Lorcan Finnegan, director of ‘The Surfer’

0:12Hello and welcome to the Monaco Weekly. This time I had a pleasure to speak with Irish filmmaker Lorcan Finnegan on his new film The Surfer, a sweaty psychological thriller featuring Nicolas Cage. He starts telling me about his fascination with surf imagery.

0:34You can't stop a wave. Born in a storm, way out to sea. Pure energy. It's all building to this breaking point. Lorcan Finnegan, director of The Surfer. First of all, Lorcan, I love the film. And I have to tell you, I love surf imagery. I wonder if you had any connection with surf at all before this film, or was it something new, perhaps, to you? I've been surfing before. I wouldn't call myself a surfer, but I've surfed a few times over the years, mostly in Spain. And surf imagery, I mean, I was more of a skateboarder growing up, So there was a lot of crossover between skateboarding, snowboarding and surfing.

1:17Like you, I'm familiar with a lot of surf imagery, documentaries like Endless Summer and things like that that I would have watched when I was coming of age, skating. I thought a lot about Endless Summer, actually, while I watched in the film, because the setting was amazing, which of course was in Australia, which is a place you also worked before in Australia, right? Yeah, I've shot some commercials and stuff there and have friends who live in Australia, so I've visited a few times. So tell us about the idea of The Surfer, how he came about with this project, because I know it was inspired by surf noir novels as well.

1:53But it's such an interesting take as well. You know, he does talk a lot about masculinity and other, you know, incredible topics as well. Yeah, well, I mean, the writer, Thomas Martin, had an encounter when he was working in Australia, adapting the book. And he saw two guys getting out of their wetsuits and putting on suits, business suits. And one said something to the other. And then they started like beating the shit out of each other on the beach in Sydney. And I think that's what made him start thinking about these guys who are like seem very together and well dressed. And but then they obviously also have this violence inside them.

2:33And that was related to the to surfing in some way. Then he was looking at surfers in Lanuta Bay in California that run this beach, you know, that they're these wealthy guys who live in these big modernist houses in a very exclusive area. And if you try and surf their beach, they'll attack you. But, you know, during the day, they're obviously working with clients and in the public and see, you know, they seem very together. I think those aspects sort of inspire the story. And then that was something that's really interested me, seeing this like character who at the beginning seems very together.

3:06But obviously he's got some underlying problems. He thinks that by buying this house, this materialist goal will help resolve his emotional and relationship problems. He's pinning it all on this one thing that if he can have this thing, then everything else will be fixed. But obviously that isn't the case. And then he unravels across a few days. and seeing that happen to somebody, seeing things being stripped away from them in order for them to get to the core of what it is that they need instead of what they want was pretty fascinating to me. They're not like engines. You've got to release a little steam now and then or you'll blow up.

3:50And during this process of unravelling, as you mentioned, sometimes watching the film was like, is that real or not? You know, there were a lot of kind of questions, especially in the middle part of the film. Yeah, I mean, that's because I wanted this film to be from the character's subjective point of view. So the audience experience everything as he experiences it. So we never cut away to learn something from another scene elsewhere as he experiences it. So as he becomes more dehydrated and sunburned and delirious, you know, we he becomes unreliable. He becomes an unreliable narrator in a way.

4:29So you're not sure if he is who he is and he's not sure if he is who he is. So the audience experience it along with the main character. And there's something about being an outsider in the film as well. I mean, the film was directed by an Irishman yourself. Nicolas Cage, of course, is American. and, you know, the film was set in Australia with some Australian actors as well. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a tradition of the outsider's view in Australian cinema with Walkabout being directed by Nick Rogue, who's British, and Wake and Fright was directed by Ted Ketchoff, who's Canadian. There's always been that sort of tradition in Australian cinema, but at the same time, we wanted to tell a kind of contemporary version of an Australian story and come at it from the outsider's perspective because Nick's character is the outsider also, you know, returning to the childhoods, the beach home.

5:23So that is me being Irish, the writer being Irish and cinematographer Radek Lodzic is Polish. Everybody else involved in the film was Australian, all the crew and the rest of the actors and everything. It was good sort of exchange. No, I love that. And tell us, you know, I've been reading, you know, Nicolas Cage saying that actually the setting when he had to learn how to serve was actually quite, quite a tough one, you know, especially there was some sharks in the area as well, apparently. Is that true? Yeah, yeah. No, it's very sharky. They have like an app called Shark Tracker and you can, you can open it up and you can see like where they all are with the ones that have been tagged and there was loads.

6:03Yeah. And people had been eaten by sharks, Like not, you know, like right before we were shooting, I think while we were shooting. And there's even a guy on the actual beach we were filming on, a swimmer. He was in the 70s and he was attacked by a carpet shark. He survived, but he was in the hospital. So, yeah, there's all sharks. There's not much you can really do about that apart from not think about it. Just use the app correctly and everything will be fine, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, you just, yeah, just try not to be eaten, I suppose. Another thing I would like to mention that I love about the film is the soundtrack.

6:39It's fantastic. I wonder, what can you tell us about the soundtrack? So, Francois Titaz, where is he from? Yeah, so Francois is Australian. He scored a film, another kind of classic Australian film called Wolf Creek. It's a completely different type of soundtrack. So me and Francois started chatting about this film based on the script, and he started doing some sketches. And then once we got to location scaling, I sent Francois some photos. And once I found that place in Yallingup, he'd actually, it was interesting, he'd been there and he'd spent time there at Christmas. And not that many people, even Australians, have been to Western Australia, never mind this little town.

7:18So it was a bit of a coincidence. He sort of had an emotional connection with the place as well. And then when we were actually filming down there, we were doing a night shoot and Francois came to visit and there was like houses dotted along the clifftop. At night you could see like do-do-do-do-do and he took a sketch of that and it ended up forming part of the composition for the melody. Like do-do-do-do-do-do with the houses on the cliff. So yeah, we had a great time working on the soundtrack for the film. It was weird. It was like we were approaching the aesthetic and the music for the film sort of from the character's point of view.

8:00So because he's an outsider returning back to a place, he felt nostalgic about it. So it was almost like from his memory of the place was sort of 60s, 70s, because that's the time that he grew up there. you know that was the same with the approach to the music we're inspired by exotica which is a music invented by martin denny which creates a kind of fake holiday feeling you know it's sort of something that exists in the imagination so that's that was probably the sort of jumping off point for the music of the film and the film looks that way as well kind of slightly wild sweaty you know the saturated colors which i thought it was stunning as well you can even see that on the poster of the film, right?

8:43Exactly, yeah. Part of the story as well is like the heat of the place. So, yeah, that was part of the design of the film was to keep making it hotter and hotter and make the audience feel that, you know. We certainly felt. Alison Lorcan, a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for talking to us and I love the film. Thank you.

9:06I'm not trying to be cruel. We don't belong here anymore.

9:16Thank you very much, Lorcan Finnegan there. And The Surfer is in UK and Irish cinemas from the 9th of May. The show was edited by Elliot Greenfield. Thank you for listening.