Lorcan Finnegan has trapped Nicolas Cage on a sweltering Australian beach for an increasingly unhinged thriller in The Surfer. The movie marks the latest effort from Finnegan, well-known for his sci-fi horror thriller Vivarium and Eva Green-led Nocebo, as well as his first SXSW premiere in 13 years since bringing one of his short films to the Austin-based festival. The Surfer also marks Finnegan’s first feature-length pairing with writer Thomas Martin, with whom he spent years developing the latter’s story treatment for the film between his other projects.

Cage leads the cast as the тιтular family man who ventures back to his Australian hometown since having moved to the United States as a child with his mother in the wake of her divorce from his father. While trying to reconnect with his son, Cage runs afoul of a group of territorial local surfers, sending him down a spiral of increasingly tense conflict between them. Also starring Julian McMahon as leader of the surfers, Scally, and Nic Cᴀssim, The Surfer has garnered widespread acclaim in its festival run, currently holding an 88% approval rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes.

In honor of the movie’s SXSW premiere, ScreenRant interviewed Julian McMahon and director Lorcan Finnegan in our media suite at the festival, as well as The Surfer‘s red carpet alongside producer Leonora Darby and writer Thomas Martin. The group all broke down their biggest inspirations for the film, and what movies they would recommend audiences watch to prepare for the thriller, particularly those in the Ozploitation genre. McMahon and Finnegan also discussed the deeper themes of the movie and why their interpretations of the material are more than that of a takedown of toxic masculinity.

Finnegan & Martin Were Decidedly Inspired By The Ozploitation Genre For The Surfer

“…Tom And Myself Were Heavily Inspired By [Those Films] Growing Up.”

Though having always stayed in the realm of thrillers, Finnegan has often explored different subgenres within that world behind the camera, usually with frequent writing partner Garrett Shanley going back to their 2011 fantastical horror short Foxes. When it came to bringing Martin into his fold of collaborators, the filmmaker recalled that he and the writer had not only met at 2012’s Tribeca Film Festival, where they debuted some of their short films, but that they also “lived about 50 meters” from each other in Dublin, Ireland.

This led to a friendship in which the two would frequently stay in touch with one another, always eager to find a project to work on with each other, though always busy with something else that they were “just waiting for the right time“. Finnegan pointed to this time being when Martin shared with him a “two-page outline” for The Surfer, with the director immediately finding it to be “really interesting” and wanting to take it in “the vein of an Ozploitation, New Wave Australian” film that they were both “heavily inspired by growing up“, and after a few years of talks and developing it together, they “decided to get all the things aligned.”

In reflecting on his years-long journey developing the script while at the movie’s SXSW red carpet premiere, Martin revealed that the only major change to come for The Surfer was making Cage’s тιтular character an American after he came onboard as an executive producer and star. Wanting to make an Ozploitation film, the writer envisioned something that could “box clever” and “had a real route to production” that would still allow him and Finnegan to do things “on their own terms“, though also said that the changes required after Cage’s casting were “an easy fix“.

Returning To Australia Provided An Interesting Challenge To McMahon

“I Was A Bit Worried, Actually.”

Having largely made a name for himself in the world of American productions with the likes of Nip/Tuck and the FBI franchise, The Surfer marks a notable return to McMahon’s home country of Australia, with his last such project being the 2018 dramedy, Swinging Safari. Though delighted at getting to come back home, both McMahon and Finnegan humorously recall their initial concerns about him not being able to get his accent back, with the former even admitting “it took me a couple of days” to recapture his Australian accent.

From there, however, McMahon found himself presented with numerous elements that thrilled him for having joined The Surfer cast, namely the movie’s setting, which the star described as being “kind of its own character” as they found themselves in the southeastern coast of Australia along the Perth and Margaret River areas. After noting his busy schedule is largely why he hasn’t made more productions in his home country, he did praise the filming location as being “quite extraordinary” and was thrilled to “spend some time in a really extraordinary part of the world.”

The Beach Was Just As Important To The Movie’s Production As The Cast

It Also Led To Some Preparation That Verged On Seeming Ridiculous For Finnegan & McMahon

As the movie opens with Cage’s character and his son driving into the beach’s parking lot, audiences are quickly shocked to realize that this will be their home for the rest of The Surfer‘s runtime, with Cage becoming increasingly manic as he tries to get his surfboard back from the territorial locals. More than just location scouting, which brought them to the “perfect” town of Yallingup where “the color of the water was turquoise” and they had “white sands” and a parking lot “in the right place“, Finnegan worked closely with his cinematographer Radzek Ladczuk (Nocebo) to create a sun-baked texture.

The director’s biggest goal was wanting The Surfer to “have a hard light feel” to its visual palette when compared to a trend he’s observed in recent filmmaking in which “everything’s become diffused“. He and Ladczuk found themselves pouring over pH๏τos and references in order to really “use the basis of the place” along with “nice vintage lenses from Panavision” in order to give the film a “bit of texture” in which it felt like the temperature was increasing “through color and visual language.”

This technological approach to creating the sun-baked visual of The Surfer further extended to certain on-set techniques Finnegan and Ladczuk used. Some of these include “lens flares and flame bars” in order to authentically create the “heat distortion” layer to the movie’s palette, with Finnegan also expressing his graтιтude at having gotten generally nice weather throughout filming, even if the occasional rain created challenges for the few scenes filmed inside of a car.

“We had a day, basically, in a toilet, and that’s the only time we’re inside,” Finnegan went on to explain. “So, it was just the weather, really, and maintaining the sense of the place getting H๏τter and H๏τter, but having no real control over the elements, apart from shooting in certain directions during the day. Also, the sand was white, and the shrubbery and everything also had an aggressive quality to it. And there were a lot of snakes and lizards and kangaroos, and Australian wildlife around, so it sort of becomes part of the pressure cooker of the film. The environment being punishing, and Nic’s character almost becoming like a wild bush animal or something.“

This environmental influence was also put into the makeup and costuming for the movie’s cast of characters, with Finnegan recalling how the various departments also had to “tan everybody like mad” every day. Though he admits the cast “looked a little bit ridiculously tan” off-camera, the director ultimately felt they “looked great” on camera, while McMahon also recalls his own initial uncertainty about the look after seeing himself in the mirror for the first time:

We basically started every day in the makeup trailer with about 40 minutes of tanning, and I mean full-on tanning. And then even the color texture of the outfit that I wear, this red jacket-type thing with a hoodie and stuff. They were all really extreme choices. I remember the first time I looked at myself in the mirror and thought, “Oh my God, this guy’s really tan.” And then the way that he was shooting it, the texture that he was using, the colors that he was using, it just all made it come together.

The Surfer Isn’t Only About Toxic Masculinity (Even If It Touches On It)

“…I Wouldn’t Say That’s What It’s About, But It Depends On You.”

With the movie revolving around Cage’s тιтular character being hazed by McMahon and his group of local surfers, The Surfer has already found itself analyzed as an exploration of toxic masculinity, with McMahon’s Scally frequently exemplifying said behaviors. For Finnegan, he does acknowledge that this and “masculinity in crisis” are certainly themes of the movie, though describes his belief that “it was never a film about that“, and that the characters’ morals are not “black and white“, but instead are “just caught up in this thing” and that “a lot of young men need these strong male role model types“.

McMahon similarly found himself reluctant to outright describe The Surfer as primarily being about toxic masculinity, particularly when it came to how it influenced his choices as a performer. Instead, the star explained that his key to connecting to his character was that Scally and the group he’s amᴀssed are people “trying to find their way” and who want to “be able to communicate, to connect with each other” and “to feel like they can express themselves without being criticized“.

Interestingly, though, producer Leonora Darby had a fairly contrarian stance to McMahon and Finnegan when talking on The Surfer‘s red carpet at SXSW, explaining that toxic masculinity was something she “wanted to engage with” through the movie’s story. Briefly recalling the justified “over-correction” in productions following the #MeToo Movement, and her own experiences “as a young woman in production“, Darby also notes that she still receives scripts about “bad women, f—ed-up women“, but that those don’t solely focus on “toxic femininity“, and as such she wanted to see the same from the thriller:

I wanted to show all the shades of masculinity and celebrate them. There are aspects of this movie that are a little bit homoerotic. That’s because I wanted it to be that way. It’s about all of the messiness of being a man, and celebrating them, but also making fun of them. So, I think people should just enjoy it, because it’s a wild ride. I’ve said before, it’s a coliseum. You want to see Nic get absolutely hazed, and I think that is a very good mirror on the reflection of society, that we want to see someone get absolutely screwed like that, but we also want them to be able to fight back and root for the underdog, and he sticks it to them. So, that’s what I want people to take away from it, to just have fun.

The Group Has A Unique Range Of Suggestions For Audiences To Prepare For The Surfer

“…That One Kept On Coming To My Mind.”

With the movie borrowing heavy influence from the Ozploitation genre generally produced through the ’70s and ’80s, there are certainly a wide range of options for audiences to dive into for getting in the mood for The Surfer. Interestingly, while Finnegan and McMahon do have a few such movies to recommend to viewers, they also have a few classic American movies that they feel will get audiences in the right headspace for their psychological thriller:

Lorcan Finnegan: So, I’d say The Swimmer, and that’s obviously an American movie. I’ll give you another American one, Scorsese’s After Hours, that was an inspiration for his costume, a little bit. And from Australia, Wake in Fright, Walkabout, Long Weekend, The Last Wave, even Picnic at Hanging Rock, a little bit, for the sort of dreamy atmosphere.

Julian McMahon: So weirdly, I kept on going in my own space and mind to the Gene Hackman movie, The Conversation, the Francis Ford Coppola movie. I don’t know why, but I kept on thinking about that a lot. Everybody’s talking about the Ozploitation stuff, but I think there are a lot of American 1970s movies that were particularly inspiring for that kind of stuff in their own right. So there’s a bunch of them, but that one kept on coming to my mind.

McMahon Thinks Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom Performance Will Be “Pretty Extraordinary”

“His Body Of Work Speaks For Itself.”

Of McMahon’s American body of work, the Golden Globe nominee played the iconic Marvel villain Doctor Doom in the 2000s Fantastic Four movies. While he was later replaced by Toby Kebbell for the 2015 failed reboot, Robert Downey Jr. will now be carrying the Doom torch in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, serving as the main villain for Avengers: Doomsday and Secret Wars. The casting has been a real point of debate among fans of the franchise given the Oscar winner brought his MCU tenure to an emotional close in Avengers: Endgame‘s ending.

In reflecting on this casting, McMahon immediately points out that Downey Jr. is a “super talented guy” and that he loves watching the star’s work, expressing that “his body of work speaks for itself” and his belief that his performance will be “pretty extraordinary“. McMahon also recalls his Fantastic Four movies were “at the [precipice]” before the MCU revitalized the comic book genre, and how that led to the creative teams behind them still “trying to figure out what space the movie itself lived in“:

Was it a kid’s movie? Was it a family movie? Was it more comedy-driven, or was it more trauma-driven? We were trying to find all that stuff as we were shooting. I think now that there’s so many different realms of establishment of the way that you look at those pieces, you can pretty much do so many different things now.

More About The Surfer

In the psychological thriller directed by Lorcan Finnegan, a man returns to the idyllic beach of his childhood to surf with his son. But his desire to hit the waves is thwarted by a group of locals whose mantra is “don’t live here, don’t surf here.” Humiliated and angry, the man is drawn into a conflict that keeps rising in concert with the punishing heat of the summer and pushes him to his breaking point.

Source: ScreenRant Plus