Irish filmmaker, writer and producer Lorcan Finnegan discusses his beach-bound mystery-thriller The Surfer [+lire aussi :
critique
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interview : Lorcan Finnegan
fiche film], how he created the character with lead actor Nicolas Cage and the psychological impact of the colours in the film, which has just screened at the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival (BIFFF), where it snagged a Special Mention in the International Feature Film Competition (see the news).

Cineuropa: BIFFF is quite a special festival with rather a vocal audience… How do you like it here?
Lorcan Finnegan: This is my first time at BIFFF, and I like it a lot. It’s great when the audience is so alive and reactive. It’s perfect, actually. It would be great for testing a film before it comes out, to see what works and what not, what makes the audience laugh or cry. It’s much worse when there is no reaction at all.

How did you work on creating the surfer character with Nicolas Cage?
The character’s vibe was already very much alive in the script [by Thomas Martin], and the casting of Nick settled it, in a way. I wanted the surfer to be a likeable guy whom you feel sorry for, and Nick naturally exudes that. We wanted to make him a dreamer who believed that buying a house back would fix his family, that he would be able to give his kid the same kind of childhood that he had. The surfer is kind of an optimistic character in that sense. All of these elements came alive through our discussions. I remember Nick suggesting to use the surfboard as his “rosebud”, to continuously try to get his surfboard back from the Bay Boys, sometimes in simplistic ways, and to try not to let them bully him. This was the main driver for the dynamics in the film.

There are some similarities between your 2019 movie Vivarium [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Lorcan Finnegan
fiche film] and The Surfer. It seems that the more infernal the situation becomes, the more you resort to certain colours, such as green and red.
I enjoy using colours for the symbolism as well as for their psychological effect. With Vivarium, that kind of green colour was actually proven to induce anxiety, so that’s why we chose it for the colour of the house. With The Surfer, obviously, in Australia it is very hot, so there are a lot of warm colours like reds, rusty oranges and yellows. But then there are also elements such as the sea being a dreamy turquoise, calling him forth all the time. Because the character has this nostalgia and warped memory of his childhood, the faded yellow is related to his father. Last but not least, Scally’s red hood is almost like an early depiction of Jesus, mixed with the devil, while Nick’s character is spending his 40 days and nights in the desert. It’s a bit like the Temptation of Christ, and in the very end, when Nick puts on the blue robe, it is all washed away.

Both films start with the main characters wanting to buy a house. In Vivarium, Gemma and Tom want to get out of the house, while the surfer wants to get back inside his childhood home. The houses are like characters themselves.
The characters in both stories are prisoners of the houses. Gemma and Tom go in there to buy a house, but then become trapped inside. The surfer is a prisoner of his own mind because he is stubborn and does not want to give up the dream of his childhood home. I have always enjoyed these kinds of stories because all humans are trapped somehow, whether that means being trapped in the way we’re thinking, or even in the fleshy vessels of our bodies. The house is a great way to illustrate this. It’s also a bit like therapy for people struggling with having lost their childhood home.

It’s interesting that you say that Scally in his red robe is a bit like Jesus because, given the rise of populism in the USA and Europe, I read it as a political commentary as well… For me, the surfer was a bit like a refugee wanting to get back to safety, while the Bay Boys represented the right-wingers calling for the building of walls.
It was slightly inspired by Joe Rogan, Andrew Tate-y kind of people... That’s sort of Scally’s character, except that he is not quite as nasty. What was interesting to me was that these people can be very charismatic – men who are lost get easily sucked up, wanting to belong to some sort of club. It’s like little boys wanting to be in a tree house and others not allowing them up the ladder. Scally, with his toxic masculinity, is seen as a saviour by these men who feel invincible in the beach house, but then go back to being crushed by their normal jobs as doctors and lawyers. They are almost like the hellish part of masculine society down in this beach hut, and up above, they behave completely differently. They are all white guys in Australia, too, so they are all colonisers. And the only person who’s nice to Nick’s character is the indigenous photographer [played by Miranda Tapsell].