“It was a different film when Jake was alive,” Fernando opens up the conversation. The team had been working with the idea of making a Jake Burton documentary since 2018, with Jake then being very much involved in the planning of it.

Committing to a documentary that showcases an entire life and career isn’t something you take on easily and initially Jake had his own reservations about how the film would be perceived. But as producer Ben Bryan explained to us, “Once Jake decided to do something he was all in. He was writing, he was showing us all his home video footage, taking us through his basement and all his original documents, all these slides that never had been developed.” Ben thinks back to how it all first started to come together. “He was in the process of making it in the beginning but then obviously, things changed…”

“Once Jake decided to do something he was all in”

“His DNA is in the film so I worked off of what was already there”, Fernando tells us. Jake’s sudden passing and the outburst of the global pandemic forced the team to take a different approach to the project. “We had to craft a new idea, one based on archives and interviews. It was always meant to be archive heavy but not all archive. So, prioritise shifted and resources shifted. Luckily, there was an amazing archive, both the snowboarding archive and also his personal archive.”

For George, the beauty of Dear Rider is that you don’t necessarily have to be a snowboarder to appreciate it, “Watching this film awakens your spirit, living life to the fullest and following your passion, trusting in your community and your family but be able to overcome hardships. I think it really awakens you as a person and motivates you to live a life full of passion, which is also authentically you. There’s no pretending.”

He continues, “A lot of snowboarders didn’t really know the history behind Burton at all so it’s good if it kind of gives you this rich, detailed history of what happened. It’s good to know where we came from in order to know where we are going.”

“If you’re only telling one side or painting a pretty picture, that’s when people smell bullshit”

Fernando thinks back to the beginning of the process, “Jake’s desire was to make a movie that didn’t upset the core, I was like what does that even mean at first, but how I interpreted that was don’t bullshit anybody. If you’re only telling one side or painting a pretty picture, that’s when people smell bullshit. I wanted to tell the story, Jake thinking Alpine was the future of the sport, which it clearly wasn’t, but his resiliency and his love for the riders and willingness to change the course and to improvise and find the smartest person in the room and listen to them.”

Dear Rider, is an authentic watch, and we’re not the only ones who rate it. Fernando Villena has really managed to capture the human story here, making the 1,5h documentary go by so fast. “He really dug into the human elements of the human story. He was being very specific in what he was looking for which made it really relatable.” George on Fernando as a director.

“He really dug into the human elements of the human story”

When Fernando sent through the final cut to Donna, Jake’s wife, she texted him back saying, “I saw it twice and I felt like he was sitting next to me”.

In order to put it all together, Fernando collected 41 sources of Jake’s interviews from four different decades audio tapes no one had heard of, resources from mainstream media outlets and anything else they could get their hands on. He then used the material to craft Jake’s way of telling his own story and get to the heart of who Jake was as a human. Quoting Ben, the producer, “It’s a combination of people who love and care about snowboarding, people who care about telling an authentic human story, and putting that together, that’s the magic of Dear Rider. I think the film will bring people back into the sport, remember their early love for snowboarding and attract new people.”

Dear Rider is now available to watch in the UK by Amazon Prime.