Interview with The Surfer director Lorcan Finnegan

“Really pummeling each other – there was blood and teeth and everything.” The brutality, localism, and tribalism of surf culture is explored to the darkest depths in The Surfer, a new Nicholas Cage starring psychological thriller that ain’t no surf movie.
The Surfer is set in Western Australia, having been filmed in Yallingup, as part of a co-production between Australia and Ireland, with Irish director Lorcan Finnegan taking the helm. He spoke to DAVID MORGAN-BROWN about the making of the film, and which films and books inspired this grueling tale of surfer tribalism.

I’m assuming that where you filmed, the locals there were much friendlier than the ones in the film?

Yeah, definitely. It’s funny, when we were in prep and we were probably there for about two months at Yallingup before we even started filming, preparing everything. Every day I’d be going down that little path to the beach and I got nothing but “good morning”. Everyone was very friendly and nice and welcoming. I was kind of hoping for a little bit of aggressive localism, but […] everyone at Yallingup was just very nice.

What was the inspiration for these villains and the gatekeeping they’re doing at their beach?

Thomas Martin (writer of The Surfer) was in Sydney years ago and he saw two guys getting out of their wetsuits and into suits. And then suddenly they started fighting each other on the beach, like really pummeling each other – there was blood and teeth and everything. And it started making him think about “who were these guys?” They look like, in his mind, a dentist and a lawyer or something, like yuppies. But they were being very territorial and tribalistic over this piece of sand.

So that got him off on a journey into the idea of localism and what it means in surf culture. There is localism all around the world on different beaches. Obviously, a lot of surfers are cool and just very zen and welcoming. But in certain places, they can be very tribalistic and possessive over the beach. And more frequently, there’s this sort of yuppie kind of surf localism, very exclusive areas where the houses are really expensive. So the only people living there are wealthy bankers and doctors and lawyers and stuff, who go around in suits and drive expensive cars, but then when they’re down on the beach, they’re like tribalistic animals.

But for the purposes of our story, it was really more of a way of digging into some themes that we were trying to explore in the film around identity and ego and ownership, so that Nic’s character could kind of go on that journey that he goes on in the film.

How did you get involved? Was there a script ready to go or did you help with crafting any of its drafts?

I met Thomas Martin in 2012 at the Tribeca Film Festival and we both had short films there. And then we stayed in touch and planned on collaborating on something together, and I think it was 2019, Tom sent me a two page outline for this project.

And we thought it would be a kind of a vehicle for an actor like someone like Cage. We hadn’t really had him in mind, but we thought this sort of outsider character in this single setting location could be really interesting to shoot in Australia, in the tradition of Australian New Wave films.

How was it that you were inspired by that era of filmmaking?

We’re kind of drawn to that world, that style of storytelling, and so we wanted to kind of make a contemporary Ozploitation film with this film and carry on that tradition of the outsider making quite an Australian film like Ted Kotcheff making Wake in Fright, who’s Canadian. Or Nic Roeg, who’s British, making Walkabout.

Any other films you looked at for reference or inspiration?

The Burt Lancaster movie, The Swimmer, that was directed by Frank Perry. Burt Lancaster and Nic Cage have this sort of parallel to me, as he was around that age when he played the character in The Swimmer. Nic’s character is sort of similar to the Lancaster character.

I think the actual short story of The Swimmer, the John Cheever short story, was an inspiration to Tom when he was sort of setting out. But he was also inspired by Robert Drew’s short stories and this collection called Body Surfers. He read it when he was in his teens and I think they kind of drew him to surf noir and a lot of that kind of short fiction from Australia.

Do you feel that you wanted the film to feel like it had that outsider perspective in terms of the directing, or did you want it to feel embedded in that Australian culture?

Yeah, a bit of both. So basically Cage’s character is the outsider coming into this town where he hasn’t been in 40 odd years and he’s lost his accent and he’s kind of got a distorted memory of the place from the ‘60s or ‘70s when he lived there as a child. So the fact that the character was an outsider was an interesting way for me in terms of going on that journey.

But it’s a very subjective point of view type film where we’re with Nic’s character throughout and we learn what he learns and we feel what he feels and we see what he sees. So as he becomes a kind of unreliable narrator, dehydrated and suffering from sunstroke, the audience feels that too. So we weren’t kind of bound by reality in a way. It’s not like a social realist film. It’s much more of an impressionistic and subjective kind of story. So all of the characters to me were like facets of Nic’s personality in a way, his own persona. So they could be exaggerated and be amplified in order for us to kind of dig into some of the themes that are in the film.