Adam Sorensen kept saying it would help him. Her sister was dying and would not touch it. Her father had just put money into a hemp company in Slovenia. All of it happened at once.
The idea behind the film was a piece of ordnance.
"The IED, which was the signature weapon of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, goes off twice. Once in the field, and the blast radius affects those closest to furthest. And again at home."
Danielle Bernstein was making documentaries then, not hemp ingredients. Her production company had the United States Marine Corps among its clients. The second detonation was the one nobody was filming.
"The bomb goes off again when the active duty service member arrives home, and they have their own kind of experience in the living rooms of American families."
So she went looking for people who had been near a blast. One of them lived close by.
His name was Adam Sorensen. He was a Force Reconnaissance Marine, newly married, still training rangers, on his way to officer candidate school. She started filming him while things were going well.
She kept filming for six years.
What the camera found was not the injury. It was the paperwork around it.
"The Marine Corps was not acknowledging a lot of the injuries that he had sustained, and he was self-medicating and suffering. But he was still in service."
He left the service to go to college, because that is what becoming an officer requires.
"And the wheels kind of fell off."
She lists what he did not want in the order he lost them.
"He didn't want to get a divorce. He didn't want to be sick. But he also was going to the doctor and they were just giving him pills."
The mechanism is circular and she describes it as one.
"As you become more addicted to all these pharmaceuticals, you seek them. And it just was this crazy, vicious circle that he very, very courageously let us document. Like, he opened his whole life — the good, bad and the ugly — to us."
Through all of it he said the same thing.
"Cannabis would actually help me, and I'm just not allowed to use it."
He was allowed, eventually, by leaving.
"When he finally got out of the Marine Corps and was able to use cannabis and microdose psychedelics, he really did — I mean, he regained control of his life."
She does not present this as a result. She presents it as the thing that made her change careers.
"Witnessing what he went through is a huge catalyst for me to think, like, how do you fight this? And so I wanted to fight it from the inside out."
Three things were happening at the same time, and she narrates them as one weather system.
Her father had retired after many years as a chief executive in textiles and put money into a friend's son's CBD company in Slovenia.
"And we're all like, what's that about?"
Her oldest sister, a half sister, was dying of breast cancer. Cannabis had been heavily recommended to her. She did not want it.
"Really not open to cannabis, because of her role in her life at the time."
And a Marine who could not have it was telling her it would work.
"So there's, like, kind of this swirling thing."
The 2018 Farm Bill was coming. The family already knew the European supply chain. They decided to build something of their own, and Laurelcrest was incorporated in Washington state that August.
She grew up in Atlanta, where the plant barely existed as a subject.
"There's very little exposure to cannabis in Georgia. Maybe a little bit in high school we would try to buy weed. It was just not a large exposure."
Her parents smoked a little. Her mother was, she says, definitely a hippie.
"I think when I was younger I thought that was really wrong."
Moving west did not change her mind about legality. It changed her mind about the level of knowledge involved.
"I was like, wow, this is way more sophisticated and nuanced. Like inspiring in this way — with the terpenes and like different levels and heat temperatures, and how you create your medicine for yourself out of what you start to learn about your own body in relationship to the plant."
She has lived in a lot of places and says this one surprised her.
"The education of people growing up around cannabis on the West Coast was shocking. Like, I really was surprised and also really inspired. It's like, oh, well, people are finding their own alchemy towards healing."
Then the line that says what the South did not have.
"This is an entire way of life that just didn't exist in the Southern United States at all."
She brought one habit from film sets into manufacturing, and it is about money rather than art.
"If the camera is here, it needs to be rolling, or you're losing money every second that you're not actually making something. And so I kind of approached the manufacturing like that. Even if you want to just try something new, just make sure you're doing something, because something has to be happening all the time."
The other thing she brought was a negative example.
"A lot of the companies out there, people leave and they really don't enjoy their experience. And I wanted to create something that people believed in and could enjoy."
She is candid that the job is not the one she is trained for.
"I'm usually the creative person, or the ideas person, or the innovative person. I haven't usually thought of myself as the financial oversight."
Working with her father has been useful and not always comfortable.
"It's been challenging at moments. But he has so much experience."
Then a question she says gets asked of her rarely, and of women rarely.
"What do you want? And it's like, well, I do need to figure that out."
She adds, without softening it: "I think it shifts a little bit every day."
Asked what she is proud of, she does not name a product. She names a mechanism.
"This industry is so big and the numbers are so big — it's like millions and billions and all these things — and it still feels kind of word of mouth."
"To create a $1 billion industry off word of mouth, this works, is like — that makes me very happy."
Asked what the biggest obstacle is, she does not name a competitor either.
"Regulatory uncertainty is certainly the biggest challenge in working in this industry."
She has responded by joining the rooms where the language gets written. She chairs the cannabis committee of the American Herbal Products Association, and sits on the board of the Federation of International Hemp Organizations. Her fix is unglamorous and specific.
"I would set standards of purity for every extract and flower and ingredient that was accepted internationally, so that we would have something to make decisions on."
The reason is not about manufacturers. It is about the people upstream of them.
"Then farmers would be able to decide — because farmers are at the root of the whole industry — what they do. Do they go industrial? Do they go cannabinoid? Can they do both?"
Against that, the present state.
"Right now it's just, like, it's literally like a swamp. I mean, maybe that's the wrong word. It's like a mess. It's like a really great vegetable soup."
She has one correction she wants on the record, and she makes it twice.
"We're talking about one plant. There is no cannabis and hemp industry. There is a cannabis industry."
She knows exactly where that division sits and what it costs.
"In the US at least, this is a huge point of division. But we're advocating for one plant to be available medicine and healing worldwide."