Visionaries Chasing the Lotus Interview

 

 

In an exclusive Lat34 interview, documentary filmmaker Greg Schell talks about discovering the lost reels of Greg Weaver and Spyder Wills and his own voyage of surf discovery as he interviewed and surfed with several generations of surf heroes to make his film, Chasing the Lotus: The Lost Reels of Weaver and Wills.

 

 

Schell: Greg Weaver and Spyder Wills were two underground filmmaker-slash-documentarians who spent a lot of time on the road following famous surfers off the beaten track as they discovered new places around the world. Some of the time they’d be on the job as photographers for a magazine or cinematographers for a big feature film like Pacific Vibrations, and some of the time they were just out doing their thing, but no matter where they went they were also using Super 8 film and documenting the very first footage of all these undiscovered spots, just because it was something they loved to do. A lot of this super 8 footage – reels and reels of it – ended up in boxes that they would bring out for parties or to show to friends, but it never went any farther than that.

 

 

GS:There was a box of what Greg called the “A-Reels,” their best stuff, and somewhere along the line he had lost this box. I had already gotten pretty far into the project using other footage from his archive, and then one day he’s cleaning out his garage and sure enough that’s where the lost reels were. They’d been buried in there since at least 1981. At that point I had to totally re-cut my film, because I realized immediately that all the film he had found in this box was superior to anything I had already put in my movie!

 

 

GS: Exactly. It was just a hobby for them, something they’d show their friends. They shot a lot of these obscure waves that the producers of the films they were working on at the time had no interest in. We look at the footage now, 30 or 40 years on, and it’s like National Geographic type stuff: not just because it documents a specific period in surfing history before any of these places had been exposed, but because their vision was much bigger. What they were doing was much deeper than would you would normally associate with making a surf film.

 

 

GS: These guys, even though they were not bona fide ethnographers, they did many of the things that a professional ethnographer would do. They would go into these foreign cultures, have an exchange with them, and just document everything in a very objective and responsible way.

 

GS: It’s true. In a way, these guys are probably the original archetypes for what have become the surf stereotypes. But I also I think that both Weaver and Wills had a very unique knack for seeking all of the other things that were going on around the surfing – the landscapes, the people, the customs, all the different aspects of the surrounding culture – and that’s what ultimately interested me about these guys and why I made the film.

 

 

GS: As a young man in the military, Spyder Wills was trained to follow airplanes in the sky with a gun scope, and somehow that training helped him get up on cliffs and follow surfers on waves from very far away, so he had this unique perspective right from the start. He taught the technique to Greg Weaver, and they became masters of what is now called follow-focus: As you’re tracking someone across a wave with your camera, you have to be able to keep them in focus the whole time. The perfect example in my film is this footage of Sunny Garcia surfing a Malie Point on the West side of Oahu. He catches this wave and rides it for over a mile, and Greg tracks him beautifully for the entire ride. It must be one of the longest rides ever filmed, and Greg just happened to be sitting in the water with a camera and a fresh reel. He used almost an entire reel on this one wave!

 

GS: Part of it is being good at what you do, and part of it is making sure you’re in the right place at the right time. Weaver and Wills were masters on both counts. These guys managed to get themselves all over the place, with many of the top pros, for nearly 40 years.

 

 

GS: When we were over in Oahu, Randy Rarick, a famous veteran surf traveler, was watching some of our footage and recognized Warren Hoohuli, and he was like, “I know this guy. He still lives over on the west side!” So we called him and told him we had this old footage of him, and he got very excited and invited us to come to the west side for a day. It was like having the golden key. We were ingratiated into the scene, hung out at a local contest, ate the barbecue, and got to go surfing at Yokohama Bay, which is a place that is very jealously guarded by the locals. Warren paddled out first and said, “Hey, this guy’s cool. Let him surf.” Without that kind of introduction, you’d be in real trouble if you tried to surf there. That’s the kind of access Greg and Spyder managed to get nearly everywhere they went.

 

 

GS: That’s a good question! Whether you’re talking about meditation, yoga, surfing, or even cinematography, it’s about chasing that ephemeral, perfect moment. “Chasing the Lotus” is actually a double-entendre, because in addition to the Zen symbolism of the lotus flower, which represents perfection and the highest form of beauty, it was also a photography term that was popular in the late sixties, something you’d hear from your photo editor, when he wanted you to go out in search of a beautiful, perfect image. Weaver and Wills were drawn to both the pursuit of the perfect wave and the pursuit of the perfect image, but mostly I think they were drawn to the journey, the act of discovery.

 

 

GS: There are plenty of surf movies out there that are just surfing and music – surf porn, as we call it – where it’s just about climax, climax, climax. I’m more interested in telling a story, and I think the interviews provide critical context to the footage we had to work with. We started with Greg and Spyder first, trying to get as many stories as we could from each era, and making a wish list of surfers we wanted to try to contact. It was like following the fraternity line of surfing: We’d find Gerry Lopez in Northern California, and he would have Rory Russell’s number, and it just kept going. Warren Hoohuli was obviously one of the biggest surprises and the best experience we had.

GS: I’m watching these skateboarding reels, and all of a sudden I recognize Stacey Peralta in the footage. So I asked Greg about it, and he’s like, “Oh yeah, we shot tons of that Dogtown stuff.” If Stacey hadn’t just made his Dogtown and Z Boys documentary, I probably could have made a whole skateboarding film from that footage alone. If you liked Stacey’s Dogtown movie and you’re looking for more, there’s about five minutes in my movie that you’re going to love.

 

GS: We got lucky with that one! We sent a rough cut out to a couple of agents, and somehow it ended up in his lap. Lo and behold, we get a call one afternoon saying, “Jeff Bridges just saw the movie over the weekend and he loves it, he wants to do it. There’s just one catch, you’ve gotta do it tomorrow because he’s about to leave the country.” We pulled an all-nighter, wrote as much dialogue as we could, got all our DATs and recording equipment, drove up to his house in Montecito, and recorded all of the dialogue in his house. We pulled it off. It’s a great boon, and we’re very grateful. He basically did it for nothing, a basic SAG scale fee. He’ll make $10 million a picture, so for us to pay him ten grand is like peanuts. But if you love surfing, you love surfing, and it turns out Jeff Bridges is the real deal. What can I say? The Dude abides.