Director Michael Oblowitz will tell you straight to your face: This is not a surf movie.
Perhaps not, but those who were lucky enough to see the movie will attest: Sea of Darkness is most certainly about surfing, and about a group of surfers who blazed a trail of adventure, self-discovery, mysticism and crime throughout Bali, Java and other, more remote parts of Indonesia long before the days of the fully catered boat trip. At its core, Sea of Darkness is a film about choices.
It follows the life-changing decisions made by early Indo surfers Mike Boyum, Jeff Chitty and Peter McCabe, who turn to drug-smuggling to fuel their passion for surfing — and those made by Martin Daly, Bruce Raymond and Dave Barnett, who funnel their wave addiction toward more legal pastimes that gain them fame, fortune and a lifetime of perfect waves.
The movie took Oblowitz over three years to make, and, beyond Daly, McCabe and a host of other Indo adventurers, features Steve Spaulding, Jeff Divine and John Milius.
Michael Oblowitz: I was flying on an airplane to the Turks and Caicos. I had been hired to do a TV show there — one of these crazy vampire TV shows. In a prior lifetime I had films in the Sundance Film Festival, Cannes, Edinburgh, Berlin. But poverty dictates that very often I have to take real jobs, such as directing Steven Segal movies or chasing a bunch of lesbian vampires down to the Turks and Caicos and making a television show out of it, right? And lo and behold I am sitting in the airport in Miami, and the guy next to me looks extremely familiar; he looks like a grey-haired version of Martin Daly, who I was very familiar with because I read Surfer Magazine regularly, as all of us do when we’re not surfing. And it is Martin. And the two of us get to chatting. And we talk about what we respectively do. We are about the same age. We both love surfing. I am from South Africa and I talk about the early days of surfing in South Africa. So Martin and I were having this conversation about all these strange and mysterious waves, and he had his Mac with him and it was just loaded with amazing, exotic photographs because he was in the midst of the Quiksilver Crossing at the time. And he showed me all these fabulous pictures of these young kids and then he started talking about Jeff Chitty and Dave Barnett and the elder guys and how all of this had come about — what his boat had previously been used for. And of course out of all these names comes the illustrious Mike Boyum. And how Mike Boyum had a built a camp at G-Land. How Boyum was dodging the cops in fifty countries. How he got booted out of G-Land, and how he came to live with Martin and Jeff Chitty in a place in Jakarta — a little house called the “Skull Cave” from which Boyum conducted many, many sojourns, forays and drug dealings. And all of this was done to fund Boyum’s dream of building another G-Land somewhere. Now I said, ‘You know, Martin, we’ve had five Scotches each, but this is a movie I’m going to make.’
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