Sterling Spencer releases film, gets love-choked, makes new friend

SURF MADNESS! from pinchmysalt.tv on Vimeo.

You’ve probably heard, by now, about Sterling Spencer’s awesome new film, Surf Madness. Sterling has a productive formula: A dry sense of humour, an inside track to surfing’s best, a thirst to make light of pro surfing and, his best play – the ability to catch famous surfers doing funny stuff. Sometimes the surfers dig it, sometimes they don’t. Perhaps the most well-known instance of distaste at Sterling’s antics was that of Jeremy Flores. Sterling acquired footage of the Frenchman telling a young autograph-hunter to fetch a pen and meet him at the competitors area. He then placed a voice-over on the clip that made it appear as though Jeremy told the kid to beat it. Jeremy was none too thrilled and, since then, hasn’t been Ster’s greatest fan. Until just last week! Now, they’re buddies! Just in time for the release of Sterling’s new film!

Stab: So, I heard your new friend wanted to cuddle and make up?
Sterling Spencer: Yeah, at the Surfer Poll awards, Jeremy came up behind me and like, started strangling me. I was like oh, who’s strangling me? My friend, his mouth was open and his eyeballs were really wide and he didn’t know what to do. He was just like, ‘whaaaa!’ I almost passed out and then he let me go and was like, ‘Nah! I’m just kidding! I love you, I love you so much!’, like, kissing me on my face. He was being cool, but you could tell he was still not happy with the video stuff. But it was all good. And, he actually came to my premiere! I had a premiere at Turtle Bay and Jeremy Flores was there. It was like a dream scenario. I think he came to make sure he wasn’t in the movie (laughs).

Adriano De Souza featured heavily in both the trailer and the film itself. Is it true that he wanted the trailer taken off the Chopes webcast? Yeah, I’m not sure, I got mixed reviews about that. Stirling Howland, who does Billabong’s webcasts, he said Adriano came in and they were playing his wipeout over and over, and then they were playing the trailer with him over and over and over, and he came in like, all bummed-out, like, ‘why are you guys picking on me?’ They were like, ‘no, it’s just wipeouts, they’re funny.’ But I guess ASP told Stirling to stop playing my trailer because it was pretty… whatever. But you know, I saw Adriano in New York and he’d definitely seen that clip, and he was cool, he thought it was funny.

Did the whole Jeremy Loves Children saga subconsciously make you soften your comedic stylings? Yeah, I mean, I’m not really that guy that’s like, trying to hurt feelings or anything like that. I was bummed that someone got really bummed-out. I’m not trying to be famous for making fun of people, I’m just trying to do cool stuff. If something’s funny, it’s just to be funny, not like, someone’s attacking you and you should take it to heart. The funny thing is, it’s good for your career. The Jeremy video made him that much more famous and popular. So, I don’t know. But I’m definitely not trying to catch people out. And as far as changing out approach, we definitely just figured out this formula, which is catching a famous surfer doing something funny. All the clips of like, Adriano, or Jordy, were all just from friends. Like, that Adriano clip, in Costa Rica, my friend has a house down there and Adriano did that right in front of his house. He just filmed it and sent it to me. That’s what is so great about the movie – everyone made it, not just us.

Is everyone pleased with your film? Yeah, all day people’ve been hitting me up saying they’re stoked with it. We were working on it around the clock, stressing out and it was nice to see how many hits it got straight away. Our server actually got hacked, right when we launched. It took a virus. So, the first day, the majority of people couldn’t download the movie, ’cause the site kept going offline – my web guy actually showed me that it was really easy for someone to go into my system and hack it. It’s all sweet now though. We were joking that Adriano hacked PinchMySalt.

What were you most proud of? I think the most classic, for me, would be the Rob Machado skit. That was the first idea that started the movie. But it was actually the last thing we filmed for the movie. We were trying to get Rob to do it all year. He was down, but it was just hard to pull together. I emailed him and was like, hey, wanna do this? And he was like, ‘yeah, I love your work!’ So we did it and he was just so cool. It was the rebirth of Loose Change!

So, is there a whirlwind tour of crazy premieres to follow? I definitely wanna. We’re not gonna do it if everyone’s seen it. But I wanna come to Australia and do a tour on the east coast, just like, drive a van and bring a projector and just play it wherever… (distracted) sorry, I’m just watching Off The Wall, it’s kinda going off right now.

Get out there. Nah. I’m retired. And I’m too full. I’ve just been eating… like, spam. I came to Hawaii and gained so much weight. All you do is sit around, eat and watch the waves. Like, ‘should I surf? Nah, I’m retired.’ I wanna be the first surfer that’s retired for his whole career.