Sometimes an image too strange to not be from real life is enough to inspire a movie.
It was just such an image that sparked the script for The Surfer, the new drama starring Nicolas Cage receiving its North American premiere at South by Southwest after debuting at Cannes last year. Director Lorcan Finnegan recalled that scriptwriter Thomas Martin was driven to write the film after witnessing a bizarre moment in Australia. Finnegan said, “He saw two men in suits beating the shit out of each other on a beach.”
Finnegan first met Martin at Tribeca Film Festival in 2012, “and we hung out there for a few days, and it turned out that we lived round the corner from each other in Dublin.” They always planned to work together but both ended up busy, until finally, in 2019, Martin sent him a one-page outline for The Surfer. Aside from that baffling beach brawl that he witnessed, Martin told him it was partially inspired by the reign of terror of the Lunada Bay Boys, a surf gang that had claimed a stretch of Californian coastline as their own. “It’s a beautiful cove with a cliff behind the beach, and there’s all these amazing modernist houses perched up along the cliff. They’re all owned by hedge fund managers and doctors and wealthy yuppies, but if you try and surf there they will actually attack you, beat you up. Because they won’t let anyone else surf the beach.”
Even though the Lunada Bay Boys are Californian, there was no specific location stated in that outline. Finnegan said that he and Martin felt the story spoke most clearly to an Australian setting. Like many Irish people, he was raised on a diet of imported Australian soaps like Home and Away and Neighbours, and both he and Martin had a shared love of Australian New Wave films from the late 1970s like Wake in Fright, The Last Wave, and Long Weekend. Like The Surfer, they dealt with themes of toxic masculinity, often through the iconic Australian figure of the Ocker: a bluff and boisterous blue collar kind of bloke who reveals an edge of violent misanthropy underneath that jovial exterior. “Plus,“ Finnegan laughed, “we wanted to go to Australia and make a movie. So that was a big motivation.”
The influence of the Australian New Wave is obvious in the cinematography of Radek Ladczuk, who has helped define modern Australian cinema through his work with director Jennifer Kent on both The Babadook and The Nightingale. However, SXSW audiences won’t even need to open their eyes to feel the heritage, as the score by François Tétaz (Hesher, Wolf Creek) evokes the unnerving juxtaposition of Bruce-on-Bruce violence with sweet, swelling strings that so often soundtracked the era. “There is a scene that has a harmonica, which was slightly inspired by the music in Skippy the Bush Kangeroo,” said Finnegan.
“[Exotica] was supposed to evoke the feeling of being on holiday somewhere like Hawaii, but it’s supposed to be a fictional place. … It’s kind of a false memory of his childhood and this idyllic beach.”
The protagonist of The Surfer is a man who feels he has just as much right to the beach as any of the well-heeled bullies that have taken it over. However, just as the nation of the location wasn’t set in the script, neither was his nationality. Finnegan and Martin initially discussed having him be played as an Australian, raised on the beach and returning having moved away for years. That element of the outsider increasingly fascinated them “and we thought we could amplify that by making him a complete outsider.” So in writing the script, they made the unnamed surfer local by birth but raised in America, losing his accent but never his connection to the area, “so he now is seen as an American.”
The resulting script mixed elements of macho bravado and alienation, dark comedy and bloody violence, quiet introspection and febrile energy. “There’s not many people who can do all that,” Finnegan said, and he soon realized there was only one actor for the part. “I remember reading the script and seeing Nic Cage in every scene, and something just clicked.”
The Surfer
Festival Favorites, North American Premiere
Monday 10, 6pm, ZACHWednesday 12, 6:45pm, Alamo South Lamar
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This article appears in March 7 • 2025.
