Late last year, Max came out with his biggest documentary yet, a personal story called Torn. It tells the story of his iconic father’s death and how it has impacted his family.
Max Lowe is an adventure filmmaker whose award-winning films have screened at festivals like Cannes and Tribeca. He’s also the son of the famous mountaineer, Alex Lowe. Late last year, Max came out with his biggest documentary yet, a personal story called Torn. It tells the story of his iconic father’s death and how it has impacted his family.
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Show art photo credit to Elliot Ross.
Max Lowe: I think also the fact that our family story had been in the public image for pretty much my entire life, starting with Alex's first ascent of Everest when I was two years old, that's when he really stepped into the limelight as a climber. The idea of finally taking a stab at telling our story from my perspective, the perspective of this kid of the hero who had been regaled and tales my entire life, that's when it really became something that rose to the forefront of my mind as something that could be a project for me to pursue.
Shelby Stanger: Max Lowe is an incredible adventure filmmaker whose award-winning films have screened at festivals like Cannes and Tribeca. He's also the son of the famous mountaineer, Alex Lowe. Late last year, Max came out with his biggest documentary to date. It's a personal story, called Torn. It tells the story of his iconic father's death and how it has impacted his family. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living.
Max Lowe: Do you have any memories of Dad?
Speaker 3: Honestly, all that I have to describe him as is basically what he did.
Speaker 4: We all have a glorified idea of who Alex was.
Speaker 5: Bring it on. Now I want it bad.
Shelby Stanger: In the '90s Max's dad, Alex Lowe, emerges one of the best mountain climbers of the century. He summited Mount Everest twice, he rescued teams off of Denali, and he climbed some of the world's most challenging ascents.
Shelby Stanger: Alex's friend and fellow elite climber, Conrad Anker, was also a renowned mountain athlete. In the fall of 1999, Alex and Conrad went on an expedition to Shishapangma, a mountain in Tibet. When an avalanche struck, the team split up and they ran in opposite directions. Alex was buried, along with cameraman David Bridges. Miraculously, Conrad survived. Conrad, who was devastated by his climbing partner's death, moved to Bozeman, Montana to help care for Alex's widow, Jennifer, and their three sons. Conrad ended up stepping in as a father figure for Max and his brothers. Pretty soon, Conrad and Jennifer fell in love and a year and a half later they got married.
Shelby Stanger: In 2016, Alex Lowe's body was found, mostly preserved by ice on the side of Shishapangma. His family flew to Tibet to recover his body and hold a funeral. As they prepared for this adventure, Max decided to document their journey. He didn't know it at the time, but the footage Max took while recovering his father's body would become a large part of Torn. The movie premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in 2021.
Shelby Stanger: In this podcast episode, Max talks about several family members. Just a reminder, Alex Lowe is Max's biological father, Conrad Anker is his stepdad. The story of their family is complicated, and also beautiful. Before Max decided to make Torn, his family hadn't had that many private conversations about losing Alex, but that was one of the reasons why Max wanted to shoot this documentary.
Shelby Stanger: Max Lowe, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living.
Max Lowe: Thanks so much for having me, pleasure to be here.
Shelby Stanger: I really related personally to your film because I was 11 when my father died and it was just sudden. He died of a heart attack, he was a dentist, and my mom remarried really fast after. I just related so much to your story. I'm just really curious, when did you know you were going to make this film? Is this something that you had in you for a long, long time? I've been writing about my father's death since I was pretty much 11.
Max Lowe: I don't think it really occurred to me until pretty recent, to be honest, in the few years leading up to 2016, when we went over to recover Alex's remains. I thought about maybe making a film about Alex someday, just as an excuse to dig into this huge troth of archive that our family has. There's just a cabinet in my parents' basement that is just filled with slides and old VHS tapes from all the expeditions and programs that were done about Alex and Conrad over the years, and then also all this footage that Alex, my mom and Conrad had shot of our family. I just had never really touched that in my life up at that point, because, I mean, for most of my life, after Alex's death, even hearing a song that resembled him in a memory or seeing a photo of him, let alone watching a video or hearing his voice, it was just painful and so I just avoided it, which I think is probably what most people do in that situation.
Max Lowe: In 2016, when we decided as a family to go back and recover his remains when they were discovered alongside David Bridge's, the other climber who was killed in that avalanche, that's when it really became something that rose to the forefront of my mind as something that could be a project for me to pursue. I, with the permission of my family, decided to film that journey and document it for whatever purpose, whether that be a project or just for our purposes of self-discovery, because I knew it was going to be an emotional bomb, but it wasn't really until I got back from that trip that the idea of what the film could be really started to form.
Max Lowe: It was on that trip that my eyes were open to just how much Alex still was in our lives and the trauma of his death still guided each of us so strongly in different ways, even 17 years later. My stepdad Conrad, I could see so clearly how much he was still struggling with survivor's guilt and imposter syndrome, and how much my mom, even 17 years later, still loved Alex so deeply and never got to say goodbye really, and how me and my two younger brothers each had this complex and messy relationship with the idea of this man who, because of his fame in the world we exist in, never really faded. The man faded, our father figure faded from our lives, but the stories of who Alex was and what he did continued on informing how each of us experienced our world, and that really became the core of the story that I wanted to tell.
Shelby Stanger: I've heard of your dad's story for years and I remember when the body was recovered, but I didn't know you and your face and that there was these kids attached to it. I couldn't help but think, being a little kid, when I was young, my father died and there was a open viewing, I didn't go. I would continue to see my dad riding his bike and I thought, "Well, maybe he didn't really die." For you, there's been so many years where, geez, I'm going to get choked up talking to you about this, but there are so many years you didn't see your dad. I remember there's this line in the movie, he's kind of like an astronaut lost in space. Was there part of your little kid brain ever that was like, "Maybe dad just wanted to keep climbing and hid." I don't know.
Max Lowe: Yeah. Yeah, I mean that was a big part of my conflict in embracing Conrad as a father figure after Alex's death. I turned 11 five days after his death, he had written me this birthday card, painted me this birthday card, and it arrived maybe a week after my birthday or something like that because it had been from Tibet. That cemented in my mind this idea that he wasn't gone and that I shouldn't say goodbye to him for forever. I haven't done probably the proper amount of therapy to truly unpack what that did to my brain as a child, but those sorts of experiences are the kind that end up driving you through life, whether or not you acknowledge them, these things that we experience as kids especially, because we don't really know how to understand them, but even as adults. We just aren't very good at processing trauma and how those traumas impact us in different ways.
Max Lowe: For me, I lived with that hanging feeling. I just never had any closure on Alex's death and his life and impact on my life, and definitely hung on to that idea that Alex might come back someday, for years after his death.
Shelby Stanger: The story that Max shares in the movie Torn is as much about his family as it is about his late father, Alex. In the film, he asks his parents and his brothers pressing questions that are clearly uncomfortable and painful to answer. Max is the oldest of the three boys, he was 11 when Alex died. When he decided to make the film, it took some convincing to get his brothers on board, but Max's brothers and his parents ended up telling their story with a level of honesty and vulnerability that he didn't expect.
Shelby Stanger: What were the parts about making this film that actually brought you joy? Because it seems like it was a really challenging film to make, but it's so beautiful that there had to have been parts that were also joyful.
Max Lowe: Oh yeah. I mean, the purpose for me and my family was breaking through this painful emotional wall. That is a good majority of what the film is and that's one of the reasons my mom was upset with me at first, because she's like, "Our life is not this sad." Me and my brothers are goofballs and most often are just joking with each other, and we all inherited Alex's dry, coy sense of humor. Our lives since have been a great adventure. If I could have made this movie three hours long it would've showed a lot more of that, but you make a film as a tool to deliver something, and Torn ended up being what it is as a sharpened tool.
Max Lowe: The process of going through the film was a joy in many moments, it was hard in some, but getting to go back and watch through all the archive of Alex, once I had broken into the inner sanctum of being comfortable being in that space, and I think having the film, this thing that I was creating for a larger purpose other than just my own, allowed me that strength and courage, but getting to watch this footage of him doing what he loved in life and seeing him interacting with me and my brothers with a camera, as a filmmaker who's making a film about his own family, to be able to see that my dad took at the time to shoot a day of skiing with this old Handycam with me and my brothers and bust out the camera and film us all on Christmas morning, it gave me this sense of understanding of who he was in a deeper sense that I was missing before that, I think. There was a lot of beauty in that.
Max Lowe: It is sad because you're looking into this alternate universe, but at the same time you're finding pieces of your own puzzle that you didn't even know you were missing before. That was just a remarkable gift. Moral of the story is take more iPhone videos of your kids.
Shelby Stanger: In the film, you get a peek into the treasure trove of home videos that his family had. There's footage of the boys growing up and also a lot of film from Alex's early interviews and expeditions. In the 1980s and the '90s, Alex was a famous climber. He was pushing the envelope of possibility for mountaineers. His fame also meant that his family's story was well known, and Max's brothers weren't ready to return to the public eye.
Shelby Stanger: What was it like having these challenging conversations with your brothers?
Max Lowe: Yeah, I mean, I'm the annoying brother that's always trying to drag everybody into stuff, but you could tell in the film that my brothers were skeptical. I think of that, it's just because they were my brothers. My parents signed up and they were like, "Okay, this is our son, we have to do this," but my brothers were like, "Come on, you're really going to do this to us?" I think that they, from the very get go, have just distanced themselves a little bit more from our story, especially since it's so public and the fact that Alex and Conrad and my mom's story about their lives and who they are has shaped each of us in ways that we didn't have any control over. I think that they resented that a little bit more. They wanted to each find their own path that didn't intersect with this very strong pull of our family story and legacy.
Max Lowe: Especially for my brother, Sam, who shot a lot of the footage from Tibet. I think that any shots in there that you see me in frame, or a lot of them, are ones Sam shot. He works a film. When we came back from Tibet, I asked if he wanted to make this film with me and he said no, it wasn't something that he wanted to go into, that he didn't see the value in for himself at that moment.
Max Lowe: I think that both of them have found something more in it since the film has come out and started to be something that is being talked about in a broader sense. Sam and Isaac, you see in the film, they didn't really have any memories of Alex, and so the film for them, as well as myself, has been the broadest understanding of him as a man that we've ever really been able to grasp. I can't speak for them, but just in my conversations and observations of how they've interacted with the story, I think that they've found something in it. Even though we have turned over the stone and showed the world what is underneath parts of each of us that we were hiding doesn't mean that we're done in any way exploring all this stuff and what it means to each of us. I'm sure that me and my brothers will have a developing and evolving relationship with this story for the rest of our lives.
Shelby Stanger: What happened when you showed the film to your family for the first time?
Max Lowe: Different reactions. I mean, my family is all pretty used to stories about us coming out and being presented to the world, but this was different because it was on a level of vulnerability that they had never really stepped up to before. They did that for me, they did that because they loved me. I think instilled in the title of the film is this idea that each of us, if you experience something like this as a family or in any sort of group, each person is going to have their unique perspective on it, each person is going to be torn from that trauma in a different way, no terror is the same. In that sense, my mom and my dad and each of my brothers have their own perspective and experience of all of this.
Max Lowe: When I shared the film to all of them for the first time, they each had their unique reactions to it. The process of experiencing both the making of the film and then the release of the film has been different as well. My mom had a lot of issues with the film early on. She has been this mother grizzly bear, is how she describes herself, in regards to defending not only the story of Alex and the story of our family, but the experience that each of us is going to take away from interacting with that story. It was hard for her to allow me to have my own perspective on this. She has been the guardian of this story for so long, that having me come in and take my own tack and have my own observations of the decisions that Alex made in life and decisions that she and Conrad made, that was challenging for her.
Max Lowe: Conrad, on the other hand, just gave me free rein and supported me throughout the production, but when the film initially premiered and was being released to the world, he had a much harder time sharing that side of himself. He is not an emotionally vulnerable person naturally and to find the value in sharing the story with the world was a longer journey for him, I think.
Shelby Stanger: When we come back, Max talks about coming to terms with his parents' imperfections and humanity, the experience of releasing the film, and what he hopes people will take away from his movie, Torn.
Shelby Stanger: Max's stepfather, Conrad Anker, is an icon in the climbing world. I knew of him at a young age, and he always seemed like this larger than life guy. Conrad and Alex were both incredibly talented and they rose to fame at the same time. Conrad has climbed some of the most challenging peaks in the world, and he's been featured in many adventure films. He's also been a North Face athlete for decades. He's an absolute legend to so many. For Max, Conrad is someone else. He stepped in as a parent, and at first, that wasn't the easiest thing for Max to accept.
Shelby Stanger: There's something your mom says at the end, and I thought this was so beautiful because it helped me understand my mom. She says to you, and it's in the trailer, she says she wanted you to know you can lose someone you love and love again. When I heard that line, I was like, "God, that's so beautiful, and so hard to understand, as a child." I always thought my mom's pool of love is just finite and it's like a pie. If she gives a little bit of love to one sibling, that piece of pie is gone. But I don't think a mother's love is a pie, it's completely infinite. They're also humans. It's really interesting, there's a point in every adult's life where their parents are not these larger than life characters, they're fully human. At what point did you decide your parents were also just fully human, maybe not given the same tools you were given and-
Max Lowe: I mean, it took me a while to come around to that understanding. My mom wrote a book about her life with Alex and the experience of his death, called Forget Me Not, that came out in the early 2000s after his death. Writing that book, for her, I think was a very similar process that I went through in making Torn. I actually hadn't finished reading the book until I started working on Torn over 10 years later because I think it was difficult for me. I remember reading the book on an airplane and just weeping quietly and just shutting it, similar to seeing photos or hearing his voice or whatever. It was just this thing that I had eventually, a few years after his death, just closed off this part of myself in him that I had just closed off and left behind because I didn't think I would ever be able to really wrap my head around to understanding who I was because of him, other than the stories people would tell me about how awesome he was.
Max Lowe: I think that making Torn, personally and selfishly, was a way by which I was finally able to reconcile, accepting this fact that my parents were all just people with their beautiful parts and their ugly parts and their challenges. I think that every child has a hard time coming to terms with that. I really have recognized that, starting in Tibet, when we went back to recover his remains and put him to rest, and through the process of making Torn. It was a pretty in-depth examination of generational trauma and looking at my parents' experiences in life and how they decided to choose partners. My mom's father was a fighter pilot in World War II who had all sorts of horrendous traumas as a young man that he carried into his life with his family and that informed, as I observed it, how she chose to be with Alex and then Conrad. These experiences, they just carry on far into where you fail to be able to really see how they are impacting and driving you.
Shelby Stanger: Max has worked on several documentaries and corporate productions. This film felt a lot different. It was his biggest professional project to date and there were so many emotions, personalities and family dynamics at play. After several years of filming and production, Max was finally ready to release Torn in 2020, but the premier didn't go quite as planned. For one thing, the pandemic happened.
Shelby Stanger: A lot of times when people have a big project like this there's a depression that sinks in after it's finished. Did you experience a comedown like that?
Max Lowe: Oh yeah. I mean, well, Torn was supposed to come out in the fall of 2020 when everything was canceled. We were looking down the pike at doing a total virtual release of the film and just didn't feel right to me because so much of why I had gone into this project and committed myself and my family to it was so that I could experience sharing that story and have my family see the value in sharing it. I felt like I saw the value in sharing vulnerability in this way by pretty early on, but I wanted my family to be able to sit in an audience with people and see how other people saw value in stepping up to the plate and presenting yourself in this way. That was worth it in the end, but that year of waiting was definitely hard because I had finished this thing that was, A, a huge personal emotional leap, and then also the biggest step in my personal career up into that point and then we just shelved it.
Max Lowe: I didn't tell anybody about it. I didn't watch the film for almost a year until I watched it with my girlfriend a few weeks before the Telluride premiere this last September. It was the first time in my life that I have been depressed, I think. I've had moments where I had a hard time finding the next step, but that was just such a big step that I couldn't fathom taking another one that big without having this thing out in the world and the affirmation that would to come with it, the affirmation of seeing that it did what I hoped it might for people.
Max Lowe: Yeah, I mean, I have a bunch of ideas brewing at the moment and I'm looking for my next project right now, but I think having Torn out in the world was a big part of me finding my ability to even start thinking about that, because, yeah, I mean, there's no harm and nothing wrong with having to have that outside affirmation. I feel like you always feel like you should be able to just do everything on your own and believe in yourself, but with Torn, I had made it to do a specific thing and I was so afraid that it wasn't going to and that it was going to be terrible and everyone was going to hate it and it was going to be too sad and that was going to be the end of my storytelling career.
Shelby Stanger: What did you learn about grief and loss that I guess that people are telling you maybe they learn from the movie too that's been helpful?
Max Lowe: I mean, I think grief and loss is something that you just experience, and then what really hangs with you is how that impacts the decisions you make going forward. I think that's what I probably learned the most about, how you say goodbye and how you allow things to carry on in you and how you analyze the decisions you're making because of the feelings you had during those moments of grief and loss. Losing Alex, as a young boy, I think that impacted me in a pretty strong way. If it's too painful to look back at those moments and analyze what they meant to you, you're never going to learn how they changed you.
Shelby Stanger: It's really interesting to hear you talk about this because you can talk about this as if almost you've been to therapy for years and years and years, but I imagine it was just making this film that allowed you to connect a lot of dots.
Max Lowe: Yeah.
Shelby Stanger: Or I don't know, along the way, did you go to therapy? What did you do?
Max Lowe: I did go to therapy in the following couple years and I think it is something of our generation maybe, that I have had conversations with the people in my life that I trust about this stuff a lot more than I would have had otherwise and maybe that my parents did. I think our parents' generation is the last of the wave of just don't talk about that sort of stuff.
Shelby Stanger: What do you hope people take away from the film? I mean, there's so many messages. What do you hope people take away?
Max Lowe: I mean, I think that my hope in what people take away from the film is a better understanding of the value in love, whether that's love you already have. Love is complex and difficult to navigate and sometimes it's ugly to navigate and it's never going to be something that just comes easy. I hope that people see in Torn the value in committing yourself to that. That's what I'm hoping I can achieve coming out of this whole experience, is finding more value in trusting that it's worth it. Like my mom says in the film, it's worth it to trust in love, even if you know that you could get hurt.
Shelby Stanger: Torn is a beautiful, heart wrenching story of one family breaking apart and becoming whole again. I think Max is showing people that it's possible to wade through pain and come out the other side. This movie will help so many people dealing with grief, with love and healing, so Max, thank you so much for making it. I know it wasn't easy. You can watch Torn on Disney+.
Shelby Stanger: Max, thank you again so much for coming on the show, giving us a peak behind the scenes, and being so vulnerable with us. I can relate a lot to your story and I enjoyed this conversation a lot. Thank you for sharing your work with the world. You can see more of Max's work on his website, maxlowemedia.com. You can also follow him on Instagram @max.lowe, that's M-A-X dot L-O-W-E.
Shelby Stanger: Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, written and edited by Annie Fassler and Sylvia Thomas of Puddle Creative, and our senior producer is Chelsea Davis. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. As always, we love it when you follow the show, when you rate it, and when you write a review wherever you listen. Remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.