“One Hundred And Fifty Six Tricks was sick… I just like the music, and I think it was a little bit different. It’s like Sonic Youth, and Ozzie shooting a bunch of Super 8, running around fucking spray painting shit. Just as an individual — I think that was pretty cool.”
How involved were the individual surfers with putting together their own sections in Cluster, with the music and that sort of thing?
“I’d say a fair bit,” reckons South African Brendon Gibbens, one of the surfers in Cluster, who’s also with us. “Definitely in comparison to anything else I’ve ever been involved in, where you just surf and then that’s it, you have no involvement in how it comes out. And Kai letting us choose a song or at least put a playlist together and see how it works out, I think that was really nice. The individual has influence in their own section, so it’s a reflection of the surfers’ personalities to some degree.”
But there must be a danger of giving a surfer too much creative control over his part. Was anyone a bit of a nightmare when it came to choosing a song for their part?
“Fucking Dion dude!” bursts out Kai. “I love him to death, but I don’t know what the fuck… I feel like he knows what he wants, but then he’s so influenced by so many people that he kind of like second guesses what he wants. He hit me with like fifty songs, and they were all completely different genres, and I was like ‘I’m baffled dude! What do you want?’”
Were they good songs?
“I didn’t like some of them, and some of them were sick… I dunno, he’s like one of my best friends, so it was funny, not even weird — but I was like, ‘dude, it’s got to kind of fit in context with the film too, this is so weird what you’re trying to do.’ So he was funny because he was just so erratic, and it was just him, like where he was at — he was surfing his brains out and his head was about to pop, Dion just being Dion…
“Some of the guys are just cruisey. Jack [Freestone] I didn’t even show his part until the premiere, ’cause I just know — I’m like this is going to work sick. I guess his taste…”
…Isn’t very good?
“Well it’s not that it’s not very good, it’s just different, and I don’t think it would have worked in the context of the film.”
What kind of music is he into? There was a Wu-Tang song on one of his recent web clips.
“Yeah like rap and shit. I like listening to rap but that’s like make or break for a section, it’s got to be so on point. So I used a track, and I didn’t know whether he liked it, and then we sat down at the premiere and as soon as his section came on the whole audience started singing — because it’s an Australian Crawl track [‘Reckless’], and it was fucking the coolest moment. And then I emailed him after it and said: ‘Hey, I’m working on the iTunes version, I’m wrapping it up — were there any waves or anything like that, was there anything that kind of threw you off or that you wanted to tweak?’ And he said: ‘Don’t change a fucking thing, I love it.’
“So I dunno. I hope everyone’s stoked, a few of the boys hadn’t see their parts before the premiere — like Chippa and Mitch and Connor — but no one’s said anything.”
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