" Surfer, Dude was something we were trying to get made since 1998," McConaughey tells me, "I optioned a script that had a premise of 56 days with no waves in 1998. I got a hoot out of it I thought it had some cool things to say, I thought it was kind of corny, I thought it was very absurd, and I thought the humor was my kind of humor."
Matthew McConaughey and buddies in Surfer, Dude (Anchor Bay)
Surfer, Dude concerns internationally famous surf champion Steve Addington (played by McConnaughey) who comes home to Malibu to find things slightly out of kilter. There have been some changes involving the people handling his contract and now there are new sponsorship demands that don't sit well with this weed-loving soul surfer. He's being asked to participate in a reality TV show that is anything but real and to digitize himself for immersion in a virtual reality surf video game. Addington has no interest in any of this so his sponsored expense accounts are shut down and he finds himself out of money. And what's worse, the waves go flat. So Addington faces something of an existential crisis as he ponders whether or not to give in to the Man or fight the system and stay real.
McConaughey and Bindler are out promoting the film's message of keeping it real. Here's what they had to say about the process of working outside the Hollywood system.
Beth Accomando: You're a successful actor, why did you want to take on the responsibility of producing a film?
Matthew McConaughey: As an actor I'm hired to show up hit my mark, know my stuff if it's a big movie I work three months and I'm gone. There are movies that I've seen and I go, "Aahhh, that was better than I thought it was going to be." But there are a lot of movies where, "Oh man there must be something on the cutting room floor that we're never going to see in there." So I was like I want to get into the pre-production of it, the production of it, and the post production so at the end of the day I can look in the mirror and go, "Yup, now I got a big responsibility." Like it or not like it I know that I had my hands in the clay the whole time and I was responsible for a lot of it. I learned so much in this thing. I learned that I definitely don't want to produce every movie that I'm a part of. It's hard and it's long. But it was stuff you can't be taught; you can't read it in a book.
Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson in Surfer, Dude (Anchor Bay)
BA: What are you most proud of?
MM: Just getting it done. It's a big mountain to climb to get one made and what we had to do because we didn't have a big studio behind us you gotta do a little more door to door sales, you gotta do a little bit more haggling, a little more bartering. You had to barter a little bit because we didn't have the money, we didn't have as much money as most productions, and we didn't have the marketing budget either. So you've got to get more creative in a lot of ways.
BA: What drew you to the story?
S. R. Bindler: When they brought me the script the thing that was going on in the news that I was really fascinated with was that the bees were dying. Einstein said when the bees go we go four years after. I just thought that that was scary and amazing. So I was doing a lot of research on that and the script already had in it a couple things, it already had a reality house in it and the manipulative nature of reality television, and that was an interesting theme because I come from a documentary background where my whole approach was don't contrive something and this was the opposite. So that's where it started for me. Then I thought what if we steered Addington to the analog side of life, making him an analog character that's coming face to face with the emerging digital world and the inauthentic world because here's a really authentic guy that's coming up against some really inauthentic, fake, faux constructs, and reality television, and immersion virtual video games. Those themes resonated with me and like Matthew I grew up in the woods and have a deep appreciation for nature and the power of being connected to it and I feel like a lot of people that our country is so disconnected from nature that it's not a good thing. And we're seeing the symptoms of that disconnection in myriad ways. And I thought here's a hero that I could fall in love with, here's a hero that is a champion. And Matthew's just the perfect guy to embody that. I don't know of any other actor that's working today that would be better suited to be the representative of nature.
MM: What I gave to Addington was that connection to nature, a place that I can stand strongly and naturally myself. I have a real good relationship with mother nature. To have my shoes off and my shirt off under the sun is where I'm the most comfortable have been that way since day one I was born. The character has no attitude; the character doesn't have any ambitions other than he just wants to surf. I myself Matthew I have a lot of other ambitions. I have a lot of things I'm responsible for I have a much bigger more complicated life that I enjoy taking on those responsibilities. Addington does not. Addington's beholden to no one other than to himself. He's living that beautiful dream that he's just chasing the waves and that's about as free of a clock and schedule that you can be on, unless you're landlocked and it's flat.
Matthew McConaughey hitting the waves in Surfer, Dude (Anchor Bay)
BA: What were the biggest challenges in getting this to the screen?
SRB: Well, no one in Hollywood was ponying up money for it. We had to peddle and work to get that money. And it was ambitious for the money that we did have. Our budget was what the catering budgets are like on Matthew's other films. We made the most of what we had.
MM: Time was a challenge. We shot it in 28 days we could have used 40. So time was very precious. So there wasn't a lot of time to show up and discuss what maybe should go on. It was like let's discuss in pre-production but when we show up we need to be cranking film to get our story told.
BA: But do those constraints encourage creativity?
MM: Absolutely. I think in a lot of ways it can encourage more and even better creativity because time is precious but you can't be precious. So sometimes the sun's going down you have to combine two shots. Sometimes you have a scene and you don't have time to shoot that scene. So how can we get across what we want in that next scene in this scene and get what we wanted in this scene, let's combine them. You are always forced to compress, maybe you're going from A to B to C to D well how do you skip B can you go from A to C? Or can we pick up B along the way and take it with us into C. You have to think about how to streamline it while still tell your story.
SRB: I'm fascinated by that. You know one of our favorite filmmakers is Lars Von Trier and he talks a lot about that, having obstructions and that the hardest thing for an artist to deal with is having all the tools available and all the money all the time. It's impossible and a hindrance to creativity. He likes to start with obstacles. So at certain times you can't shoot with lights, it's all handheld. He used to put obstructions onto production, which forces the film to take on its own life and style. And that definitely holds true for low-budget films.
MM: There's not time to sit around and intellectualize the scene or the shot. There's not time to sit around and talk it out. It's time to show up and you know if you want to talk about it, get in front of the camera and press record and show me. That's what you do right away. You're on the fly there's no go to set, finish the scene and go back to the trailer. No one went back to the trailer on this one. You show up on the set in the morning, you're on the set for 12 hours until the day's done. It's hard but it's fun. But you also don't have that wait around prep time that you have on a lot of the bigger budget films, which is my least favorite time in working on bigger budget films, that lingering time for two hours in between a scene drives me crazy. I don't want to leave the set, that's where it's happening, that's where it's fun. That's the energy that you get back and it re-energizes you.
