I find I enjoy myself most on those days when it's just me and a couple close friends away from it all. True human interaction in a day when we are all spread so thin.

One of the deep routed motivations for looking at our connection to snow and its journey to our mountains came from Bryan Iguchi, who I rode with a lot when I was just a teenager.

It's probably the most personal project [The Fourth Phase] I've done, which changed the dynamic a little bit.

Ultimately it's a snowboarding film [Fourth Phase], of course, so the main thing that we wanted to celebrate was how awesome snowboarding is! Secondly, we wanted to celebrate the environment that we all shape our lives around. So the film documents myself and other like-minded individuals attempting to follow the hydrological cycles that shape the worlds we've committed our lives to.

When your location is a snowy mountain in the winter the obstacles are pretty extreme.

I knew I wanted to shoot in Japan early on. Years ago, we did a Japan segment in "The Community Project," and at the time I felt it was one of the better Japan segments ever captured.

I realized pretty quickly just how big and aggressive some of the mountains were down in Nagano Prefecture.