There’s going to be something for everyone at this year’s SLO International Film Festival, from Surf Nite at the Fremont to a screening of family classic E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial at the Sunset Drive-In. There’s a night of music videos with live bands, the U.S. premiere of Oliver Stone’s new documentary Nuclear Now, a screening of iMordecai starring Judd Hirsch and Carol Kane—and Hirsch will be in attendance.
In between, you can see a ton of independent films—narrative and documentary features, as well as shorts—at a variety of theaters from Tuesday, April 25, through Sunday, April 30.
All told, the festival received 1,120 submissions with 129 selected. According to Executive Director Skye McLennan, this year the festival has brought in more genre-oriented projects.
“We paired up with a DIY film festival called Microhorrors that started two years ago. It’s a community of filmmakers who make horror films that are [4 to 11 minutes long], so we’re screening four shorts and an ’80s slasher film called Intruder,” she said. “It’s directed by Scott Spiegel, who worked on Evil Dead and Evil Dead II.
“That’s going to be really fun, and we’re just kind of leaning into those kinds of things that make going [to] the movies really fun and exciting,” McLennan continued. “I think you’ll see that and feel that in the programming, too.”
You can download a PDF of the festival program at slofilmfest.org that lists all the details. Things kick off on opening night, April 25, with a 5 p.m. reception at Luna Red featuring live music by The Taproots, followed by a 7 p.m. screening of a brand-new film at the Fremont Theater, BlackBerry, that chronicles the rise and fall of the first smartphone. This will be its second U.S. screening after premiering at the SXSW Festival.
Cinephiles, prepare to indulge!
Surf Nite!
One of the festival’s most popular nights, which nearly always sells out, is Surf Nite, and this year’s is going to be gnarly. The evening’s luminary is none other than Garrett McNamara, the big wave pioneer known for discovering and conquering the world’s biggest wave at Nazaré, Portugal.
He’s also subject of HBO’s documentary series 100 Foot Wave, which chronicled his achievements at Nazaré and elsewhere. One episode in season 1 recorded him surfing waves generated by a 300-foot calving glacier in Alaska. He’s an eight-time Guinness World Record holder for the largest wave ever surfed.
McNamara spoke to New Times by phone from his home in Hawaii that he shares with his wife, Nicole, and their three boisterous children.
He’s now 55 years old and has had some well-publicized injuries. How’s he feeling?
“I’m feeling pretty good, actually. Up until about a month ago, I was in top shape. Ready for anything. Then I started traveling all over the place and doing a lot of work outside of the water and not at home, so I stopped training,” he explained.
He’s not exactly a young man anymore. Is he still chasing the big ones?
“I’m actively letting the big one come to me (laughs). There are a few spots I’d like to travel to and chase the low-pressure systems. The one main one I’d love to surf again is Fiji Cloudbreak, and then in Portugal, if I’m there and it comes, it’s on as long as I feel up to it. We just surfed Cortes Banks about a month ago. It was probably the best day I’ve seen from dawn to dusk.”
With his growing family and many responsibilities, have he and Nicole discussed him slowing down and lowering his risks?
“She’s anxiously awaiting the day I don’t want to chase anymore big waves around. As long as I’m healthy and strong, I don’t see any reason why not to ride the big ones, but I really have a lot of patience now, and if it’s not perfect, I’ll probably just drive [other surfers with a jet ski] or somehow be a part of it at the location, maybe through advice that I’m offering. I really still enjoy it, so if everything’s feeling good and everything’s going in a good way, and I’m in the right place at the right time, I’ll definitely enjoy some more big ones.”
What can people expect at Surf Nite?
“I think the most special thing is we get to share onstage and get to interact with everybody. We’ll get up close and personal with whoever’s there. We’ll actually be able to share and inspire each other through conversations and through Q-and-A, through our encounters with everybody while we’re there.”
Season 2 of 100 Foot Wave debuted on HBO on April 16, and he’s currently filming season 3.
“Yes, they already greenlit season 3 without 2 coming out,” he noted. “That’s how confident they are. They love it.”
At Surf Nite, he’ll be screening an episode from season 1 that chronicles the largest swell to date at Nazaré as well as a devastating wipeout by big wave surfer Andrew Cotton. Meanwhile in the episode, McNarmara is rallying after a broken foot and back-to-back concussions.
“Episode 4 is really good, and it will spark lot of the past for me and Nicole. I think it will be cool to share in person what we went through and what we felt others went through, how we got through it, and what it entailed. It will be a much more personal look, and you know what? You’ll be surprised because a lot of people have not seen [season 1].”
Garrett may also have copies of his book, Hound of the Sea: Wild Man, Wild Waves, Wild Wisdom, for sale and will sign copies. He and his wife also run Waves of Life: The McNamara Foundation, which provides “surf therapy mentorship for at-risk and underprivileged youth to allow them the opportunity to grow physically, mentally, and spiritually.”
The King Vidor Award winner is …
Production Designer Rick Carter, 73, has collaborated on a few movies over the years. Maybe you’ve heard of some. He won Academy Awards for Avatar and Lincoln, and he was nominated for Forrest Gump, War Horse, and most recently The Fabelmans. He also worked on The Goonies, Back to the Future II and III, Jurassic Park, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Cast Away, The Polar Express, Star Wars: Episode VII—The Force Awakens, and Star Wars: Episode IX—The Rise of Skywalker, among many others.
He’s joining some pretty good company. Past King Vidor Award winners have included Peter Bogdanovich, Malcolm McDowell, Stanley Kramer, Jeff Bridges, Elmer Bernstein, Morgan Freeman, Peter Fonda, Lawrence Kasdan, Ann-Margret, Ernest Borgnine, Eva Marie Saint, James Cromwell, Josh Brolin, and many others.
How did Carter find his way into the movies?
“Most prominently, I was born into it,” he explained during a Zoom call with New Times. “My father was a publicist in Hollywood, and he represented the actor Jack Lemmon in the 1960s, and he even produced a movie that Jack Lemmon directed called Kotch with Walter Matthau. He was always a part of the movie industry growing up.”
In his youth, Carter wasn’t much interested in following in his father’s footsteps.
“I knew about [the industry] but I didn’t think I wanted anything to do with it necessarily.”
Instead, he studied sociology at Berkeley, dropped out after a couple years, traveled, but eventually came back and attended UC Santa Cruz as an art major. After graduation, Carter headed to NYC to “try to be a painter.”
“After a year there doing the gallery scene, I think I recognized I wasn’t going to succeed in New York,” he conceded. “I asked my father what an art director did because it had the word ‘art’ in it.”
Upon his return to LA, his father introduced him to Production Designer Richard Sylbert, who’d done Chinatown, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Graduate, among other films.
“He was somebody who really became a mentor to me because he was able to explain aspects of what production design was in a way that I felt I wanted to see what I could do in that field. I couldn’t be like him because he was very formal in his training, but I think I’ve taken on my version of his talents and [was] inspired to be philosophical in my approach.”
If you’re wondering what exactly a production design is, you’re not alone. When people think of movies, they think of the actors and the director and maybe the writer, but without production design, there wouldn’t be much to look at.
“[The job entails] setting the stage for the movie in a visual way. A lot of people like to describe it as creating the world of the movie. Personally, I enjoy the aspect of it being somewhat invisible in the process because when you watch a movie, you don’t want to know that somebody has set up everything visually. You just want to be in the movie, and if you notice too much of that, you’re admiring the movie but you’re not relating to it in the most potent way a movie can get to you.
“It’s a bit of a magician’s act to be suspending disbelief.”
Good production design transports viewers into another world, but even if that world is pure fantasy, it still has to feel real. That’s where production design comes in. Just like a film’s score, it shouldn’t draw attention to itself, but it’s essential to a film’s “world” and the emotions it evokes.
“It was described effectively by a cinematographer that I knew,” Carter recalled. “We were doing a scene in a cave, and the director was saying, ‘Well, where’s the light coming from in this cave?’ And the director of photography said, ‘The same place as the music.'”
Carter—who continues to paint and just took down a show of his work at El Segundo’s Experimentally Structured Museum of Art that hung for 11 months—believes his visual skills come in part from a defect.
“I have a farsighted eye in my left eye and a nearsighted eye in my right eye, so they look at different things. My two forms of artistic expression have been derived from that different type of vision: With my right eye, I tend to paint people and faces, and with the left eye it’s sort of the worlds that I create.”
Both come in handy when he’s creating a world for a film to inhabit.
“I like to call it the ‘filmscape’ or the ‘moviescape,’ and ‘moviescape’ is an interesting word because it has the word ‘escape’ right in the middle of it, but it’s not the narrative or the people. It’s everything else that’s contributing to how you experience, in a sense, the dreamscape that you’re in that’s being created on all those multiple levels, both visual and audio. It creates an almost palpable sensation you can remember.”
As Carter explains, after watching The Wizard of Oz or Avatar, you can know what it’s like to be in Oz or Pandora even if you’re not with Dorothy or Jake Sully because the production designer has made those worlds vivid. Your understanding of what those worlds are like is courtesy of the production designer and the art department.
“So where are you if you don’t have the narrative and the characters to rely on?” Carter asked. “Most people, if you ask them about a movie or if you’re thinking about seeing a movie, ‘Well, who’s in it? What’s it about?’ That’s what you think you want to know, but coming out of it, you often remember a different level than the plot points or which characters meant the most to you. It’s far richer than that, and I enjoy participating in that part of it.”
As way of example, Carter explained that for Forrest Gump, he wanted to capture the essence of the American South, but the location of the story—Alabama—”really looks like any Midwest place. There’s nothing distinctive that will tell you you’re in the South.”
He wanted to invoke the pre-Civil War era with “hanging Spanish moss from old oak trees, but that type of environment only exists in a few places.” After a lot of scouting, he found a place in South Carolina that had the look that was so essential to the film’s story and setting, and they built the house there. It also turned out to be a very versatile location that fit the budget.
“We shot Vietnam there, Jenny’s tree, Jenny’s farm. In that one area, there was about a month of shooting because we could find it all there, and it provided the kind of look that I think helped the warmth of that movie.”
If you look at Carter’s list of credits, a certain collaborator seems to pop up a lot. He first worked with Steven Spielberg on The Goonies (1985), where he was art director under Production Designer J. Michael Riva. Spielberg came up with The Goonies story and acted as executive producer.
“He also became the second unit director, though I don’t think he was credited, but I was assigned to work with him and that’s how I got to know him, and then he wanted to give me a shot at production designing on [the TV series] Amazing Stories (1985-1987).”
Between their similar artistic visions and work ethic, Carter and Spielberg have enjoyed a long and fruitful collaboration.
“Our visions line up in both those realms. We have a similar work ethic and how productive and frugal we try be, and straightforward. We have a very easy rapport, where I can read his mind a little bit, and he in some degree gets me in ways very few other people have. I appreciate that and I think he appreciates how I get him. It’s sort of a shared wavelength. It’s not necessarily known right away. It’s something that comes over time—years—but then within the context of a project a language develops.”
Carter has unquestionably left a permanent mark on Hollywood history.
“I have so many people come up to me and say that they grew up on the movies that I worked on. That they meant a lot to them.
“Just because it was a fanciful movie doesn’t mean it’s lesser than some ‘real’ movie. A lot of people like to talk about film with a capital ‘L’, like ‘fiLLLLm,'” he said with emphasis.
Carter makes popular movies for people who love a great story, and isn’t that why most of us go to the theater? Lights, camera, action! Δ
Correction: In the original version of this story, two names—Judd Hirsch and Scott Spiegel—were misspelled. New Times regrets the error.
Contact Senior Staff Writer Glen Starkey at gstarkey@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Apr 20-30, 2023.