Katie Burrell is a comedian, writer, director, actor and creator of numerous online videos and skits such as Influencer, Dream Job, Still Solo and more. She’s one of the most recognizable figures in the ski community and has broken new ground with using comedy to poke fun at, and invite people into, the sports we love.
Katie’s first feature film, Weak Layers, is in theatres now and on Apple TV and Amazon Prime on February 6. She’s here talking to Feet Banks about betting on herself and her ideas to make the leap from ski-scene celebrity to the hallowed grounds of Hollywood and beyond. (Note: This episode contains profanity.)
The Road to Weak Layers
“Shooting content, editing it in two days and putting it on the internet is a really quick kind of validation. Like in standup comedy, you immediately get the laugh, boom, there it is. But with a [feature] film there’s a year of writing, a year of prep and pre-production, three months of shooting. And then a year of post-production until it’s in front of audiences. And so when we got to Banff for the premiere, I was nervous because it’s like the stakes were so much higher, you know? And having now been able to show it to audiences, it’s just the best feeling in the world and it’s made me like the movie again, you know?
But I think during post [-production] you start to hate it, right? You’re like, Oh God, this moves so slowly. These characters are so annoying. What was I thinking with this idea? And then you go to theaters and people laugh at the thing you laughed at the first time you saw it. But a hundred times later, you don’t think anything’s funny anymore or don’t think anything’s entertaining anymore. So having an audience come in has given me new life and new energy. And this is the joy of this whole process really—giving it to the audience it was intended for.”
The writing process
ML: Did you find joy in the writing process? Were you laughing at your own jokes while you were writing it?
KB: You just set me up here to tell you that. I laugh at my own jokes! My dad always says, ‘I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t think it was funny.’ Andrew Ladd my co-writer and I had some gigglefests for sure. And I think in part that was because we were writing things we had lived ourselves. And so it was sort of cathartic in a sense to be now creating scenes that were directly out of lived experiences or lived experiences of friends. It felt so close to the bone, or close to the heart in some cases. And so it was a hilarious, therapeutic and fun writing process.
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Revelstoke’s Inspiration
“We still all love to party and we love to have a good time, but yeah, we got into lots of mischief in those [early] years. And so that was a major inspiration [for the film]. There’s something about the mischief that you get into as a young person in a ski town that’s like extra funny in some ways because it’s a playful group that finds their way to ski towns.
The year that we moved to Revelstoke was one of the craziest snow years—2010- 2011. We met so many people who moved there that year, who live there. It just sucked people in that year. We were going out to The Last Drop and The Regent and the fake-smoking cigarettes outside ’cause you wanna talk to a guy and get ’em alone. We were just trouble—picking up dudes, bringing them back to the bunk beds, saying goodnight to each other. We were just hell on wheels. And that was really a major inspiration for the main characters.
So I don’t know if skiers in general are just troublemakers sometimes, but I wanted to bring that kind of rowdiness in and have that element in the film, but also make sure there was a real story as well. It wasn’t just partying … a personal growth story is ultimately what grounds the entire film, you know?”
Listen to the full episode here.
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