‘The Scene:’ Film features local climbers, nearby bouldering

W hen the climbing movie “The Scene” comes to the Boulder Theater Tuesday, it will be returning to one of the four “scenes” the director chose to highlight for the flick.

Director Chuck Fryberger, of Golden, said the four places — Boulder, Moab, Innsbruck (Austria) and Spain — are climbing hotbeds with very different cultures.

“I wanted to pick a few different areas that contrast with each other and have different styles,” Fryberger said.

In Moab, Fryberger filmed Steph Davis climbing a desert tower and then BASE jumping off the top. In Innsbruck, he shot Austrian superstar Kilian Fischhuber’s sophisticated (and state-supported) training regimen. (Note: Fischhuber will be at the screening at the Boulder Theater.)

“In Innsbruck, you’d never jump off a tower,” Fryberger added.

Here in Colorado, Fryberger captured bouldering on new problems in Endovalley, in Rocky Mountain National Park. He also followed Boulder-based climber and University of Colorado Ph.D. student Matt Wilder out of Colorado, to climbs in West Virginia’s New River Gorge.

“When you think of the Boulder climbing scene, it’s a very active scene, a very opinionated scene,” Wilder said. “There’s a lot going on. So in a way, it’s the perfect component to compare and contrast with some of the other scenes around the world.”

In Fryberger’s last film, “Core,” he captured Wilder’s hair-raising ascent of a sketchily protected climb in the Flatirons; his route in the New River Gorge in “The Scene” has a similar flavor, but the New isn’t like Boulder.

“Part of the goal there is to present the contrast,” Wilder said. “The New River Gorge, as a climbing scene, is active. But, the philosophy is quite different there from how it is in Boulder,” adding that it felt more low-key there.

Wilder’s route in the New — Golden Bullet — is a 5.13d trad climb that Fryberger calls “super scary.”

“Most of these routes have sections that are safe, and other parts that are dangerous,” Wilder said. “I don’t mind falling in the safe parts, but I want to make sure I’m not falling in the dangerous parts.”

The film’s fourth “scene” is Spain, where American climber Chris Sharma lives. Fryberger said it was his first time filming with Sharma.

“With Chris, I kind of show him making a living from climbing,” he said. “And I think in my film, he comes across as being more eloquent and intelligent. I don’t portray him as this traveling hippie.”

Though there are all kinds of side stories about the culture of climbing in different areas of the world, Fryberger said it all comes back to the climbing.

“It’s a climbing film, so the meat and potatoes of it is climbing.”