John John Florence answers all in Ask Me Anything

It is a brave man who bares his soul to another. Let alone 55 million keyboard warriors (the rough figure put on Reddit’s audience), which is what John John Florence has done over on Reddit’s AMA (Ask Me Anything). In a wide ranging interview, he fields questions on everything from his father writing a memoir, to surf groupies, the process of working with the big budget action sports gurus Brain Farm on his upcoming blockbuster, View From A Blue Moon, and the future of surfing. Below are som highlights the choice bits, click here for the full transcript.

On the future of surfing:
“I see surfing changing a lot with bigger waves and a lot more paddling of bigger waves on that side of things and I see it going to the air a lot more with bigger flips and more spins and yeah, just in general, bigger airs on bigger waves.
“It’s just kinda where the progression has been going for a pretty long time now. Everyone’s adding different things, taking things from snowboarding and skating and trying them out surfing.
“I think snowboarding’s a really good thing to look at because with the way they twist and spin, we can kinda apply it to surfing. I mean, we’ll never be able to go as high or as far as they do on some of the big jumps, but you can definitely take a page out of their book and kinda apply it to your surfing.”

On his father writing a memoir:
“I don’t know if I like it very much so I don’t think about it, haha.”

On Andy:
“Yeah, Andy’s surfing influenced me, my friends, my brothers…all of us growing up. He was my favorite surfer growing up – he was all of our favorite surfer growing up.
“He was the Hawaiian that was winning world titles and his style and power surfing was something that we all wanted to do. So yeah, definitely a huge inspiration in my life.”

On working with Brain Farm:
“As far as the process, we made it more streamlined in the end, but in the beginning they weren’t too knowledgeable about surfing and we weren’t too knowledgeable about dealing with all that gear so you know, when the waves are good you want to go surfing right then and there, but it took like 45 minutes to get ready so -ha- yeah… Towards the end we found out what we needed to shoot and exactly what we wanted though, and so it made it much more streamlined. Especially shooting with the helicopter, that’s a hard one…
“When I was surfing I was very aware of the helicopter, it’s hovering like 15 feet over your head and I mean, we have clips of me, from the rotor wash of the helicopter, just getting blown off the back of the wave. It’s pretty funny… It was really close.”

On Surf Groupies:
“Surf groupies? I believe they do exist. I’ve seen some before. Haha, one or two.”

On night surfing:
“Yes! I do do night surfing. We did it actually this summer and it was a full moon and we surfed in front of my house for like 3 hours. It was really cool.
“It was one of the times I’ve had that sharky feeling, ha. At first it’s pretty dark, or well, it’s bright but it’s kinda hard to see and then your eyes adjust and it’s surreal.
“With the white moonlight on the sand and then the water, it’s just so crazy the way the water reflects. It looks like a fluorescent light or something and it’s definitely a really cool experience.”

On His Favourite Spot to Film:
“My favorite spot to film for the movie was probably South Africa. That place was just one of my favorite places in general, and to be able to go and film with the equipment we had was kind of something I had dreamed about for a while because I had been there a lot. So I was like, wow, if we could capture this, and something amazing… it would be really cool.”

On The Pipeline Pecking Order:
“Pipe has a pretty solid pecking order, like you know who’s up next and a lot of people don’t like it, but in a way it kind of needs to be organized like that because if they don’t, people are going to get hurt, people are going to be dropping in on other people. It’s not really a wave you can just go in front of someone on, you know, you could end up really hurting someone and possibly killing someone.”