When the 2024 Cannes Film Festival lineup dropped, one film in particular sent shockwaves across the internet: The Surfer, an Australian-set psychological thriller starring Nicolas Cage. Director Lorcan Finnegan tells Andy Hazel for the Curb he wasn’t even expecting to make the lineup.
“We literally only finished the film a couple of days ago,” Finnegan says, the morning after its world premiere. “To get that kind of reaction, a six-minute standing ovation from the audience, was perfect.”
The Surfer follows Nicolas Cage’s unnamed protagonist, the surfer, as he returns from a life in California to his hometown on the Western Australian south coast. He plans to bond with his son over their shared love of surfing while waiting for the final formalities to settle in the purchase of his family home, a sprawling house overlooking the dazzling bay to which they have just arrived. As Cage and his son take their boards to the turquoise waters, Julian McMahon’s charismatic Scally steps in to calmly explain that the beach is for locals only. “But this is a public beach,” Cage protests. “Yeah, but nah.”
From this moment, every sensible decision Cage’s surfer makes is thwarted. Denied entry to the beach, unable to move into the house he has all but bought, and unable to leave the carpark, he is reduced to living in his car alongside an unhoused man who may or may not be the surfer himself. As the film eases toward its phantasmagorically visceral denouement, Cage does indeed, as the audience will surely be hoping, “go full Nic Cage”.
McMahon, best known for his Golden Globe-nominated performance in Nip/Tuck, and most recently seen playing the Australian prime minister in The Residence, says he was on board as soon as he read Thomas Martin’s script. “The stuff that was happening in The Surfer just wasn’t happening in any of the other scripts I was reading. It was really easy to visualise.”
As with Nicholas Roeg’s Walkabout, Jane Campion’s Sweetie and Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright (the latter of which Finnegan cites as an influence on The Surfer), the most incisive view into Australian culture can come from an outsider’s eye. Both Finnegan and Martin are Irish. As Finnegan explains, the germ for the film came from an incident Martin encountered while backpacking in northern New South Wales.
“Tom witnessed some surf localism,” says Finnegan. “He watched somebody getting beaten up and I think it affected him. You see fights in movies all the time, but when you actually see a real fight – somebody pummelling somebody with their fists – it's vicious. Then we started reading about this happening in Australia, and Tom wrote a one-page outline, and I thought, yeah, this could be really good. It was very contained, very psychological. I really wanted to make something that was completely subjective and have the audience experience everything as they experience it. Once I started doing that, it reminded me of new wave Australian films.”
Each year dozens of films are released under the genre “psychological thriller”. What marks The Surfer out from the pack is Finnegan’s sharply edited psychedelic interludes of sound and colour that harness Roeg’s sharp editing style and Antonioni-esque bursts of experimental cinema that both disorient the viewer and depict the surfer’s psychological disintegration. Sequences like these harken back to Finnegan’s origins as a graphic designer and animator.
“Starting out, I didn’t even really mean to make films,” he says. “Me and my friends would make sketches and stuff, just for fun really. YouTube was a new thing, and I shot and edited and uploaded all these like short filmy things, like one-minute shorts and little experiments. Then some people from an ad agency saw those and asked me to make an ad. So, I did that, and then I made some music videos. My first proper short film was in 2007 and that did well, it won some prizes and stuff, and things just got bigger.”
Finnegan’s first feature film, 2019’s Vivarium, starred Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots as a couple trapped in a sci-fi nightmare of anonymous suburbia. McMahon says it was the ideas and the visual style of this film that clued him into Finnegan as a possible future collaborator.
“Vivarium, and his short films, they're quite fascinating,” he says. “He has a unique interpretation of psychology. He's a guy who really feels naturally out there. When you meet him, you realise how grounded and kind of easy-going and relaxed he is, it’s a really interesting combination.”
To shoot The Surfer, Finnegan embarked on a surprisingly long search for the “right” beach, one with an isolated car park, a walk to pristine sand, curling waves, and a nearby luxury house, before settling on a bay near Yallingup, Western Australia. Once on set, the characters of the surfer and Scally developed through a collaborative process during the 27-day shoot.
“At one stage, the script was an Australian character going back to his hometown,” says Finnegan. “But me and Tom were a bit like, ‘there's something not quite right’. Does he have to be Australian? It could be more interesting if he's an outsider like us, in a way. That would amplify his disconnect with the place that he left as a child. So, he’s an Australian coming back with an American accent and this rose-tinted memory of what life was like there. It's not like that at all anymore, and maybe it wasn't even like that when he was a child. Once we thought of that, then it was like, all right, well that’s great.”
With the lead character set as an American, Finnegan, his wife and co-producer Brunella Cocchiglia and Martin created a list of actors. Once they arrived at Cage, Finnegan reread the script with him in mind and sent it to Cage’s manager. Fortunately, Cage had seen and liked Vivarium and read the script for The Surfer. Already a fan of shooting in Australia, within weeks Cage, Martin and Finnegan were regularly conversing over Zoom.
“It was good fun,” says Finnegan. “He had some suggestions, and I had suggestions, and then Tom went away and did a new draft.”
Outside of Cage’s operatically outsized performance, McMahon’s Scally is one of the film’s most memorable characters, a curious combination of corporate motivational speaker, cult leader and Bra Boy. Scally is revered by the other surfers in his community, especially his violent offsider Pitbull, respected by the local law enforcement and able to reason with Cage’s surfer in a way that leaves him destitute, alone and seething with impotent rage.
“God, the amount of shit I had to listen to to create that character,” Finnegan laughs before letting out a long sigh. “Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan, and there's neo-shamanism as well. A lot of guys feel disenfranchised, or they don't really understand themselves, or they feel like they need to belong to something, and these guys can offer them something. Whether that's good or bad, it happens.”
Finnegan and Martin intended Scally to be a combination of new age shaman and Jordan Peterson, a man who would act as a father figure to the other surfers. As McMahon says, it was the character’s originality that appealed to him.
“When I read the script, I thought there was this very ethereal quality to Scally,” he says. “The opening scene is of him just walking with the sun setting. The first visual I had for this character was Jesus,” he says. “I thought of him as like a prophet or an inspirational leader, the way that he never really loses his cool. It was an interesting dynamic, to be surrounded by this masculinity, this sort of sense of righteousness.”
“Of course I had known Nic’s work for years,” says McMahon, “and I knew that he would bring a lot of creative energy to the film. I really liked the ambiguity of Scally and how that could play off what Nic was going to bring.”
Despite the film’s poster, which sees Cage holding a surfboard, Finnegan is keen to point out that The Surfer isn’t a surf film, “The Swimmer isn’t about swimming. The Surfer isn’t really about surfing. It’s a psychological thriller. We wanted to be authentic, and a lot of local surfers are in the film, and we had surf advisors on set, but we knew the whole film was going to have this heightened weird vibe.”
“There was a pretty cool vibe on the movie,” agrees McMahon. “But that doesn't always translate. I've been on things that have cool vibes and that doesn't mean it's going to end up really cool. But there's been something with this movie from the beginning, a really special quality, and last night that seemed to carry through to the audience.”
Even though I am speaking to McMahon and Finnegan twenty-four hours after the film’s premiere, one of Cage’s lines, “eat the rat!”, has already become a word of mouth and online meme. At one of the surfer’s lowest points, he is reduced to feasting on local wildlife. Originally, one scene was meant to see the surfer beat a rat to death and throw it away, but once the rat prop was in his hands, inspiration took hold.
“He was like, ‘I want to bite its head off’,” Finnegan explains. “And I was like, ‘I don't know’. He's like, ‘yeah! I'll drink its blood’. I said, ‘I don't know if that's right for that part of the story, because it needs to be amplified and get more extreme later’. But he was set on it. Then we were thinking, ‘okay, what if you go to eat it, but then you get shat on by a bird and you're like, oh, birds’ eggs and you go and find birds’ eggs?’ So that's where it was supposed to end, but Nic got very attached to this rat prop and wanted to keep it in his pocket. The art department was like, ‘can we get the rat back? We only have one’, and Nic said, ‘no, I want to keep it. I need the rat,” Finnegan laughs. “I think this is part of him developing the character.”
“Then he had this idea of shoving the rat into Pitbull's mouth, which weirdly came from the Humphrey Bogart movie Sabrina, where Bogart takes an olive and he shoves it into this other man’s mouth and he goes, ‘eat it’. That inspired him to shove a rat down a drowning man's throat and say, ‘eat it! Eat the rat!’”.
The Surfer opens in Australian cinemas on May 15.
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