A film director and producer, Les Guthman has produced 33 prime time documentaries, received numerous awards, and was the man behind three of the '20 Top Adventure DVDs of All Time'. SnagFilms' Katie Klein sits down with the adventure film titan to discuss his career and three of his epic films, Messner, Churning the Sea of Time, and The Waterkeepers.

SF: Can you tell us a little about Reinhold Messner, the climber who is the focus of your film? Especially as a pioneer and role model for future climbers.

Reinhold Messner is the most accomplished mountain climber of modern times.  His solo ascent of Mt. Everest in 1980 without using bottled oxygen is considered the greatest climb in history and he was the first climber to summit all 14 8,000 meter peaks (26,247 ft.) without using supplemental oxygen.  Only one American, Ed Viesturs, has done that.  Messner lives in the spectacular Dolomites in Northern Italy, where he was born and began climbing as a child.  His fierce dedication to alpine-style climbing should be a model for future climbers.  As he says in the film, “If we kill the impossible with sophisticated technical climbing equipment, climbing will be gone forever.”

SF: Filming on a mountain, needless to say, poses a unique set of challenges. Can you tell us a little bit about what it’s like to shoot in such extreme conditions?

I’m not a climber.  But my good friend Michael Brown, whose profile also is on Snagfilms, is among the best cameramen and directors of high-altitude films shot under extreme conditions.  I was executive producer of his film, “Farther Than the Eye Can See,” which was cited by the Banff Film Festival as perhaps the finest cinematography ever shot on Everest.  He’s summited Everest six times as a cameraman and director.  I defer to Michael on this question.

SF: Do you think Messner—forgoing bottled oxygen, traveling alone—sometimes went too far? What did you make of his choice to regularly put his life at such serious risk?

No.  He was climbing in the finest tradition of exploration.  He says in our film, “the heart of adventure is the unknown.” Without the unknown, it is not adventure.  Strenuous exercise, physical accomplishment, mental toughness, but not adventure in the pure sense.  Before his first climb of Everest without using bottled oxygen, in 1978 with his climbing partner Peter Habeler, everyone thought humans could not survive in the “Death Zone” without supplemental oxygen, or at least that a climber would go mad or “lose his mind.” Messner proved them wrong and in doing so set a new gold standard for high-altitude climbing.  He was actually a very careful, cautious climber; who, on that solo ascent of Everest two years later, waited, waited and waited until he thought conditions were right.  Many people are surprised by his comment in the film that he was seeking above all, “a better understanding of myself,” in challenging the unknown; but that is the most interesting answer anyone has given me to the question of why they climb.

SF: How has the sport changed for better or for worse because of his exploits?

Messner did not change the sport - he set the ultimate standard for achievement in climbing.  In fact, he climbed Alpine style, without the aid of bottled oxygen, fixed ropes and the latest climbing equipment.  Not being a climber, I’m not in a position to offer opinions about how the sport has changed, except to observe that climbing in the popular media is too often associated with Everest.  The crowds permitted on Everest and the marketing of guided summit expeditions have changed climbing there, as much as anything else, as Jon Krakauer described more than a decade ago in “Into Thin Air.” But there are few crowds on the other great Himalayan peaks.  And every climber will tell you the best pure climbing isn’t in the 8,000-meter Himalayan peaks anyway.  It might be in the Tetons, or in Patagonia, or somewhere else, depending on the climber.

SF: What was your goal in directing The Waterkeepers?

I wanted to profile the extraordinary men and women I met who were working to protect rivers, bays and other water bodies as part of Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s Waterkeeper Alliance.  These are young lawyers who are taking polluters to court under the federal Clean Water Act.  They’re on the front lines of protecting the environment, both here in the U.S. and now around the world.  I wanted to bring their stories to the film - both to feature their battles to clean up Puget Sound, Santa Monica Bay, the Cook Inlet in Alaska, the Willamette River in Oregon, the Neuse in North Carolina, and even the Hackensack River in New Jersey; and to bring their individual stories to film:  Like Rick Dove, a former Marine Corps judge, who retired to the Neuse River, opened a crabbing business with his son and became so incensed by the terrible pollution of the Neuse by the many industrial pig farms upstream that he signed up to become the Neuse Riverkeeper and take the pig factories to court.  The Waterkeepers are my environmental heroes, and they’re fiercely effective.

SF: Tell us about your relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. How did you two come to make films together?

I’ve known Bobby most of my life.  My father was a close friend and aide to his father, Robert Kennedy, in the Justice Department during the Kennedy Administration.  I remember when Bobby was nine years old and kept a dozen or more animals, including a falcon, at Hickory Hill, his family home in McLean, Va.  He loved the natural world even then, amid the glamour and seductiveness of his father and uncle’s ascent to the pinnacle of American politics and power.  When I created Outside Television in the mid-1990s, the production division of Outside magazine, one of the first films I wanted to make was the story of Bobby’s great work on the Hudson River as the attorney for the Hudson Riverkeeper foundation.  I was out with Bobby on the Hudson shooting that film on the 25th anniversary of passage of the Clean Water Act.  After “The Hudson Riverkeepers,” I came back and made “The Waterkeepers.”

SF: What can one do now to support river, bay and soundkeepers? Could you tell us a little about the Waterkeeper Alliance?

The Waterkeeper Alliance is the organization Bobby formed to expand the work that he and John Cronin, the former Hudson Riverkeeper, achieved in helping to clean up the Hudson, taking the legal tools and political strategies they developed to rivers, bays and lakes all across the U.S. and now around the world.  Foremost, the waterkeepers work to insure that federal and state anti-pollution laws are enforced.  Often these laws and regulations are not enforced.  Waterkeepers take polluters, state governments, and even the EPA to court, again, to insure that the fairly strong anti-pollution laws already on the books, are enforced, or are not watered down by regulators.  River by river, bay by bay, stream by stream, it’s an endlessly fascinating organization.  You can go to their website, www.waterkeeper.org , to find out what they’re doing in your community.  You can support them by helping to publicize their work, if you work in the media, or by sending them money to help pay for that great work.

SF: In Churning the Sea of Time, why did you feel it was important to have your vantage point on the river as opposed to the land?

I always wanted to make a film going up the Mekong River through Vietnam and Cambodia.  I think it is one of the great mythic journeys of our time, given how deeply the Vietnam War impacted modern America, whether you were old enough to remember the war or not.  So it was a river trip from the beginning.  At the same time, I’ve always had enormous respect for the World Monuments Fund and its work restoring endangered historical sites and structures around the world, including its seminal work restoring the magnificent ruins at Angkor in Cambodia after the fall of the Khmer Rouge.  My two interests were linked in Francis Ford Coppola’s film, “Apocalypse Now,” in which Martin Sheen journeys up a river described as “the main circuit cable” in the Vietnam War to Cambodia and an Angkor-like compound, where Marlon Brando has created his own Khmer kingdom of evil.  In certain times of the year, you can take a boat up the Mekong through Vietnam and Cambodia, then turn left at Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, and continue up the Tonle Sap river to Angkor.  Which is what we did, following with some artistic license, Martin Sheen’s journey into the heart of darkness - although in this case, the story of the World Monument Fund’s work in Angkor at the end of our journey was a symbol of all the positive changes that time has brought to Southeast Asia, rather than a descent into Col. Kurtz’ hell.

SF: You described the film as a story of the “rebirth of Cambodia”. What did you mean by this?

After the devastating U.S. bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War and then the holocaust brought to the Cambodian people by the Khmer Rouge communists, who were Cambodians themselves, in which as many as two million people died, out of a population of seven million, the entire country was in a state that is almost incompressible to us even today, after everything we’ve witnessed in the Balkans, Rwanda, Darfur and Iraq. Phnom Penh had been emptied of its population.  Hundreds of thousands of land mines had been laid everywhere, by all sides, (there are still hundreds of casualties-a-year from land mines today, 30 years later).  When John Stubbs and John Sanday from the World Monuments Fund were first invited to Cambodia, they had no idea what to expect.  No one knew if the great Angkor ruins had been blown up, at worst, or overtaken by the jungle, at best.  Stubbs and Sanday describe in the film their two-decades of work restoring several important sites at Angkor.  Through their stories and the eyes of our guide and their protege, Kin-po Thai, a brilliant young Cambodian from a village near Angkor, we get a sense of the rebirth of Cambodia after the trauma of the profound devastation and genocide during the decade of the 1970s.

SF: Please describe what it meant for you and your crew to be part of what seemed to be a very personal journey.

It wasn’t a personal journey.  I had no personal link to Southeast Asia and it is not a film about the Vietnam War.  Retracing that history was of no interest to me in the film, although I highly recommend the American Library’s compilation of the best reporting on Vietnam for anyone who wants to understand the war.  I wanted to travel up the river and give a sense of what that journey is like today.  But I am an American, and as such, one can’t travel up the Mekong without invoking a sense of history, if only of distance in time, because that is what time gives us, mercilessly.

SF: Some would argue you’re an “Adventure” filmmaker. Others consider you an “Environmental” filmmaker. But how do you characterize your work?

I spent nearly 10 years at NBC News in New York; I brought two great magazines to television, Discover, at Disney and Outside, when I was head of Outside Television.  The DISCOVER MAGAZINE series I created was a science series and I never had more fun and or more thrills in my career.  Adventure, the Environment, Science and the news are all related.  In fact, you can’t delve seriously into any of the four without having a good working knowledge or understanding of each of the other three.  Network news is the best training ground for anyone working in documentaries.  You learn very quickly how to write and produce under the intense pressure of going live across the nation at 6:30 pm, no excuses; and you’re often doing that five nights a week.  Producing a magazine show one night a week lessens the daily pressure but geometrically increases the stakes.  I was fortunate to produce television series working in concert with the writers and editors of Discover and Outside.  It was a two-way street, such as a cover story in Discover about a giant Jurassic fish lizard that we found on a shoot with Dinosaur hunter and heretic Bob Bakker in Wyoming; and the Tsangpo Gorge expedition that Scott Lindgren and I produced at Outside Television which subsequently became a magazine cover story.  But I have had the wonderful opportunity to produce and direct films based on the magazines, which was really a license to do the best stories I found, regardless of whether they were science, adventure or environmental subjects—the best of all worlds for a writer, director or producer.

SF: You’ve had an amazing award winning career as a producer, writer, and director, from NBC News to creating the Discover Magazine television series and also Outside Television. Any aspect of your career you’d like to shine a light on for our viewers?

The opportunity that Snagfilms has provided XPLR to webcast many of these films around the world, 24/7, is incredibly meaningful.  Snagfilms is really doing exactly what John Hendricks did when he created the Discovery Channel three decades ago.  Hendricks went around finding documentaries to form the core of his new network.  My goal with XPLR is bring the best in adventure and environmental films to the web, and ultimately to build a viable distribution model with Snagfilms that will allow us to attract financing for new films and new series, while providing a permanent online theatrical venue for our best films from the past.

SF: What’s next on your plate?

Guthman: I’ve just finished “Skiing Everest,” a feature-length documentary about the small fraternity of men and women who climb 8,000-meter peaks in pure Alpine style - without using bottled oxygen, without bringing porters or expedition guides - and then click into their skis.  Mike and Steve Marolt, who are the focus of the film (and Mike was the director of photography) were the first people from the Western Hemisphere to ski from the summit of an 8,000-meter peak, when they skied Shisha Pangma in Nepal in 2000.  The film features their two ski expeditions to Everest and includes appearances by Hans Kammerlander, the legendary climber who was the first to ski from the top of Everest; Laura Bakos, the first woman to ski from 8,000 meters; and Chris Davenport, a two-time world extreme skiing champion, who is an avid high-altitude skier as well.  The footage is thrilling, to say the least.  “Skiing Everest” is just going out to film festivals and should be released theatrically next winter.  Next up:  3D adventure films.