Nicolas Cage goes Down Under and way over the top in South West-set Ozploitation flick

The Age

13-05-2025

When Lorcan Finnegan received a phone call from Nicolas Cage's agent with the news that the American Oscar winner had agreed to star in his beachside surrealist comedy/drama The Surfer, the Irish director admits that it filled as much with trepidation as exhilaration.
The Dublin-based former graphic designer had secured the services of one of the most celebrated performers of our time (Wild at Heart, Moonstruck, Leaving Las Vegas, Adaptation, among many, many others) and one of the few actors whose presence in a movie guarantees attention, if not an audience.
Yet Cage is famous for his method antics, such as eating cockroaches in Vampire's Kiss, having his own teeth pulled for Birdy and, more recently, staying in character as a chilling pale-faced serial killer during the whole time was on the set of Longlegs.
While there's plenty of crazy on the screen in The Surfer, which is about an American businessman who returns to his hometown of Yallingup to buy the house in which he grew up and winds up in a Wake in Fright -ish stoush with the xenophobic local surfers, Finnigan reveals Cage went about his business with supreme professionalism.
'He was brilliant to work with,' says Finnegan, whose 2019 surrealist horror film Vivarium caught the eye of Cage and paved the way for their collaboration.
'Nic arrived on set incredibly prepared.
'He knew the script inside out. And he's had so much experience as an actor he's finely tuned. He can almost see what the camera sees.
'So if you want to make a tiny adjustment, and you're explaining what must be done, Nic would cut me off. 'Yeah, I got it,' he'd say, then launch into another take in which the blocking was perfect.'
'A lot of the time he was covered in glycerin to give the impression he was sweating and would be covered with flies. Nic took it all in his stride.'
Lorcan Finnegan
While Cage kept popping up on Instagram during the shooting of the film late in 2023 in Yallingup – a popular beachside tourist destination 256 kilometres south of Perth – he largely kept to himself, staying in the home of surf legend Taj Burrow and each day taking a short walk to the car park where the film is almost entirely set.
'He was completely devoted and dedicated to the film,' Finnigan says over video call from his home in Ireland.
'Nothing else mattered to him during his time in Australia but making the movie. And there was absolutely no arrogant movie-star behaviour you hear about all the time with actors of this level.
'Even between takes he wouldn't go back to his trailer. He would sit around in a deckchair in the car park with the rest of the crew.
'A lot of the time he was covered in glycerin to give the impression he was sweating and would be covered with flies. Nic took it all in his stride. He would just go into this zen-like space and wait for us to be ready for him.'
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There are many reasons why Finnigan targeted Cage, but the strongest may well be the inspiration for the film, the 1968 surrealist drama The Swimmer, in which Burt Lancaster plays a Connecticut business executive who vows swim through a series of backyard swimming pools to his home (the film, based on a classic short story by John Cheever, is also an inspiration for Mad Men and the new John Hamm series Your Friends and Neighbors).
Cage's surfer, in an amusing contrast, struggles to get to the water as the locals all seem to be in a group gaslighting conspiracy to make him think he is going out of his mind (or maybe he is). It's a Christmastime Kafka story on an Oz beach.
'Nic has the same charisma as Burt Lancaster. He exudes power and success,' Finnegan says.
'So when we come to realise that all is not well with his character it hits hard. It is a shock for the audience when in the course of a few days his life starts to unravel, and he goes on a Jungian journey in which he must lose everything in order to find himself.
'My goal was to make a film that was from the subjective point of view of this character. I wanted the audience to kind of go on the journey in which you experience what he experiences.
'If he becomes delirious, you feel delirious; if he's filled with rage, you're filled with rage; and if he's doing something disgusting, you think it's disgusting.'
The Surfer 's high-brow literary origins may surprise, as ever since Finnegan's film was unveiled at in the Midnight Screenings section of last year's Cannes Film Festival it has been buzzed about as a nod to the Ozploitation movies of the 1970s, those down-and-dirty genre films beloved by Quentin Tarantino such as Stone, The Cars That Ate Paris and Mad Max.
'The Surfer has an Ozploitation vibe, but it is a serious examination of masculinity in crisis.'
Lorcan Finnegan
Finnigan says that he and the film's writer, fellow Dubliner Thomas Martin, forged a friendship over their mutual love for Australian cinema of the 1970s, particularly its more garish manifestation.
'Tom and I were drawn to these twisted tales in Australian movies because they're connected to our own dark stories,' he says.
'Irish storytelling is very black and weird, which is something you don't see much in our own cinema. We were seeing more of this reflected in the Australian New Wave in films such as Wake in Fright and Walkabout, which is why we were drawn to them.'
Despite the Ozploitation style — Cage's full-blooded performance, the eye-popping expressionistic visuals, the beating sun inducing a feeling of madness, exhaustion and despair — the narrative is still tethered to Cheever and his examination of masculinity in crisis, with the surfer being sucked into the orbit of a very contemporary men's group headed by Julian McMahon' Scally.
'Cage's character is looking for belonging because it is linked to his identity,' says Finnegan, whose production was enabled by ScreenWest and relied heavily on WA talent such as production designer Emma Fletcher and costume designer Lien See Leong.
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'The home and the beach that he wants to return to is a part of his identity, although it is a warped nostalgic memory not based in reality.
'So he is drawn into a cult by this Jordan Peterson/Joe Rogan-ish figure who is attracting guys who are lost and looking for a father figure.
'The Surfer has an Ozploitation vibe, but it is a serious examination of masculinity in crisis.'