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S R BINDLER:
“This was an opportunity to explore environmental themes, bring some awareness, but do it with levity and absurdity, doing it with comedy instead of being on the warpath, laying out facts and figures and dogma. This is a way to bring some awareness to Nature issues.”
MATTHEW McCONAUGHEY:
 “It’s awareness through absurdity and comedy. You’ve got this group of misfits, set in a very simple, fun loving, under the sun world of surfing. You got a lot of behavioral-driven comedy like that, which to me is funny.
BINDLER:
“We look at Addington like this is an analog guy from a simple time. How is this analog dude dealing with the digital world? How does an authentic man deal with being forced into these inauthentic situations? That is how I look at reality TV.”
McCONAUGHEY:
“You’ve got a country soul dude, with a country soul vibe, connected to nature. Currently we all have to work to get to Nature, we have to start scheduling time, whether it’s getting your feet in the sand, or going for a swim in the water, or a walk in the woods. If we are feeling stressed that ends up being the cure. I don’t hate reality TV, what we are throwing a wink at in the movie is that I live in a world where my image is one thing and myself in real life is another. If it’s being sold as truth and reality, you have to know that half of what you read and half of what you see is true half the time. It’s just a comment on how we sell it as the facts and as the truth.”
BINDLER:
“I moved here from New York and lived down in Venice. My first week I was walking around and this guy comes by on this long board skateboard. I just thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen. I went out and bought a long board and taught myself how to long board skate. I surfed a little bit too, but we looked at [this film] more like this is a metaphor for Man’s connection to Nature.”
McCONAUGHEY:
“How do you surf life when you are in your own drought? What’s that thing that each one of you loves to do, and if it’s taken away how do you deal with it? You either endure it and go through a gnarly summer, like Addington does, or you change your coordinates and readjust. This is a story about a guy that is trying to outlast it, knowing the waves will come back, but when is the question.”
BINDLER:
“We looked at some great surf films from the Seventies. The Morning of the Earth, Five Summer Stories and Crystal Voyager. They were all shot on 16mm film. That is the film-maker’s medium. We wanted to go for the sort of handmade look for the film, without sacrificing an aesthetic, because Malibu is a beautiful place. But we didn’t want this film to be overly polished, overly lit, overly manicured.”
McCONAUGHEY:
“Or overly choreographed for the actors. It looks like a bunch of friends doing it, and that was supposed to be the feel. We had a script we followed, but we were free to improvise. We kept it loose. We cranked a lot of film, we weren’t doing a lot of rehearsing, we were recording the rehearsals to keep that free flowing feel. I’ll say it again, when you are surfing life you are going to go through your drought as well. You can still do it with a wink, a chuckle, having a good time doing it.” 
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THE CONCEPT:
