With a passionate crew and a creative universe that drew inspiration from unlikely places, Dave Rouleau and Gnarcore flipped the script on snowboard films.
Words :: Cooper Saver
Hype is generally at odds with cool, particularly in the Whistler snowboard scene of the early 2000s. But when the Gnarcore crew needed to drum up attention for the premiere of their third no-budget shred flick Help Is On The Way, they turned to an unlikely source: David Bowie.
“Bowie was unknown in North America when he arrived in 1971,” says Dave Rouleau, co-founder of Gnarcore. “So he created a larger-than-life persona through DIY advertisements and photoshoots of himself roaming around New York city wearing eccentric clothes.”
Rouleau says Gnarcore copied the strategy to shift the narrative from “Who the hell are these people?” to “I need to pay attention to them.” They draped the inside of Merlin’s Bar with white sheets splattered in blood, painted signs, built light boxes with the film’s title and even rented a limo to drive directly up to their red-carpeted entrance with photographer friends enlisted to pose as paparazzi. Tickets to the premiere cost five bucks and were preprinted with a note that said, “You lucky bastard.”
It worked. The premiere sold out and Help Is On The Way became an instant classic and a calling card for the future. The liner notes to the film laid the Gnarcore mission out clearly: “Redefine what can be done with little budget, some imagination and really good snowboarding.”
Tickets to the premiere cost five bucks and were preprinted with a note that said, “You lucky bastard.”
Before GoPros, social media engagement statistics and relentless branded content, a keen shredder’s only window into local snowboard culture consisted of buying magazines or once-a-year DVDs (or VHS tapes) from a handful of local production crews like Whiskey or Skids. Rouleau flipped the script with a passionate crew, a website and a creative universe that would pull inspiration from anywhere (even skiers). But it wasn’t an easy path.
Dave Rouleau moved to Whistler in 2003, another wide-eyed 19-year-old snowboarder from Alberta ready to grab the local scene by the short and curlies. The reality didn’t quite line up—he found a segregated summer glacier scene and a lot of old-guard pros with a gatekeeping attitude.
“In the private camp parks, it was all these rock-star dudes with big egos,” Rouleau says. “I went from admiring them to, F*ck these guys, we’re gonna do our own thing. But over in the public park there were dudes like Robjn Taylor and Logan Short. No egos, no competition. These guys had something.”
“No egos, no competition. These guys had something.”
Sessioning the glacier every day, Rouleau took to sharing his staff meals out the back door of the restaurant where he worked, hooking up other cash-strapped up-and-comers. “I’d tell them to come by for some chicken fingers and fries, then they’d see me on the hill and be like, ‘Yo, Dave. You’re the homie now.’”
Despite a total lack of experience with filming or editing, Rouleau had vision—and an ally. Lauren Graham moved into the house he was renting (the now-legendary Art Barn) and she had film school credentials, industry experience and Shot In The Dark, a DIY all-female snowboard film under her belt. “I got to witness her making the films and doing the business side of it,” Rouleau says. “I absorbed everything she was doing.”
One helpful friend turned into many, and Rouleau began to understand the strength of a collective. “There’s power if you actually tell people your plans,” he says. “They get on board, they band together. It’s a force—the big dogs don’t understand us but we can do this. We can blow it up.”
Benny Stoddard, who was managing the terrain park at the time, saw the potential and wanted to come on board. Rouleau had already been stacking clips of his talented, lesser-known friends and Gnarcore Videoplay had officially begun. (The name was originally a joke: “It’s gotta be gnarly and it’s gotta be core!”)
“It’s like Fight Club, right? Buddy shows up with his duffel bag at the door, like, ‘I want in on this,’” says Rouleau. “People said, ‘Hey man, follow your dreams.’ I got pumped full of idealism and would have super-idealistic bouts of creativity that lasted for years.”
The Art Barn became a clubhouse for snowboarders who just wanted to shred, including future icons like Gerhard Gross, Molly Milligan, Keith Martin, Jess Kimura, Andrew Geeves and E-Man Anderson. And when Rouleau came home one day to find Whiskey filmmaker Sean Kearns and top snowboarder JP Walker visiting Graham, “She ended up showing them our first Gnarcore film right there in our house.”
Low on budget, high on creativity, Rouleau and Gnarcore released their second flick, Shoot The Ones You Love, in 2004. The success of Help Is On The Way (the hype worked) helped launch a number of careers, while other members of the Gnarcore roster moved on to start families and settle into adulthood. Not Rouleau, though. Alongside tech-savvy boarder/skater Lenny Rubenovitch, he rode the wave of stoke into a new platform: Web 2.0.
“I would look at websites in New York and L.A.” Rouleau says. “Whistler was pretty small, but it had that element to it—we knew it could be a cultural institution. So we started Gnarcore.com, just posting bar photos and having fun with it and just doing what’s ridiculous. It’s culture.”
With a weekly online blog and a series of short films and edits inspired by what was happening on skateboard platforms like The Berrics, the Gnarcore site gained popularity quickly thanks to their “Walk in the Park” series, which featured a single terrain park run from local slayers and visiting pros like Jake Kuzyk or “whoever else was sleeping on our floor that week.”
Carving their own space in the early days of the digital age gave Gnarcore global street cred and separated them from the Whistler crews that had come before. Recently, snowboard pro and Airtime podcast host Jody Wachniak said, “They created a ripple effect felt within snowboarding to this day.”
But the internet moves fast. “I was getting older, and still into older music,” Rouleau says. “I remember sitting in this home office I’d made with Dave Brocklebank. He was young and new, editing clips with his type of music and style. I saw a shift where I was like, ‘Okay, my influence might not be it anymore. I might need to pass the reins.’ A lot of my friends didn’t get it, but it’s a movement. It moves and sometimes it moves outside of us. I learned that from skating—once you get old, you pass the torch. They’re going to keep it going.”
“There’s power if you actually tell people your plans. They get on board, they band together. It’s a force—the big dogs don’t understand us but we can do this. We can blow it up.”
Brocklebank went on to start D.O.P.E. Industries, his own DIY empire rooted in the Gnarcore vibe. “That aspect of snowboarding—talent meshed with personality and style…it’s definitely influential,” says Whistler snowboarder Brin Alexander, who grew up influenced by both crews, waving the flag at huge contests and events like the Natural Selection Tour with his own pro model D.O.P.E. snowboard. Whiskey and Skids set the foundations for the BC/Whistler snowboard culture archetype, but Gnarcore and D.O.P.E. put it out for the world to see. The legacy continues with Shmobb, a new generation of Whistler snowboarders riding against the grain in favour of authenticity, creativity and, most importantly, fun.
Dave Rouleau stepped away from snowboarding for a while, and even moved back to Alberta, but these days he’s back on a board, taking a hard look at returning to the Sea to Sky. And last summer he started filming skateboarding again with his wife.
“I’m in my 40s,” he says, “but I’m still able to find that stride. Once something is a part of you, it never leaves. I just want to do what I love and it’s kind of come full circle. You move around, see the world and then you come back and realize we really got something special here. I think the biggest thing is being where there are people choosing to live their life in a certain way.”
And that will always be cool.
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