Watch: Facing Monsters, Featuring Kerby & Cortney Brown

Facing Monsters ia no longer splaying on Stab Premium, as our licensing agreement has run its course. You can still find the film on various places online.

Most surfers hit rock bottom on social media long before they do in waves of consequence. Not the Brown brothers, though. You won’t find any geotags or name-dropping here. Even, ironically, at the waves that break miles offshore and whose sole purpose seems to be mincing whatever unfortunate floating object bobs into their path of destruction. That’s about 90% of the waves featured in this film, btw. 

“Kerbs and I started shooting four years before we went into production,” explains award-winning cinematographer Rick Rifici. “In between working on film sets, and Kerbs doing his FIFO work, we’d sort of just track swells off the deep south of WA. Initially we didn’t really have a purpose for it, we were just exploring and documenting along the way. We had Google Earth and a RED but no real storyline or purpose. We didn’t want to put it on social media.” 

Years later, Kerby warmed to the idea of sharing his story. “He was very into the documentary All this Mayhem,” riffs Rick, referencing the gritty story of the Pappas brothers, Tas and Ben, Australian skateboarding prodigies whose meteoric rise to fame in the 1990s was overshadowed by their battles with addiction and personal demons, leading to Ben’s tragic death and Tas’s eventual path to redemption. “I think he just thought it was a good medium to tell his story. I get the feeling it might’ve come from there.”

Kerby got busy stroking his beard. After securing funding, they began filming the Browns’ backstory and family life in Denmark and Kalbarri. Six weeks into production, they chased a major swell in the south, where some predictably unpredictable events happened. I won’t spoil it.

Rick describes Kerby as “pedantic” and a “perfectionist” when it came to his creative input. “I think that’s why the media came across so strongly, because he had so much input into it. He didn’t really dictate the storyline, moreso the surfing. He picked all the waves, the in points, the out points, all the shots he wanted to use. If he could have been deeper or approached it from a different line, he’d veto it. It was more the technical aspect of it he wanted to highlight. I mean, the guy always looks stylish. Even when he’s going upside down onto his head over a bone dry rock, he looks stylish. He surfs a lot of those big slab waves like they’re two-foot beachies.”

Kerby’s other unwavering demand was no bullshit. Though the opening scene talks of connection, escapism and other played-out cliches, they are cliches for a reason. They’re true. 

“He just wanted to tell a story that was real. He didn’t want anything in it to be non-factual, including the surfing and the backstory of his personal life and his monsters that he’s been battling with or fighting. It’s funny, I got a call from Jack McCoy, and the only bit that he was wigging out on was when we showed the rescue boat at the end. He was like, ‘why did you show the boat? The whole way through you don’t see anybody, but at the end you see the boat’. I had to explain to him that it was because Kerby didn’t want anything to be untrue. He wanted to make sure people knew that everything was portrayed accurately. Because if you show anything that isn’t true, then the audience starts to question what else isn’t true.”

Facing Monsters will be playing exclusively on Stab Premium for the next two months, and we’ll have a podcast with Kerby soon.