Behind The Scenes: Luring Luke Hemsworth, Mick Fanning, Mason Ho, Joe Turpel, And More Into ‘One Big Dick And Balls Joke’

You can watch The Greatest Surf Movie In The Universe here.

“It’s a really ridiculous idea that snowballed into an avalanche, and here we are. The film is such a miracle,” said the film’s director and Stab High Japan co-host, Vaughan Blakey

Snagging the torch from movies such as South Park directors’ Team America: World Police and beloved cult surfing classics like Doped Youth and Loose Change, The Greatest Surf Movie In The Universe is a screwball surf comedy produced by surf filmmaker Nick Pollet and surf journalist Vaughan Blakey that is the product of six years of labor and aims to take surfing down from its ivory pedestal — albeit less academically than that might sound.

“When some of these big-name guys heard their voices coming out of claymation characters with their dicks hanging out they were kinda shocked,” Vaughan said. “But we told them to just trust us, none of the humor is mean, it’s just fun, we knew they’d be ok and wouldn’t get in trouble.”

The synopsis (without spoilers) is this: in the year 2033 a pandemic spreads around the world, erasing everyone’s memory of surfing entirely. So, Ronnie Blakey (playing God) recruits a scrappy Joe Turpel (playing himself) to petition a messianic Mick Fanning (also himself,  but thiqqqer) to put together a propaganda film of sorts — “greatest surf movie in the universe” — to inspire people to surf again.

“It’s crazy because Joe Turpel is the face of the WSL and has a fucking flawless reputation and this whole film is one big dick-and-balls joke, but he still agreed to it. Joe is actually the coolest, loveliest guy” Vaughan told Stab.

Because of this err… phallic emphasis, the movie has already garnered rave reviews, with the New York Times evening calling it “humongously bad.” Though no-one in the surf world has ever truly cared what mainstream media thinks, we can already tell this will be one of those movies the Stab Premium audience either loves or hates.

“I could not believe The New York Times tried to write a serious review of this film,” Vaughan explained. “Surely you would figure out in the first three minutes that what you’re watching is ridiculous and that it means nothing, there’s no lesson to be learned here [laughs]. Our goal was just to make each other laugh making this. Everytime we made a joke and didn’t we were like ‘fuck’ and we changed it.”

Vaughan and Nick were serious about their humor. Despite the flippancy in which Vaughan talks about the project, the team spent years in the painstaking process of making all the life-like figurines, convincing Nick’s mum to sew the outfits together, wait months for objects like a petrol pump to come in the mail, and trick Luke Hemsworth into coming on the set for the narration.

“Luke literally thought he was coming in to do a voiceover,” Nick told us. “Then he walked onto the set and saw props, and cameras, and microphones, and everything and was like ‘what’s going on?’, I guess he didn’t know we were filming a proper scene [laughs]. But, it worked, we got him.”

Despite the tsk tsks from the mainstream media and us reaching our yearly limit of dick jokes here at Stab, since it’s the first and last time Joe Turpel and Luke Hemsworth will ever co-star in a claymation film that mingles proper surfing clips featuring Mick Fanning, Griffin Colapinto, Mason Ho, and Craig Anderson with battle scenes fought by sex toys, we thought it our sacred responsibility to license the film for the next eight weeks for our Premium audience.

You’ll be able to watch The Greatest Surf Movie In The Universe exclusively on Stab Premium (app or website) starting tomorrow, September 13th, at 5 PM PDT.

“When we got to the end of it I wondered, ‘Have we gone too far? Is this too much?’” Vaughan Blakey told us. It’s up to the Stab Premium audience to decide.  

You can watch The Greatest Surf Movie In The Universe here.