Stuart Nettle June 9, 2010

Caught Inside is the first feature film for Sydney-based surfer and director Adam Blaiklock. It's a psychological thriller set on a charter boat in the Maldives and is premiering at the Sydney Film Festival. I recently had a chat with Adam about how the film was made, why credibility from the surfing world is important and where surf films have failed in the past. As you'll read he was a most obliging interviewee...

Stuart Nettle: The Sydney Film Festival has been going for one week now, a week when Sydney has had excellent surf, how have you been spending your time?

Adam Blaiklock: I tell you it's one of the biggest dilemmas I've ever had I reckon. Sydney always gets good surf during the festival. In fact I remember surfing Bronte one year when the festival was on and I got concussion. It was one of those beautiful Bronte days and there was a big A-frame right in the middle of the beach, anyway I gave myself concussion and I had to spend three days with this massive headache.

I'm managing to make sure I go to festival sessions at night at the moment and tell everyone at work that I'm at the festival while I'm surfing. Funnily enough I just got out of the surf at Newport because I thought you were gonna call. So here we go.

Good surf over there?

Yeah, it's fantastic. I was at the Peak but there was a couple guys over off Newport Reef at the southern end and there were some beautiful waves coming through there.

Nice, I won't keep you too long then. About the film, you wrote Caught Inside with two other people, where did the idea come from?

I was on a boat called Arimbi up in the Mentawais a few years ago and I noticed that there was this other boat staying near us, and this other boat had eight blokes and two girls on it. One girl had a boyfriend and the other girl was single, and you could tell that she just loved the attention of these eight guys. And it was interesting, boat trips are kind of a pressure cooker anyway, you kind of start to give each other the shits as a bunch of guys, but throw a couple of girls into the mix and the heat turns way up. Especially when one of the girls is madly flirting with her captive audience.

So I observed this other boat and there was this guy on it, this guy from Wollongong, a pitbull of a guy, one of those guys that if you go to a pub you don't want to look at twice because he'll come and confront you. Anyway we were all in the surf and he's looking back at the boat and the single girl is kinda flaunting it on the boat and he just turns to his mate and says calmly "let's just take her to the beach and fucken do her". It sent chills down my spine....and that was the seed for the story.

I don't ever know what happened to that girl or what happened on that boat but I thought, 'OK what do you do if you're in that situation?' 'What would I do in a situation like that, where you have a physically intimidating man who decides he's gonna teach a girl a lesson?' How do you stop him? So that's what the film is all about...

And you've written that character into the story?

In the film the guy is named Bull and he's a bit of an old legend who was one of the first guys to surf the spot they're at and kinda discovered the islands for surfing and everyone thinks he's a bit of a hero. But realistically he's just a sad lonely guy who's got nothing but this one thing in his life.

So you've set a psychological thriller in the surfing world, how important is it to get credibility from the surfing community?

I've been directing for a long time though this is my first film. But it's always been my dream that my first film would be around the culture I love, which is surfing, and to tell a story honestly and truthfully. Because there are a couple of things in surfing films that really piss me off. There's always about ten or fifteen things in a surf-based drama where, as a surfer, you just cringe.

The first one being that you have actors that are sitting on a lake and suddenly someone paddles for a left and then all of a sudden they're catching a right. Surf-based films make all these kind of mistakes. To fix that I only cast actors that could surf. I wanted the scenes in the water to be absolutely true and real. It didn't limit my casting because I got an amazing cast and I thought, 'fuck, well, if you're an australian actor and you can't surf you shouldn't be acting'[laughs]. I kind of had an idea of who I wanted anyway and luckily I got them.

Offering them four weeks on a boat in the Maldives is a good incentive....

Yeah, well that turned out to be the hard part. We had sixteen people - all surfers, cast and crew - on the one boat, and I'd made promises to them all you know? Let's go to the Maldives for a month! And then we got there and there was perfect surf and I said "no, no, no you can't go and surf in that, we have to work now". A few people were like, "hang on a minute, this isn't what I signed up for".

But back to the things that piss me off...the second thing I hate in surf movies - and it happens in all of them - is that there is always one scene where someone has to explain why they surf. The rush and the adrenalin and all that bullshit...

The Point Break moment.

Yeah, yeah but even in a film like In Gods Hands they do it. That was made by surfers and they show all this incredible surfing footage, but then all of a sudden they have to have this mandatory scene where there's this girl on a train asking the guy why he does it. Anyone who has to explain surfing just sounds immediately like a wanker....unless you're Tim Winton, and I'm not Tim Winton.

And the third thing that pisses me off: every time you see a surf movie they paint surfers as being complete fucken idiots. You know, like we've all had a lobotomy. We're not a bunch of idiots, we're like any part of society, we've got smart people and we've got the people who smoke too many bongs and perhaps surf too much. But they're not the people I wanted to show in the film.

So essentially what I've done is put a psycho on a boat and tried to make it as honest and as truthful as possible. The threat was just one man and his intimidation and physicality. There is a moral question in the film also about where our responsibilities lie. This guy intimidates this girl to a very bad point but there's also a point where she has to take responsibility for her actions too. It's not just black and white. It never is.

What do you want your audience to be talking about when they leave the cinema?

I want the audience to walk out and have heated conversations about it. For me a film is about engaging, challenging and entertaining an audience. I think what's been great about the film is this psycho, Bull, is in the film and a lot of people walk out and go, 'but hang on a minute, she has to take some responsibility'. And I want people to look at it and go 'we all have responsibility for the monsters that we create'. We have to step up sometimes and take responsibility even though it might not be directly happening to us.

It sounds like you've gone to a lot of trouble to create a fair representation of surfers.

I don't paint the prettiest picture of surfers...

Well, we're not all like Bull.

There's a little bit of surf rage in the film too. I didn't want to be heavy-handed but just make a little statement about the stupidity of surf rage. There's a scene in the film where they go to this perfect spot that one guy reckons he discovered and thinks he owns but there's some other guy surfing it. So he decides to beat him up over it. One of the other guys encourages him to do that and manipulates him into it. It's trying to show the futility of that bullshit behaviour.

Because you know, it happens. It just happened to me. I got chased out of the water at North Narrabeen the other day. Not chased out but 'asked to leave' by Terry Fitzgerald, and he was exactly like the Bull character. It was like art imitating life with Terry Fitzgerald telling me to get out of the water. It was just so absolutely stupid. I was thinking that this was so unnecessary you know? And here I was thinking you are meant to be an ambassador for our sport and you're behaving like this. But in those situations you can't really argue with someone over that, they've got a silly point of view...and, it's just disappointing. It's disappointing that we behave like this sometimes.

Did you get many waves when you were filming in the Maldives?

Ha..this was the dilemma. We got there and the swell was absolutely perfect on the first day and I said don't worry about it, it'll get good again. But then it didn't get as good again till the last two days we were there!

You've got one more screening at the SFF, what happens after the festival is over?

We've got a sales agent called Arclight who are in negotiations with distributors in Australia and the rest of the world. We're on the starting line with this film, no-one has really seen it yet so this is very exciting. It's the beginning of our journey really.

Have you any idea where Swellnet readers might be able to see the film next if they don't catch it this Sunday night?

I'll have to keep you posted on that. It will get a cinema release at some stage but where and when is all in negotiations at the moment. That's the beauty of a festival screening, you put it in the festival to generate interest for a distributor, and we've certainly been getting that.

Thanks a lot for your time Adam. I'll let you get back to the surf now.

Caught Inside is showing at the Sydney Film Festival this Sunday night. Adam Blaiklock is having an audience Q+A after the screening.

View Caught Inside trailer here.