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BLUE CRUSH
THERE HAVE BEEN LOTS OF SURF MOVIES OVER THE YEARS, YET FEW OF THEM REALLY SEEM TO CAPTURE THE SPORT UP-CLOSE. pLEASE TELL ME WE WON'T SEE ACTORS ON WOBBLY BOARDSIN FRONT OF A BLUE SCREEN IN BLUE CRUSH!
Grazer: No actors on bouncing boards! Both John and I said from the start that we wanted to capture the truth. We wanted surfers to see the movie and feel like they were inside the physics of the wave. We were there in the water with real surfers in front of and behind the waves. The whole crew was Hawaiian. We tried to keep everything real.
Stockwell: I was sort of terrified going in, to be honest. Surfing has to be the most difficult sport to capture on film and I knew how bad the movie could be if we got it wrong. I also knew that water is one of the most difficult environments for film-makers to work in. The history of Hollywood is full of water movies that went badly wrong, horribly over budget and over schedule.
“Sometimes it would be just one camera operator on a boogie board following one surfer and we’d capture a moment of magic. It’s not something you can plan for or choreograph” |
SO WHERE DID PEOPLE GO WRONG BEFORE?
Grazer:I don’t know whether I can answer that, but I would say we just kept our nerve and did whatever we could to get it right. Ron Howard and I did Apollo 13 a few years ago and that was the first time that a movie had actors really being weightless. We could just as easily have faked it, had the actors on wires and then digitally removed them, and it would probably have looked almost as good. But, at some level, it’s as if the audience can feel it and know when they’re being cheated. I thought about that a lot when we came to make this movie.
Stockwell: Some of it’s just practical. Hollywood films are not well suited to waiting around for conditions to be right. There are these big crews and lots of money being spent and the clock is ticking, so it’s not easy to tell your producer, ‘You know what? We’re not going to shoot today because the wind is in the wrong direction and the swell is hitting long!’ I mean, producers don’t like it when you tell them that! Even on days when we were scheduled to shoot an interior, we’d sometimes get a report saying surf conditions were going to be perfect for about two hours on the other side of the island and off we’d go. The extras were already hired for the interiors, the location was paid for, and we’d just blow it off. Thankfully, Brian gave me the flexibility to do that, and I think it paid off. Sometimes it would be just one camera operator on a boogie board following one surfer and we’d capture a moment of magic. It’s not something you can plan for or choreograph.
Kate Bosworth as top surfer Anne Marie
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HOW ABOUT ALL THE ADVANCES IN FILM TECHNOLOGY? DID THEY HELP YOU PUT THINGS ON THE SCREEN THAT WOULDN'T HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE BEFORE?
Grazer:Yes, there have been amazing advances. I mean, this movie will capture the whole surfing experience in a way that’s so much more visceral than anything that we’ve seen before. Yet some of it was still pretty low-tech.
Stockwell: Some of the specialised cameras we used were ones developed by the military in World War II, but they got the job done.
director John Stockwell
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HOW ABOUT YOUR CAST MEMBERS? DID YOU ONLY AUDITION PEOPLE WHO COULD ALREADY SURF?
Grazer:We met hundreds and hundreds of actresses for the lead roles and we made all of them surf. We knew we had to have people who could already surf or could learn very quickly.
Stockwell: I wasn’t sure initially whether it would be easier to get actors and teach them how to surf, or get surfers and teach them how to act. In the end, we did kind of a mixture for the supporting roles.
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