing and acting at the same time

Boyer plays Doug, one of the three classmates. It was his first time acting and directing simultaneously, and he doesn’t know if he recommends it. The moment he called cut, the actor brain had to stop and the director brain had to take over: coverage, timing, the next shot. No moment to breathe. He and co-star Matthew Rush, who also produced, drove the Alaska-Canada highway from Seattle to location over three days and spent most of the drive running lines in the backseat, which Boyer credits as the reason the whole thing didn’t fall apart.

What to know before you press play

Boyer pitches Uphill as My Dinner with Andre meets The Breakfast Club on a mountain. “It’s a movie about ordinary people,” he says, “people who happen to be from Alaska, taking pause in a unique moment in their life with people they wouldn’t normally be around.” It’s not a survival story or a bear-attack movie. It’s a film about what people say to each other when the usual ways of not saying it have all been taken away.

Comedy

---

Streaming now on Relay.