LA: But first, how Jen Peedom stumbled into adventure filmmaking.
JP: I grew up in, in Canberra, in Australia, so, um, the capital. It’s a sort of relatively small town surrounded by a lot of nature. And my parents took us out to, you know, all of our holidays were camping and trekking and, and all of that kind of thing. So, I sort of learned, I guess, to love the, uh, outdoors. I was the youngest of three kids, so I was always the smallest. By the time I was about six, we were out and, um, back, back on camping overnight, cross country skiing up mountains.
And I think, um, there were probably times where I found it really difficult, but somehow learned that beautiful lesson that’s so hard to learn unless you’re thrown into an experience like that, which is that you get stronger from doing that. You, you think you can’t, and then you do it anyway and you’ve got the choice, so you have to go and you do it.
Later, when I finished high school, I went off and I lived in like America for a year, and I traveled a lot through Latin America. I also traveled through Southeast Asia. And again, I think I was always looking for those experiences to challenge myself. And within those, there were adventures and those were the days before mobile phones. And so, we were taking different kinds of risks. Um, I was traveling sometimes alone, sometimes with friends.
A little bit later, I was living in Sydney near Bondi Beach with a bunch of, um, New Zealanders actually. And I had learned to operate a camera at this point. Um, and I was sort of not yet successful, but aspiring, let’s say, documentary filmmaker and these guys used to film adventure races. So I, I got asked to be on the crew as one of the adventure racers, if you’d like. And it was that that introduced me to more filming in the natural world.
LA: I’m gonna sound like a total novice, but what do you mean by adventure races?
JP: They’re these, kind of epic outdoor adventures, uh, and often they’re team things. They go from sort of team building activities in the corporate world to professional adventure races where people are doing these, you know, uh, 100 kilometer runs and kayaking and cycling and rock climbing. And so, in order to be able to film these things, you needed to be f- pretty fit
and you needed to be able to kind of do all of the things that those guys were doing. So, I had to sort of learn to keep up. But it was, it was those experiences and meeting that camera crew, you know, most New Zealanders you meet in the world, they’re adventurous, outdoorsy people, at least in my experience.
LA: I was gonna say that and then I was like, no, I’m like completely stereotyping an entire country. [laughs] But it’s true, right?
