Surf Scion Dana Brown's 8 Tips For Making a World-Class Surfing Movie (or Any Movie)

Welcome back to Moment of Truth, Movieline's regular showcase for the best in new nonfiction cinema. We return from our brief summer hiatus with filmmaker Dana Brown, whose doc Highwater opens Friday in New York, Los Angeles and Maui.

As accidental dynasties go, the Brown family's makes pretty good sense. The son of surfing documentary pioneer Bruce Brown (the Endless Summer trilogy) and long an established docmaker in his own right (Step Into Liquid, Dust to Glory), director Dana Brown has invited his own kids into the creative fold for his new film Highwater. Here the family takes on surfing's Triple Crown -- a series of championship contests on Oahu's celebrated (and treacherous) North Shore -- and the complex evolution of athletes and culture that is changing the sport and the Shore forever. Not unlike their subjects, the art and science of surfing is literally in Browns' blood, and their shadows on the genre are long and crucially influential.

Yet in the, er, wake of hearing such news that Sam Worthington plans to develop his own indie surfing movie next year in Western Australia, it's worth asking what that influence means -- and what other filmmakers (not to mention viewers) can learn from it.

"People sometimes say, 'Well, can other people do surf movies?'" Dana Brown told Movieline last week in New York. "Of course they can! If they're good stories, there are an endless variety of them. There's an endless variety of romantic comedies or detective movies -- if they're any good. It's such a bigger idea. It just depends on how you do it. I don't think anyone will make them exactly like me, and I wouldn't make one exactly like anyone else."

So: Let's go to film school! Herewith, find a few pro basics that can make any deep sea doc -- or dry land drama, for that matter -- work for you:

1. Stay flexible

"The biggest secret shooting Highwater in particular was to kind of be fluid enough to change your position at any time. Besides the surf changing or the size of the waves or time of day, you have all these people in your way and around. So you have to make a decision that there's no way around these people; let's get a shot that features all the people in the foreground. Just being able to think on your feet is half the thing. When Malik Joyeux died at Pipeline, everybody said, 'Should we move the camera?' I said, 'Don't move the camera -- you're fine right there.' Because if you move the camera, you're probably going to miss the action."

2. Stay small

"To be honest, in film especially, you always say, 'How should we do this?' Thank God for technology. We got a couple of these smaller prosumer HD cameras, and we were able to kind of wade into the crowd during the Pipeline Masters. You couldn't do it if you had a bigger camera. That shifts the dynamic of the crowd."

dana_brown_highwater_mid.jpg3. Stay personal

"I made the mistake every now and then of saying, 'Let's set up an interview with so-and-so.' And my producer, God bless him, would do it in a really traditional way: He'd contact their sponsors to get permission and go get him. But by the time you got the interview it was so formalized that the people weren't nearly as casual as they would have been if I just said, 'Hey, let's go get Sonny Garcia' -- and then I walk up to Sonny Garcia and introduce myself. 'What would be a good time? Anything's good for me.' I would notice it's much easier to do that interview because the people have contacted me. When it's time to talk to them for the interview, they're more comfortable than when we go through these formal channels. You end up using a lot more tape to get what you want."

4. Think like a surfer...

"You have to know where the wave's going. Is it going right or left? What kind of day is it? Even what you're looking for; you've got to tell the camera guy. You don't have enough film to shoot every wave. So you say, 'Don't bother shooting when the wave's over here or if this is happening. Here's what we're looking for." The knowledge of surfing helps quite a bit. But you also need to know when to deploy the water cameramen. They can't be in the water nine hours a day. They're not inhuman. So you figure out when is a good time to send them out and what you're looking for."

5. ...But act like a director

"If you're shooting with four cameras, you don't want four cameras you are covering something the same way. Ultimately you're making a movie, so you're going to want master shot, close-up, this or that. You don't want to get to the editing room and say, 'Wow, we have five wide shots from different angles of the same thing.' So be sure to tell someone to shoot close on the guys. I don't care if it's slightly out of focus in parts, because we're just looking for little bits and pieces here. If you're shooting super-tight in slow motion, a lot of times a lot of the shot is out of focus. All I'm looking for is a little piece here or there. If we don't get it -- say a shark attacks him -- we have the wide camera, the medium... We know we have them.

"And stay in contact with everybody. It's a long day; if you walk up to someone and say, 'What did you get?' And they say, 'I got 45 minutes of these kids playing...' I mean, we don't need that much unless they're learning to tap dance and juggle fire. You maybe go through a checklist. Or if someone gets something interesting maybe you haven't counted on, you say, 'Really? Can you follow up on that? That'd be great.'"

6. Preserve a moment

"After I made Step Into Liquid, I didn't think I was going to make another surfing film. I thought, 'I told all these stories, I worked on material with my father... What else can you do?' But then I went and made a movie called Dust to Glory about the Baja 1000, this race across the desert over this four-day period. So I thought maybe I could go back to surfing and make kind of a small, one-place-at-one-time film. The North Shore has 100 stories. Then it occurred to me to do it now because it's not going to be like that forever. Surfing's changed so much anyway, but it's the fact that so many people go to the North Shore -- that that's still the focus. A lot of the guys who helped popularize it are still around. There's still a connection to the roots that won't be there in 10 or 12 years. It's not a bad thing; it's like the West. The last lines of barbed wire are going up, and it's going to change. It's inevitable. So I thought, 'Well, we'd better go capture this now.' The worst that could happen -- if we didn't get much surfing or much story -- was that we got a look at this place at this time."

7. Never stop looking for the Perfect Wave

"The 'Perfect Wave' could represent just about anything. There are different levels of surfers looking for different perfection. The Perfect Wave might be surfing with your best friend on an August day in warm water. The Perfect Wave for another guy might be surfing by himself, challenging himself against the biggest wave ever. I'm just searching for what seems to fit the scene or the story at that point."

8. Make your film

"I've been asked about [the Brown family tradition] few times in different ways, and I don't have a good answer. We must have similar genetic sensibilities in a way, but I think it's just [important] to tell the best story you can, and to present it the way you kind of imagine it to be. You'd like to make a film that you'd like to see. Other than that there's no real tricks of the trade. As much as people say there must be, there really aren't."



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