Behind the Scenes of Your New Favorite Fishing Film
"Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.”—Navy SEAL Maxim
“Never rush a fly rod, especially a Spey rod”—Fly Guide Credo
Fishing well usually means going slow, but speed is comforting and habitual. We race to rising fish, assault shadows the second they slide into range. Why? Because the tension of not knowing how the situation ends itches like old-school wool. We crave resolution, often to our own detriment. Experienced anglers fight the urge to rush. They know the best part of a fishing trip lives in that liminal space when you’re still not sure how it all plays out.
Most fly fishing films reflect our impatience. They sprint from shot to shot, fish to fish, scene to scene, delivering a barrage of action. They fish for our attention, and our attention feeds on shiny objects like Yellowstone River whitefish. Fly fishing films let us vicariously live our wildest fantasies without the effort, sacrifice, time, resources, luck, or skill required to actually experience those fantasies. Such films are undoubtedly entertaining; they also reinforce our worst impulses as anglers (and maybe as people).
The Hard Way, the newest production from Off the Grid Studios, offers an alternative to dub-step fish fetish mash-ups. It’s a celebration of the Deschutes River told from the perspective of Matt Mendes, a guide and Warm Springs tribal member who credits the river with saving his life.
“In an age when our lives and our media move so fast, we wanted this film to breathe,” said director RA Beattie. “We wanted to invite audiences to fully see the river, to notice the details, and to reflect on why so many of us are drawn to fly fishing and the outdoors in the first place.”
Beattie, who has shown work in almost every Fly Fishing Film Tour, has watched the evolution of the genre over the past two decades. “I’ve been part of this scene since the very first F3T. Fly fishing films have come so far—the quality of the equipment and the caliber of the filmmakers these days are beyond what any of us imagined when we first started.”
Despite all the advances, he worries that the focus on festival stoke—the big fish moments that cause audiences to audibly gasp and applaud—has caused filmmakers to ignore some of the aspects that make fly fishing so unique.
“It became an arms race. First it was about shots: who could get the craziest close up topwater eat, the most impressive slo-mo jump, the biggest grip and grin. Then it was about location, who could go the farthest to catch the most elusive fish. I was part of that. I bought a RED [camera] as soon as they came out and started shooting as many frames per second as humanly possible. I traveled all over the world making fishing films—Mongolia, New Zealand, Dubai, Alaska, Patagonia, remote Caribbean islands—I am as guilty as anyone for making fly fishing films into the quick-cut, music video, glory reels that we see so often now. But I think we may have taken that style as far as it will go, and I feel like it’s missing something. Fly fishing isn’t an extreme sport, no matter how much we try to make it look like one.”
For this project, he stayed local. A resident of Bend, Oregon, Beattie wanted to celebrate his home river, the Deschutes. “The original idea was to make a love letter to the Deschutes. Thousands of anglers have fished here, but very few actually know the river. There’s an intimacy of seasonal experience that I wanted to try and capture on film. That’s a lot more difficult to do than going out and filming someone catch an epic fish, but it also felt like a more substantive goal.”
For the project to work, however, he needed a main character, an angler who lets the audience see the river through his eyes. That’s when Beattie reached out to guide and outfitter Matt Mendes.
“I love this place and this river, but I’m not from here,” Beattie explained. “We needed someone to be the heart of this story, and I couldn’t imagine anyone better than Matt. Not only is he one of the best guides on the river, basically booked solid the entire season, he and his family are connected to this place and this river on a generational scale.”
Matt’s grandfather was the first tribal member to guide fly anglers on the Deschutes River where it flows through the Warm Springs Reservation, and Matt apprenticed under him. “I started working for him when I was 10 or 11 years old; little stuff at first, chopping wood and washing boats. Pretty soon I started running shuttles. I didn’t have a driver’s license, but that didn’t matter. I’d sometimes have to wait for hours at the takeout before the boat showed up. That’s how I taught myself to fish, and I just fell in love with it. I started guiding full time at 19 and went full on beast mode with the fishing. Now I’m one of the busiest fly fishing guides in the state of Oregon.”
Matt’s not just good at guiding trout and steelhead; he’s a steward of this landscape and community. He leads river clean-ups and spearheads riparian habitat restoration projects, planting streamside willows. Matt’s wife, Sophia, has helped facilitate the burgeoning construction of an aquaponics farm with the help of Fly Fishing Collaborative, a non-profit that uses aquaculture to support local communities in fly fishing destinations around the world.
Unfortunately, the Warm Springs community is not only a high-desert ecosystem, it’s also a food desert. “At our local grocery store, we don’t have a lot of fresh options,” Sophia Mendes explained. “It’s very limited to potatoes, celery, maybe some apples, but sometimes a lot of them are past their due date.” The Warm Springs project will be the first Fly Fishing Collective farm in the United States, and Sophia has been instrumental in moving this project foreword. Carina Miller, who works at the Warm Springs Community Action team said, “What we want the farm to accomplish is to get a steady source for fresh foods for the community and somewhere for community members to come and put their hands in the dirt and learn about growing and planting.” Though Sophia has been more involved in the farm project, Matt is a fervent supporter. “This has been a vision of mine and my wife’s to get something here in Oregon for the First Nation’s People,” he said. “We can’t wait to break ground. FFC has done a lot of really positive things in the world with impoverished communities. We're just stoked to have something here on American soil especially with the native people.”
For Beattie, getting Mendes to be part of the project was just the beginning. “Once Matt agreed to come on board, we knew we had an opportunity to create a different kind of fly fishing film but actually pulling it off took a lot more work than I anticipated.”
To create a portrait of the river throughout all the different seasons, Beattie and local photographer and cinematographer Arian Stevens spent 18 months filming. “We would wake up at 3 am to get to Warm Springs and set up for dawn light,” said Stevens. “Then we’d be out there fishing and filming until dusk, putting in 18, 20-hour days, week after week, month after month; it was a grind, but it was also incredible to get to spend so much time on the river across all the different seasons.”
After all that time and effort, Beattie and Stevens had hours and hours of arresting footage—sweeping drone shots of the river cutting through arid canyons, leaves and foliage transforming throughout the seasons, macro shots of salmonflies’ stumbling flight, and of course, fish. Native redband rainbows smash giant stoneflies in the spring before sipping fluttering caddis all summer. Come fall, steelhead arrive. Through it all, we see Mendes with a fly rod, usually bent.
When Beattie sat down to edit the film, however, he discovered something was missing. “We had all this amazing footage,” he says, “But it wasn’t really a story. I found myself watching Matt out there blasting these beautiful Spey casts and plucking rising trout out of shade pockets with pin-point bow and arrow casts, and I realized that for this film to work, the audience needed to know more about him.”
Matt and his family are thriving here now, but the trajectory of his life could have gone a very different direction. Though a registered Warm Springs tribal member, Matt spent his childhood in Central California. “We definitely lived on the wrong side of the tracks, and I got into some trouble as a kid,” he says. After getting stabbed 13 times at a party and suffering severe internal injuries, Matt moved north to live with his grandfather.
“After I got out of the hospital, I got out of there. Got out of Central California, moved to Central Oregon and discovered fly fishing. Fly fishing saved my life.”
“As I got to know Matt more and more while filming with him, I learned his story and I knew that it would make this a much better film,” Beattie said. “But it isn’t my story to tell, it’s his. Once he agreed to include some of his background in the narrative, the whole thing just came together.”
The Hard Way announces itself as a different kind of fly fishing film from the very start. We meet Mendes, a powerful protagonist but reluctant narrator. We experience some of the majesty of the Deschutes, with a series of scenic shots over narration in the native Ichishkiin language by Chief Jefferson Greene. We get a sense of the river through its seasons, hatches, and fish. The film aims to slow the audience down, a reminder that fly fishing is a fully immersive experience woven from our relationships to people, landscapes, and ecosystems. Fly fishing rewards patience, practice, and effort. When we do finally get the payoff of fish (and yes, there are plenty of fish in The Hard Way) they feel more significant. We get to measure those fish beyond inches and egos.