Britton Caillouette’s Filmmaking Odyssey
Above: BTS of David Schlicht (left), and Britton Caillouette (right) on set of the UCHealth shoot
“I was a typical Colorado teenager who loved to ski, hike, and fish,” says David Schlicht, the subject of UCHealth’s ‘Still the Same David’ spot. He continues: “Then I lost my leg. Now, I’m a typical Colorado teenager who loves to ski, hike, and fish.”
The spot is an unsentimental, celebratory snapshot of David’s life, who became a below-the-knee amputee after a ski-training accident. For David, that part of his life was but a stop along the way, and definitely not the whole journey.
The spot was directed by Farm League’s Britton Caillouette, blending shots of present-day-David in action pursuing his hobbies – full of kineticism – alongside archival footage of his childhood. It recently won a Silver Clio Sports award for ‘Diversity in Storytelling’. It bears many of the touches that recur in Britt’s visual language: a deep, anthropological approach to subject matter, a cinematic style that embraces lyricism, and an undeniable warmth.
But that’s just the filmmaking part of the story.
For Britton, this project was personal in more ways than one. He is an above-the-knee amputee after a cancer diagnosis at 16. That period in his life changed everything; it made him the filmmaker he is today.
Above: 'Still The Same David', UCHealth
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Britton grew up in Orange County, Southern California and like many of the kids in that part of the country, he was an enthusiastically outdoorsy guy. “I was at the beach, surfing; I was a skateboarder, I was a musician.” His first exposure to film was through play – a friend’s dad was the owner of a commercial film production studio, and Britt would hang out there with his friends from as early as he can recall. He’d sit in the edit bay while an editor was cutting and every once in a while, when a commercial needed children’s voices, Britt and his friend would be ushered into the sound booth. He never seriously thought about filmmaking of any kind as a career option, even though all he wanted for Christmas was a VHS editing system so he could edit transitions after seeing one used at his friend’s dad’s studio. But once he got into surfing and skateboarding, he reflexively picked up his dad’s video camera and started capturing footage.
“A really massive wrench was thrown in my gears when I was at the start of eighth grade. I was 14 years old and I was diagnosed with bone cancer of my left leg,” Britt recalls. His dad, an orthopaedic surgeon, was the one to diagnose him. Britt noticed pain while part of a competitive rowing team and chalked it up to a sore muscle at best, a torn one at worst. It turned out to be much more serious. The treatment was supposed to last a year, and in that time Britt’s previously active lifestyle took a backseat. “For most of my adolescence, I was in and out of hospital. I did full chemotherapy. I was a paediatric cancer patient, basically just doing whatever I could to get through that.”
That initial ‘year’ of treatment lasted four. The cancer returned. “I thought I was healing, I thought I was doing well. I went in for a regular checkup only to discover that the cancer had come back in the same spot in my leg, and my only option at that point was to amputate the leg. I was a sophomore in high school and that changed everything,” he says.
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Britt’s distant relative is a fellow Farm League director, Chris Malloy. When Britt was in middle school, Chris and his brothers – Keith and Dan – were professional surfers, travelling the world and gracing the covers of surf magazines, stars of the wave-riding world. “Being a younger kid who was into that stuff, it was so cool to have these relatives who were basically superstars in their industry and living this envious lifestyle.” Still, he really didn’t know them well until Britt’s grandma called the Malloy brothers’ mum and told them what was going on in Britt’s life.
They would come and visit, with Britt calling them “wholesome guys” who “were trying to do whatever they could to keep my attitude positive.” On one particularly low day, Chris showed up with the world surf champion Kelly Slater, a hero of any surfer – amateur and professional – just to hang out in Britt’s room and play guitar.
A month after Britt lost his leg, he got a call from Chris out of the blue, saying: “Britt, I heard about everything. I’m going to Australia for a few months to make a surf film and I was wondering if you wanted to come on the trip?” When his parents (reasonably) objected, he told them that they didn’t have a say in the matter.
He simply “took a month off from school and went to Australia.” And while Britt’s cancer changed his life, the trip to Australia transformed it.
On that trip, Britt found himself the youngest among a group of mostly 20-something creatives, supervised, in the loosest sense of that word, by the three Malloy brothers. He brought a film camera with him and documented the whole experience. Not only did Chris end up using a lot of the photos, they were also published in Surfer magazine.
Chris was shooting a film, ‘Shelter’, on 16mm while there and in that niche world it became a document of the time and the scene; a throwback to the “cool, non-competitive and soulful surfing experience of the 1970s,” says Britt. A lot of the stories focused on the challenges people faced and Chris interviewed Britt, off camera, and “just for fun” too. He remembers that “at the end of the trip, he convinced me to go out on a tandem surfboard with my cousin and try to get back up on a wave again.” Chris was filming the whole thing in secret from Britt. “I only learned about it at the premiere, there was a whole section of the film about my story, which I didn't know was going to be in there.”
Beyond getting featured in a film, the trip opened Britt’s eyes to a different kind of life. “It was my first experience hanging out with creative people. Everyone was taking photos and shooting films and making music and living a bohemian kind of lifestyle.” Though art and science co-existed in his family home (his mum was a designer), it was not a bohemian environment by any definition. He says he was raised “pretty conservatively” and expected to get straight As, and probably follow in his dad’s medical footsteps. “And I'm looking around like, holy shit, these people are getting paid to do this. Like, what is going on?”
Still, Britt didn’t feel like he “had permission to be a bohemian artist”, enrolling in a pre-med programme in Stanford when the time came. “I thought I was going to be a doctor because I had the whole experience, I could literally speak ‘doctor’ by that point.” He started the programme and within a year of “biochemistry and bullshit” he had to stop and wonder, “What am I doing? This is not who I am.”
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Britt quickly shifted focus after that realisation and threw himself into film classes, photography, art, archaeology, and linguistics before becoming a history student, which allowed him to weave many of those threads together. “I like knowing about why things are the way they are around me,” Britt says. “My focus was specifically on the history of the American West and California, and understanding of our current modern landscape through the past. It’s still a very formative piece of who I am and the types of projects I'm interested in.”
Soon, an opportunity presented itself to put Britt’s newfound knowledge and interests to an intense test. His friend and roommate, a political science major, had recently returned from a research trip around West Africa. While in Liberia, which had then been in the midst of a civil war for 20 years, he met a teenage boy – Alfred – who as far as he could tell was Liberia's first and only surfer. Alfred’s story was “incredible”, he had found a board amid the war-strewn rubble and taught himself how to ride it, an activity he called ‘sliding’. Once Britt heard this story, he could say only one thing: “Let’s make a film about it.”
There was only one small obstacle, he didn’t know how to make a film. But he knew some people who would teach him, and help along the way too. He called Chris Malloy and cinematographer Dave Homcy, convincing them to come and make the film together, shooting on 16mm. A co-production credit went to Tim Lynch (TL), now the founder of Farm League, then a producer with a keen eye for untold stories and authentic storytelling; it wasn’t going to be Britt’s last encounter with him.
‘Sliding Liberia’ was released in 2007. “Still, to this day, it’s the craziest experience of making something. The experience of shooting over there was wild and really intense in a lot of ways.”
After graduating from college, Britt was “riding on the coattails of that film” and moved to San Francisco where he made any kind of film that people would let him, building up enough experience with corporate and talking head videos to land a series of journey films made for the Levi’s design team. His work with Levi’s led to a connection with Wieden+Kennedy Portland, and eventually the Nike’s ‘Makers’ campaign – a film that looks behind the iconic brand at all the elements that make it; the craft, the materials, the people. It’s a holistic and playful exploration of the Nike brand that plays more like a short film than it does an ad.
Above: 'Makers', Nike
When Britt found himself at a bit of a loose end work-wise, he called TL who had just recently started Farm League, asking if he was looking for directors to add to the roster. The Levi’s and Nike work was enough for TL to see Britt’s talent in the commercial sphere, and he’s been with the company ever since. “From there my career definitely kicked into a different gear and I started doing much bigger productions,” says Britt.
Like the majority, if not all, of Farm League’s directors, Britt's involvement with the ‘ad industry’ is on a as-needed-basis. “I love the outdoors, and I now live 90 minutes outside of the city on a small farm in a rural area. I’ve always had one foot in and one foot out.”
It’s this distance – a result of choice and disposition – that necessarily shapes Britt’s drive to make films and his visual style, which always tends towards the magic and lyricism of an image more than narrative itself. It’s been shaped by his love of Italian neo-realist cinema – he can and does list all the movement’s notable contributors – but Britt returns to the idea of filmmaking as a “way out”; the drive that pulled him away from his conservative upbringing, and through the years of illness when he really didn’t know what tomorrow was going to look like, or whether it was guaranteed at all.
He reflects that filmmaking is “an excuse to immerse myself in faraway lands, in places I don’t belong, and meet people I don’t have a connection to, to hang out and forge that relationship.” His eye and appreciation of the craft is never usurped by the experience of the making, the reasons to uproot himself and become immersed in something that feels maybe foreign to start, then familiar and universal – in part, at least – by the end. “An empathy of connection,” offers Britt, is what he’s ultimately always on the search for.
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“I'm passionate about images that stick with you after you are done looking at them, and you don't know why,” Britt echoes his earlier sentiments. “Commercials, weirdly enough, have ended up being the place where that makes sense the most for me.”
It’s difficult to call much of the work that Britt has done a ‘commercial’ in the traditional sense. There’s a brand attached but the work itself – the films – are often visual poems, imbued with lyricism and gentle, inquiring camera work that approaches subjects and objects with a desire to know more. ‘Wax & Gold’ for Stumptown Coffee is maybe his favourite example of this, it’s maybe his favourite film he’s ever done, period. There’s not a single product mentioned on screen and the brand’s name appears only in the credits while the film explores and draws viewers into the sights, sounds, and textures of Ethiopia through looping and drawn-out shots that shift between colour and monochrome. “If I could just do that over and over and over again for the rest of my life, I would be happy.”
Above: 'Wax & Gold' (trailer), Stumptown Coffee
Britt has also applied his preference for image-forward storytelling to films for Patagonia, specifically ‘Blue Heart’ and its emotive tale of protecting rivers in the Balkans; and in Google Seed Studio’s ‘Making Material You’, he brought together the abstract and natural worlds to interrogate the root of creative inspiration. Most recently, he worked with Wonder Valley – an olive oil brand branching out into skincare; it’s another full circle moment for Britt as the co-founder, Jay Caroll, worked with him on that very first Levi’s job. The brand takes inspiration and branding from where it was born: Joshua Tree, a bohemian Californian enclave. Working with the artist Jack Pierson on location at his bungalow in actual Wonder Valley, with Britt serving as the director, producer, and creative director on the film, with input from Jay. Bodies, faces, and places are connected through a voiceover reading a poem by Mary Oliver, further adding to the dream-like feel of the film.
Above: Wonder Valley
Britt’s continuous curiosity and search for connection was never going to rest easy in one craft. His multifaceted way of approaching filmmaking recently found a natural home at the Eames Institute, located at the Eames Ranch in Sonoma, where he serves as an executive producer. In part a museum dedicated to Ray and Charles Eames’ designs, the Ranch is also in the process of becoming a “destination for people to come and experience the collection and the working ranch itself as there was a major regenerative agricultural component to the Eames’ thinking,” he explains. The idea is to bring together interdisciplinary thinkers from "totally different fields to work in tandem and create original works and also address the problems in the world through their practice.” Britt is excited to be helping build a community of people who share visions and goals, but are taking very different paths to achieve them. Plus it’s another chance for Britt to be a welcome visitor in the multiple worlds and disciplines that he’s interested in, and now has a reason to visit.
Above: 'Everything Connects', Eames Institute
Britt never set out to be a filmmaker, and his path to the craft is nothing short of an odyssey: through illness, big waves, and expectations. Has he ‘arrived’? Hardly. For someone who uses the camera as a vector to other worlds, other consciousnesses, he’ll likely always wander.
