Lorcan Finnegan is one of the few directors that we do our best to follow their every project, and it’s not only because he casts many of our favourite actors and actresses in his movies: Niamh Algar (in Without Name), Jesse Eisenberg (Vivarium), Eva Green, Mark Strong (in Nocebo) and Nicolas Cage in this year’s The Surfer. The main reason for us to keep a close track on his filmography may be explained by a certain level of je-ne-sais-quoi, a healthy (but serious) dose of uncanniness that haunt all his movies. When everything seems perfect in a Finnegan movie, that’s when we begin to worry and even a feeling of terror creeps on us. Mr. Finnegan’s first feature film is from 2016 (Without Name) but we first got hooked to his movies with his second feature Vivarium, in 2019. After that, we had the chance to interview Mr. Finnegan for the first time in 2020 (click here for that interview) on Vivarium and after four years, thanks to the 77th Cannes Film Festival, we are so glad to be able to do another interview with him, this time on The Surfer, starring Nicolas Cage, Julian McMahon and Nicholas Cassim. We would like to thank Mr. Lorcan Finnegan from the bottom of our hearts for accepting to answer Burcu Meltem Tohum’s questions.
At the very beginning you have worked with Thomas Martin about this movie, can you talk about the main reason for you to choose The Surfer as your next project?
I met Thomas back in 2012 when we both had short films at the Tribeca Film Festival. We hung out in New York but it turned out we lived very close to each other in Dublin. So we stayed in touch over the years and planned to do something together. He sent me a one-page outline for a story called The Surfer in 2017 and we chatted about it but we were both busy with other projects. Years later we came back to it and decided to develop it together. So it was really about timing rather than a decision for it to be my next film. Once we both had the time to properly concentrate on it, the film came together pretty quickly.
Since we are used to see a lot of references in your movies, we can safely say that The Surfer also has several metaphors and symbols. Did you choose the island as the main location so that it can assume a metaphoric role or was it just a reasonable option for the plot?
The locations were chosen primarily for the staging of story, but I was also looking for a place that would feed into the themes we were exploring, particularly nostalgia and distorted memories. To me the film has a dream like quality and gets inside Nick’s [Nicolas Cage] character’s head, so the way in which we framed, designed and shot that location was mostly motivated by that.
Can you tell us a bit about the casting process? For instance, did you always have Nicolas Cage in mind or was he the result of many happy coincidences? Also, what was your experience with him on the set?
In an early draft of the script the main character was an Australian who was just returning to a town he grew up in, without having lived in America etc. We felt we were limiting ourselves with cast and that maybe we could amplify the character’s sense of being an outsider and ‘not local’ if he didn’t have an Australian accent because he had been living abroad since he was a child. Once we thought this through it opened up the story and gave us the opportunity to look outside of Australia, which made it much more exciting. I read the script imagining various actors playing The Surfer and when I pictured Nicolas Cage it all really clicked, it was good film in my mind, all the scenes were working. It was going to be a long shot to get him on board but we offered it to him, he read it and really liked it, we had a zoom and we both got along very well so he said yes. We had a lot of fun shooting the film, Nick is a total cinephile so we talked a lot about films but also just had a good laugh, he’s a funny dude. We did quite a bit of work on the script together while we were in prep and he was incredibly prepared. We both like to work fast so it was a wonderful collaboration.
And a second question about the cast, how was working with Julian McMahon? His role is a little bit different from what he usually plays but it was a delight to watch his performance.
Julian was great, a joy to work with. It was a pretty difficult role to cast as his character had to be charming but also a bit nasty, have a surfer’s physicality and a strange chemistry with Nick’s character. I got very lucky with Julian and he brought lots of good ideas to the table. We had been shooting with Nick for a while before Julian arrived and his first scene was where he was offering a beer and sandwich to a deliriously dehydrated and starving Nick. There is a lot of intensity to that scene, Julian grabbing Nick’s face and dominating him so it was our first time seeing them together and their first-time meeting, so we were all hoping it was going to work, and luckily they were perfect together.
The set design is remarkably minimalist, which adds, if I may say, another layer of psychological profoundness to the atmosphere of the film. Can you talk about creating a limited set design and working in it? Was it challenging?
The film is all contained to the carpark, the beach below, the tiki hut on the beach, the toilets in the carpark and The Surfer’s car, so it was always going to be a challenge to make a film that is so contained but that also really appealed to me. The key was to find a location that worked for all of the scenes and make it feel hot and oppressive, with nature all around the carpark and the pounding waves of the surf beach below. In prep I worked a lot on colour theory and the visual language for the film and put together a document that we could use as reference for the storytelling and to create atmosphere and psychological perspectives etc. but also for the composer who started making music for the film before we started shooting. Radek [Radek Ladczuk] and I discussed using long lenses, super wide angle lenses, when to be tracking and when to go hand held etc. and made camera tests with colours etc. and also worked with my colourist Gary Curran while in prep to develop the look. The location had certain colours – browns and greens from the trees and bushes around the carpark, blue skies, turquoise sea, beige sand etc. so they were elements that we had to work with as a starting point and build onto with props, sets, wardrobe, makeup etc – adding yellows, reds and burnt orange to increase the heat, giving everybody suntans, Nick’s suit being a sandy colour to connect him to the beach etc. Because so much of the film is outdoors the production design was very much intertwined with costume, makeup and locations. We also had a lot of night shooting so we developed a look for night with a green light for the carpark and quite a saturated blue light for the beach. The audience experiences the story very much from The Surfer’s subjective experience, so the place changes as his psychological perspective changes, which was great fun to experiment with.
The Surfer made me think about your earlier film Vivarium and since I am a fan, I loved it. Can we say that The Surfer and Vivarium have the same tense atmosphere? And if so, was it your plan right from the beginning of the project?
Thanks, I’m glad you enjoyed Vivarium! I remember meeting you at one of the screenings. It wasn’t really my plan to have a similar atmosphere but I’m sure I learnt things about making a very contained, tense and atmospheric film by making Vivarium that I brought to The Surfer subconsciously. There is a similarity in that the character is kind of trapped in this place but where Vivarium was more surreal and the place is actually a trap, The Surfer is more psychological and the character can escape only by coming to terms with the place and his past. Vivarium had a total absence of nature, which was part of the dread, but nature plays a big part in the atmosphere of The Surfer – the chorusing of cicadas in the heat, the reptiles, the flies, the wizened dried trees surrounding the carpark, the bird calls, all contrasted with the crisp hypnotic turquoise waves on the surf beach below, calling The Surfer. Actually my first film Without Name probably also had an influence in how I created the atmosphere, particularly the use of long lenses and fragmented editing.
Can we say that the movie is totally loyal to Thomas Martin’s script or were there some changes along the way? For example, did you keep in the final version any improvisation from the actors, if there were any?
Ultimately it’s loyal to the intention of the script but there were lots of changes along the way, some that Thomas and I did together with Nick’s input, others that were implemented by Thomas and I as solutions to budgetary or scheduling constraints while in prep or filming, others that responded to the actual location rather than the description in the script, some that were spontaneous improvisations on the day and others that were planned maybe a day before shooting them. For example the trippy party scene in the hut was originally a bigger scene with lot more people and characters but we changed it to be more intimate with just the Bay Boys for schedule and budgetary reasons but as a result it’s now one of my favourite scenes. When Nick’s character is walking around the carpark towards the latter part of the film, half mad asking if he can borrow a phone, Nick told me he had some ideas that he wanted to try so we cleared the carpark and let him improvise for a couple of long takes, his dialogue about ‘puttanesca pasta’ and ‘clams casino’ that are in that film all came from that improvisation. A rat being shoved into another character’s mouth was something Nick suggested to me the day before we shot it, I loved the idea we did a quick test with our stunt coordinator and the actors in the carpark between setups so that nobody choked when we tried to do it properly the following day. Shooting in a real location where everything was there allowed for constant experimenting and playing around while making the film, which was a rare pleasure.
Can you talk about The Surfer’s journey on the 77th Cannes Film Festival? I was so moved to see Nicolas Cage very emotional about his participation to the festival.
It was an amazing experience! We found out about 5 weeks before the screening date but we were still in post so it was a crazy rush to finish on time but to rush to the finish line and show the film at the Palais in Official Selection was incredible. We had a brilliant night. Nick getting the crowd to chant ‘Mangez le rat!’ won’t be forgotten any time soon!
What can you say about shooting the film in Australia? Pros and cons, maybe? Also, was Australia always on your mind as a shooting location?
Since I first read the outline, I pictured Australia. I was influenced by New Wave Australian films when I first started making films and this story felt like it belonged to that world. We could have set it anywhere with a good surf beach but the themes of masculinity in crisis, the oppressive heat, the colonial aspect of Australia, the way Australia’s seasons are completely the reverse of Ireland’s (having Christmas on the beach) all made a lot of sense for the story. Both Thomas and I had worked in Australia before too, he adapted a book there and I shot some commercials there. My cinematographer Radek Ladczuk shot three films in Australia before. So we all felt pretty comfortable shooting there. We were outsiders, just like our main character, The Surfer. Some of my favourite Australian films were also shot by outsiders, Canadian filmmaker Ted Kotcheff who made Wake in Fright [1971] and British filmmaker Nic Roeg who made Walkabout [1971].
In terms of production, Australia was great and I had an amazing team. We were in a town called Yallingup in Western Australia, about 3 hours south of Perth, so it was very remote which made it tricky. A lot of our equipment and crew came from the East Coast, which was around 4,000 km away. This was an Australian, Irish, UK and US production so finding a time for production calls in post and prep was probably the most difficult thing. Time zone madness. Overall, I loved shooting there and would happily go back.
Finally, can you talk about your future projects?
I’m preparing a new film called GOLIATH at the moment, it’s a dystopian fable about creating monsters in order to start wars and steal natural resources, the idealism of ‘the hero’ and the power of stories to shape political agendas. It was written by Garret Shanley, who I collaborated with on Without Name, Vivarium and Nocebo.
Thank you so much.
Questions: Burcu Meltem Tohum
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