Irish director Lorcan Finnegan and Nicolas Cage bring out the best in each other in The Surfer

RTÉ News​

10-05-2025

Irish director Lorcan Finnegan and Oscar winner Nicolas Cage prove to be a formidable team in the ego-under-the-Sun psychodrama The Surfer, a movie that ranks with Cage's best work of recent years.
In The Surfer, Cage's Man with No Name returns to the beautiful Australian beach of his early years, all set to buy his childhood home overlooking the bay. And then everything falls apart as he roasts alive in a car park.
Watch: The trailer for The Surfer.
In Irish writer Thomas Martin's screenplay, there are elements of both the Western genre and the unleash-the-fury dynamics of a vigilante movie, but The Surfer also manages to skewer machismo, guru notions, property porn, and the arrival fallacy that sees so many of us struggling to keep our heads above water.
"It's all building to this breaking point," Cage says prophetically.
Below, Finnegan talks about working with the screen legend, a long way from home in Yallingup, Western Australia.
Harry Guerin: The Surfer is a beautiful film to look at, but when I was watching it, I thought, 'That heat in Western Australia must have been hellish...'
Lorcan Finnegan: It actually wasn't that hot in reality! We were shooting in October/November, so it was Spring. It was gradually getting hotter as we were filming, but one of the challenges of the film was actually to make it feel very hot through the use of colour and lens flares and heat distortions. Yeah, so that was all by design really, to try and increase the heat and the pressure on Nic Cage's character throughout the time that he spends there.
In my head, I see you standing there on the beach on the first day of filming, and this mirage in the distance becomes Nicolas Cage as he walks towards you. Now, I know it's not like that!
We had about three weeks or so of prep, and then we had to take a break and then come back and do another three weeks. When Nic arrived, it was more like people on the radio. First AD (assistant director), going back to the third AD, lining up that Nic had arrived at the airport, he was now in Perth, and then he was on his way to Yallingup, and then he was in the costume department. He went straight to costume because we were going to be shooting the next day. No, it was more like I jumped in a car and went around to the costume department, and I met Nic in a tiny little dressing room! That was the first time we actually saw each other in real life. We'd been chatting on the phone and on Zoom and everything in the months leading up to that and talking about the story and the script. So actually, when we were filming, he was very prepared, and I was prepared too and comfortable with him as an actor.
Now that you've worked with Nicolas Cage, tell me about untangling the man from the myth.
Well, I think you have to compartmentalise a little bit, you know? I think there is a perception that he's this wild animal that you let out of a cage and he's going to do whatever he wants, but actually, he's like an encyclopedia of cinema. He loves cinema and is an avid cinephile. He loves reading scripts, he loves character development, and he loves challenging roles that will push him. And he's very, very prepared. He reads a script forwards, and then he reads it backwards, and then he reads it forwards! He knows absolutely every inch of it.
It is strange when you're working with an actor who's very familiar to you. I got a chance to know him a little bit during the process, so I was pretty comfortable making a film with him. We talked a lot. We didn't have a whole lot of time, to be honest, to be thinking about it! We had to hit the ground running and make a film. But actually, I think some of the other actors, who were, like, day players on the film, were very prepared and very good actors - they knew their lines - but when they were suddenly in a scene with Nic Cage and he was delivering dialogue back to them, I think a lot of the time they started, like, watching a movie! They were watching him speaking to them and forgot that they also had to reply back in character! So, I think it took some of the other actors a little while to kind of snap out of it and get into it!
Nicolas Cage turns down more films than he takes on. What was it about The Surfer that clicked with him?
As an actor, I think what attracted him to the project was 1) He loved the title. He grew up in California and he thought, ' The Surfer. Ok, this sounds intriguing'. 2) He had seen a film that I directed called Vivarium. He was like, 'Oh, the director's the same guy who did that. Ok, it could be interesting'. And then he went and watched Nocebo, another film I made, and he liked that. And then he'd read the script [for The Surfer ], which he loved. He thought it had this interesting, existential journey. It was quite Kafkaesque. It reminded him of a few things, even like Citizen Kane, you know, like 'Rosebud...' [but] trying to get back a surfboard. And then this Russian film called The Overcoat that he saw when he was a kid, about this character who's trying to get back this coat that was stolen from him. He's looking at this as a role to play and how to play it and how to be that character and how to embody it, as opposed to some of the other elements that are going on in the script, the subplots and all these things, which obviously he enjoys, but he's more focused on his performance and his character in the overall story.
And what was it that chimed with you?
The first thing is the collaboration with Thomas Martin, who's a screenwriter that I met back in 2012. We were hanging out at a film festival in New York, at the Tribeca Film Festival, and we got on very well. We ended up meeting up back in Dublin and talking about films. We both have a love of New Wave Australian films like Walkabout and Wake in Fright, and The Long Weekend, and a lot of Peter Weir's early films like Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Last Wave and The Plumber, even films like that that are really interesting. It was a really interesting time for Australian Cinema. And then Tom sent me this outline for this project that he was working on called The Surfer and shared it with me, thinking I'd like it. And he was right - I did. I thought, 'Yeah, this could be great'. We both wanted to make it in Australia as sort of a contemporary version of an Ozploitation (low-budget genre films made in Australia from the early Seventies to the late 1980s) or an Australian New Wave-style film, also taking influences from films like The Swimmer, the Frank Perry movie. Tom was influenced by [John] Cheever's short story [on which The Swimmer is based].
But what attracted me to it was 1) Working with Tom on this and 2) Making a very subjective point-of-view film - entering into the story with this character and staying with him the whole time so the audience experiences everything as the character experiences things in the film. We never cut away to any kind of other scene or an objective view of what's actually happening. Everything is experienced through Nic Cage's character's experience. I love the idea of a man at a certain age in his life clinging to this hope of a materialistic goal of buying this house and thinking that that is going to fix all of his other problems like his relationship with his wife, his relationship with his son, and it will give him some sort of anchor and belonging in the world if he can just buy back this old family home. And then during the few days that he spends there [he ends up] being stripped of everything and goes on this sort of Jungian journey to discover what it is that he actually needs instead of what he thought he wanted. To me, it was a challenge, and it was going to be very interesting to try and do that in this single-setting kind of location. Although it's a big setting, it's still kind of a single location in a way.
I thought the film tapped in really well to that psychological concept of the arrival fallacy - 'When I make it to here, everything will be great'. I was wondering if that's something you've had to catch yourself on with in terms of filmmaking - 'When I get to this point, then I'll have made it'?
Yeah, I suppose it's a little bit like that, you know, filmmaking. There's a metaphor at the beginning of the film about the wave and life being like a wave, and you have to either surf or you get wiped out. I think I've learned over the years that the process of filmmaking is actually what's important. Enjoying the process, all of the process, from the development of a script to casting to shooting it to editing it to doing the music and the sound design and everything, rather than just the finished product. By the time you get to the finished product, it's sort of out of your hands. It's up to the audience then - they're the final part of the project. They can absorb it into their brains and make of it what they will.
Have you and Nicolas Cage talked about doing another film together?
Yeah, we have, actually. We'd like to do something together. We're sort of talking about something, very early stages. We definitely want to collaborate on something again, yeah, for sure.
Do you have the Freedom of Yallingup now or have they been inundated with tourists and are cursing you for making The Surfer there?
Well, the film hasn't been released in Australia yet, so nobody's seen it! It's coming out on the 14th in Australia, I think.
Has the area had more tourists since the movie screened at festivals in different parts of the world?
I don't know! I haven't been back since shooting there. It'll be interesting to see. I was thinking it'd be great to have a bronze sculpture of Nic Cage holding binoculars standing up at this viewpoint! It could be pretty nice, it could be a tourist attraction, but it's also a National Park there, so they probably wouldn't want that!
What's the one thing that you haven't been asked about The Surfer or that you really want to talk about but no one ever asks you?
(Laughs) I don't know, I've had a lot of questions about this film from all sorts of people! What I'm actually more interested in is how people interpret what happens at the end of the film. I'm yet to get that kind of feedback from the audience. I was looking at a Reddit thread from people who are coming up with some good theories, which I always find fascinating. I think with this film, on one level, you've got the narrative that's exciting to watch, and it's got action and comedy and adventure and all that kind of thing. But on another level, there's enough ambiguity throughout the film to allow the audience to fill that in with their own perceptions and bring their own life experience or their own doubts or their own internal worries to the film and bridge those gaps.
What were the lessons you learned from making The Surfer that you'll bring to your next film?
I mean, every project is very different. Every time you make a film you learn a lot. I think trusting your instincts and having a kind of a freer approach to some of the blocking of scenes. We didn't really storyboard with this film at all. We storyboarded a couple of scenes, maybe that were quite technical. But Radek Ladczuk, the cinematographer, and I just kind of walked through everything. We blocked it with the actors, and we left that kind of room to explore. Sometimes I find that when things are too planned, you kind of lose a sense of spontaneity and creativity. Also, in terms of editing, Tony Cranstoun and I, this was our fourth film together, and I think we've found an interesting groove now that we can be experimental to a certain point while also maintaining a propulsive narrative and pace and everything. Bringing all those things to the next project would be interesting.
Do you know what the next project is? Are you going to start it soon?
I started it probably about five years ago! [It's] A project called Goliath, which is a Dystopian fable set in the near future about creating monsters in order to start wars and steal natural resources...
Lastly, can you give us five films that tap into the spirit of The Surfer that people might not have seen? 'Well, if you like The Surfer, you've got to see these as well'.
I'd say maybe The Tenant by [Roman] Polanski. Definitely The Last Wave by Peter Weir. I'd say Frank Perry's The Swimmer. And Ted Kotcheff's Wake in Fright. I'm probably going to give you more than five here! I'd also say After Hours by Martin Scorsese. And maybe Hiroshi Teshigahara's film Woman in the Dunes, a film that Nic and I talked about. I also sent him a film called Stranger by the Lake (directed by Alain Guiraudie), a French sort of homoerotic thriller where the camera sort of stays at this lake the entire time and follows these two characters. All of those films are worth checking out, for sure.
The Surfer is in cinemas now.