Behind the scenes at the Mountains of the Moon premiere: Benchetler on his most ambitious project yet.
By Hannah Truby
It was a quick 72 hours in L.A., but Chris Benchetler still made time to speak with Mountain Gazette before the Mountains of the Moon (MOTM) premiere. I meet the skier in the lobby of The Georgian, a beachside hotel where Art Deco detailing and bespoke bellhops make it feel as though we’ve stepped inside a Wes Anderson frame.
Despite having just returned from several on-screen interviews, Benchetler is calm, warm, and somehow carrying none of the chaos you'd expect from someone hours away from launching a multi-year film project. It’s also his 39th birthday.
“Yes, I did surf this morning,” he laughs when I ask. “A lot going on today–all good stuff–but I always gotta try and take care of myself first.”
Benchetler’s latest film is, most definitely, not a ski movie; it's a multidisciplinary, multidimensional art project so sprawling in scope and theme that he’s often asked how he pitched such an idea.
“People always ask, ‘What was your inspiration? Explain what this means.’ But it’s so much bigger than that, and it always has been,” he tells me. “When you’re emerging as an artist, you get kind of confused or stuck in thinking it has to mean something bigger than it is, but ultimately, it is just an extension of me — the most honest, pure form of what I believe and who I am. The sports, the nature, the mycology — all of it is my beliefs put into one singular project.”
Blending sport, art, lasers, projection mapping, Mickey Hart’s live drumming, and some seriously stunning nighttime cinematography, MOTM illuminates the unseen threads that connect movement, music, life, and the living earth.
The film features world-class athletes in skiing, climbing, biking, and surfing. As they move through the elements, their motions are traced by custom-made Arc’teryx skeleton suits—becoming something like brushstrokes in a moving fresco.
A nocturnal odyssey, the film was shot entirely at night. (Bouldering with Arc’teryx climber Alannah Yip at a local gym earlier that day, she told me her portion—shot in Bishop, California—required ten days of nighttime shoots, often starting at 8 p.m. and going until 3 a.m.)
“When [Benchetler] called me about it, every sentence he said, I felt like I understood it less,” Yip told me. “It was like—lasers, skeletons, mushrooms, oh, and it’s at night. But he’s just so insanely creative, and I could see the cogs turning, you know, so I was like… whatever it is, I’m in.”
Alannah Yip / Photos courtesy of Hannah Truby
Yip appears alongside Hamish McArthur and the late Michael Gardner in the climbing segment, their every move traced in glowing skeleton suits against the nighttime canvas of Eastern Sierra boulders.
Daylight, Benchetler says, was a constraint he wanted to transcend. By incorporating lasers and outdoor light installations, the film manipulates light in a far more deliberate—and distinctly aesthetic—way.
While it features some seriously rad action segments, the film becomes less about individual feats and more about communion across disciplines—with each other, with the landscapes we inhabit, and with the forces that pulse beneath the surface of the natural world.
Fittingly, Paul Stamets lends his voice as narrator. No one has done more to champion the power of mushrooms—magical, medicinal, and otherwise—than Stamets, whose mycology work has earned him numerous patents, millions of followers, and even a Star Trek character.
“And he happens to be a huge Deadhead. Go figure,” Benchetler laughs.
While the scope of the project can be mind-blowing to wrap your head around, none of it feels forced; it weaves art, science, nature, and mysticism into one long breath.
“I imagine the film to be kind of like a renaissance painting in motion, with all these different parts and forms of human motion and expression leaving their own signature on the canvas,” I say to Benchetler. “So as someone deeply immersed in both sport and art, how do you see athletic expression as a form of spiritual transmission, and how does that feed the larger message in the film?”
“I think the spiritual side of the natural world comes through in the way we light it, and the way we highlight certain textures, and features,” he says. “How Rob [Machado] views a wave is different from any other surfer on the planet. And every climber grabs a hold differently. Everyone puts their own spin on it. My job was to create an environment for them to be as creative as possible—with no direction.”
That ethos carries through in the still photographs, too. In a gallery for Mountain Gazette 204, Jay Blakesberg—a longtime chronicler of the Grateful Dead whose images have helped define the band’s visual world—captured the magic of MOTM behind the scenes. Benchetler smiles when I bring it up.
“Jay sees things other people don’t,” he says. “He was able to interpret the project through his own lens.” Seeing his work reflected back through Jay’s eyes, he says, made him notice parts of the process he’d been too deep inside to fully appreciate. “I’m so grateful we have those images. They’re part of the story now.”
Benchetler firmly believes that art’s meaning is left up to the beholder—everyone will take something different. But if there’s one thing—a feeling, an idea—that he hopes people take from MOTM, it’s a sense of gratitude and wonder.
“I do hope it leaves people curious, and inspired, and just grateful that we're on this little floating rock, and living this life,” he says. “And then also, if it doesn't do any of those things, I don't really care either. I'm happy that I was able to be completely honest.”
Below: scenes from opening night, including the retrospective “Illuminating the Threads of Connection” exhibit, which showcases the people, stories, artifacts, and the magic within the MOTM universe. Photos courtesy of Hannah Truby.
The cinematic experience kicks off in Los Angeles, CA, from November 15–23, 2025, and will hit the road with Arc’teryx-hosted screenings at select locations across North America, as part of the Arc’teryx Winter Film Tour in Europe, and at special events in Asia. The film will also be seen worldwide through a limited theatrical release. Check out the full list of screenings and release details here.
