Mick Fanning On A Unicorn, Bags Of Dicks, And A Shocking Script Read By Surfing’s Biggest Stars

Editor’s note: The Greatest Surf Movie In The Universe (TGSMITU) will be airing on Stab Premium on September 14. You can find a list of locations and showtimes for their current US tour at the bottom of this article. This article was originally published in March 2023.

Sometimes froth gets the better of us. While we do make a concerted effort to accurately represent the content of a given project, sometimes we get swooped up by the tendrils of digital desire.

This is not one of those instances.

The Greatest Surf Movie In The Universe is not a product of our (sometimes) sensationalistic titling, nor is the claim that it stakes ours to bury.

TGSMITU — as it’s been affectionately abbreviated to — is the absurdly animated brainchild of filmmaker Nick Pollet, which features surfing and voicing from the likes of Mick Fanning, Mason Ho, Craig Anderson, Matt Wilkinson, Griffin Colapinto, Joe Turpel, and more

Nearly six years in the making, with a script written by Vaughan Blakey, the stop-motion picture is an archetypal farce of contemporary surf constructs. The promise it bears may alter surf comedy, the realm pioneered by ‘Are You Serious?’ protagonist Sterling Spencer, forever.

To get an idea of the process behind such a unique film, we sat down with co-creatives Vaughan and Nick, who have produced multiple successful projects together — including Free Scrubber, The Search, and Postcards From Morgs.

TGSMITU is coming to US theaters August 16th & STAB Premium September 14th. Screening times + locations are available at the bottom of this article.

Have a read below to top up your excitement.

– Holden Trnka

Stab: Since this is your first bit of press for the movie, how would you describe the film if you had to in a sentence?

Vaughan: It’s an idea, a really ridiculous idea that snowballed into an avalanche, and here we are. The film is such a miracle.

Nick: This is a COVID baby. We started working on it three years ago, when COVID first started.

Vaughan: The craziest part is, the film has a whole vaccination element to it. Nick’s original idea was all about a virus wiping out ⅔ of the world’s population. A vaccination being developed that wipes out the memory of surfers. That was his whole idea, prior to COVID even happening. And then, we’re working on it and the real vaccination arguments start, and we’re sitting there on this giant anti-vax film just shitting ourselves! [laughs] It was all completely done beforehand.

How did you start the process for this?

Nick: Ten years ago, when I was Matt Wilko’s full time filmer, we got talked about how we could make a unique film. I’d always wanted to do stop motion, and the next day we were in a shopping center. I ended up finding a toy that looked like Wilko, and so I set up this little green screen in his house — just to see if I could do it. I filmed this one minute thing, and realized I could. 

Then, probably six years ago I went to Vaughan and pitched the idea for a film, because I loved his sense of humor. He fully brushed it, I could tell he kinda thought it was a shit idea [laughs]. I heard someone say the other day, you can have a great idea in your head, but it might end up looking shit to someone else, depending on the way you describe it. But if you show them your idea, it could look terrific. 

At the start of this, we were working on a different project, and I was getting all these dolls together and I could tell he still wasn’t 100% sold on it. Then, we started putting the first scene together and I could tell something switched in his mind. When Vaughan started caring about it, that’s when it really came to life. It escalated. We both got so excited, and he came over the next day and we kept going. He’d take some breaks and I’d just spend hours in my garage doing stop-motion. He’d come back and have insights. We both took it way further than we ever thought we could.

Vaughan, you and Ozzie Wright wrote Doped Youth in 2003. Then you and Nick both worked on Postcards from Morgs and Free Scrubber. Where do these types of exaggerated surf caricatures come from?

Vaughan: I reckon it was years of reading surf mags, and then working on ‘em. You’re just pumping air into tires constantly. Back in the day, reporting on surfing wasn’t really a thing. Most surf mags were creating this crazy spirit of adventure or escapism. People bought surf mags to fantasize. I grew up looking at these larger than life personalities who were just too good to be true — Tom Carroll, Kong, Pottz, Occy, even Tom Curren. They were so mysterious, so phantom-y. 

Then you work with them, and you realize they’re just people. But I always loved the idea of how they’re portrayed in our culture. I loved making guys like Mick and Joel larger than life, it was always what I did when I was editing mags back then. 

I loved that people thought they knew these people, and they didn’t — and then if you turned the dial up to 11, you start creating with these crazy lunatics [laughs]. And fuck man, truth ends up being stranger than fiction. You look at some of the guys — like Mark Healey, Christian Fletcher, Ozzie Wright — and they’re more wild in real life than you could ever make them out to be. 

When everything clicked at the beginning of making this film, I had the exact same feeling making Doped Youth when we first sat down and cut the very first scene of the movie together. Me and Ozzie just fucking lost our minds and realized it was gonna work. The same thing happened with Nick. It instantly became the most intense labor of love, three years of working for pretty much no money. We had a tiny, tiny budget — which was sick, because you can’t just work for free for 3 years [laughs].

Nick: Doped Youth was one of my favorite films ever, so getting Vaughan involved for me sparked that fire again. Trying to get surf humor like that to come back. That’s what makes me happy. Laughing at people you think you know, but you don’t. 

You guys pushed this pretty far. We’re in an era now where there’s a lot of sensitivity around language. Was that the plan? To push it and make it absurd?

Nick: It wasn’t the plan, but when you’re dealing with dolls, I think not pushing it just doesn’t do it justice.

Vaughan: I wrote this script in a single night, hours before we had to show it to producers. I was drinking, and just letting it fly. No concerns for what people would think. In my brain, I was just trying to make Nick laugh. He’s got a pretty similar sense of humor to me and Ronnie — just dicks, balls, bums, farts, real basic toilet humor. I sent it to him, and he rang me up in the morning going, “I LOVE IT. NO CHANGES AT ALL.” [laughs]. And then every time we were creating a new scene, we’d see opportunities for more and more gags, and we’d go way too far. I’d say “Oh maybe we should do this,” and he’d say “Yes!” Then I’d say “Nah man I was joking! You can’t do that,” and he’d just say “We’re doing it.” He loves going as far as you can, whereas my surf mag brain has more of a line. Nick has no line. 

In regards to the sensitivity of stuff, the one thing that isn’t cool is if you’re putting anyone down, and there’s nothing in this movie like that. All the things we make, if we’re laughing, we’re laughing at the state of surfing. Lots of people are going to find something to hate about this movie, but if you do, man, you are missing the point big time. This thing is so ridiculous, to hate on it is so pointless. But I’m expecting hate, I think there’ll be plenty of it, and I can’t wait.

Nick: As long as we know we didn’t put anyone down, the only humor is just us making fun of ourselves. That’s how humor should be. You should never be putting someone else down for a laugh. There was one line in there that was putting someone down and we pulled it out.

You sent the scripts out to the various surfers, but they had no context of the entire movie, so what they were reading was completely out of context. How did you get them on board for that?

Nick: Ages ago when I first started, I hit up all the surfers I had footage of. I got dolls made of them and ended up showing them all the dolls. One doll was about $300 by the time everything was made. I got the idea because I had a bobblehead of Mick.

I had a pretty shitty script written, and I started shooting and doing the voices myself. Then we got Vaughan and Bronte Pictures involved, which gave me a lot more confidence to reach out to the surfers. If Vaughan’s writing the script, they knew it was gonna be hilarious. Everyone was down then.

Griffin Colapinto was probably one of the first guys we did, in Mick’s sauna. He was tripping out at some of the lines, just losing it laughing with no idea of the context. 

Vaughan: They were given their lines, nothing else. We knew the context, and we were directing their emotions for each line. We literally had everyone do their voice like that, it was pretty hilarious.

Nick: When Bronte Films got involved all the surfers had to sign releases. I was so nervous, it’s a legal document, and I was worried some of them might not want to do it. Everyone was down, except Gabe Medina never got around to signing it. We made the whole movie with him in it, and his voice was so good. But, I sent it to him when he was going through a bit of a rough patch, and his manager refused to sign it. So we got Ando in it, and it was a whole new thing, which brought a new element to it. It was all good, it wasn’t a bummer. 

Whose figurine looks the most like them, and whose looks the least?

Nick: I reckon Freestone’s looks the most like him. Who do you reckon?

Vaughan: Well, not anatomically [laughs]. Funny story, when Nick got the dolls, they came with a massive bag of dicks — all different sizes. We knew we had to use them [laughs].  

Anyways, Joe Turpel’s face looks the most like him. Mason and Griff look a bit different, Mason just changed his hair so much, but he’s got short hair in the film.

Nick: They’re all pretty good. None of their mouths move though. The first draft we had, none of their mouths were open, and it looked so fucking weird. My girlfriend suggested we give them smiling mouths, and it just worked.

How do you expect the audience to react to the film?

Nick: In the beginning, I was so stoked on it, thinking everyone was gonna love it. But now I’ve been sitting with it for so long that the doubts can come creeping in. The fact that we haven’t shown the surfers anything is a bit scary. What if one of the surfers hates it? That’s my biggest fear. I feel like if I was one of the surfers, I’d be stoked to be in this thing. That’s what we wanted the whole time, to make them feel like that.

Vaughan: This is definitely the most terrified I’ve ever been at the end of a project. I’ve never felt so up and down about it. Like Nick said, you get lost in this world. This entire movie is three years spent in Nick’s garage. When we started it, he’d just had a baby. When we finished it, he’d had another baby, renovated his house, sold it, and bought a new house. The amount of time this took makes it a really hard project to wrap your head around.

When we got to the end of it I wondered, “Have we gone too far? Is this too much?” 

But, I started to realize that there’s an entire population of surfers out there who are being told what surfing should be. I think this is completely free of that narrative, and I’m super proud of that. We didn’t pull one punch for the sake of anyone. We made it because we thought it was funny. I actually believe it will translate. In all the projects Nick and I have done together, we got to a point where we knew it was all-time. With Free Scrubber and Postcards From Morgs, we knew deep down they were going to be great.

This is just on a much bigger scale. It’s so exciting, but it’s so scary. Like Nick says, we don’t wanna bum people out, we wanna stoke them out. But we definitely didn’t make this movie to keep everyone happy, we made it because we wanted to laugh our heads off, and we wanted everyone else to laugh.

How’s it been dealing with all the bureaucracy that comes with trying to sell the film?

Nick: We kinda need to not pay attention to it, because otherwise we’re going to do our heads in. It’s not people that surf, it’s people trying to sell the film, which is fair enough.

Vaughan: It started in a garage, it became a bigger thing than any of us anticipated, and you can only be grateful for that. You can’t be stressed or dark about it. It’s just the whole process of it becoming the avalanche. You can’t control an avalanche, and I’m not losing any sleep over that. I just reckon we gotta give props to the production company, Bronte Films. They’re spending money on it which is, to me, fucking absurd [laughs]. I’m super proud of it, we had the best time making it. We just laughed and laughed.

Nick: The bit that made it real for me was going up to the Post Lounge in Brisbane, where they’ve got all the audio and color engineers. The audio engineer we have working on it has done Harry Potter, 007, Mad Max. His name is Stuart Morton and he’s amazing, and we were sitting in a room with him, and they were bringing us drinks and food and whatever. Those guys are legends. The guy who was color grading it was the guy who color graded the Elvis movie. He did a few tests and it looked better than anything I’d ever seen. I couldn’t believe what those guys brought to the movie, it’s unbelievable.

Anything else you’d like to say?

Vaughan: It’s not a film for people who take surfing seriously. It’s a film for everyone else. Don’t take your kids to see it.

US Screenings and Q&A: August 16th, 2024