Nicolas Cage Talks ‘The Surfer’ & ‘Valley Girl’ 42nd-Anniversary Memories (Exclusive)

Nicolas Cage and director Lorcan Finnegan are dishing on their new psychological thriller “The Surfer.”

“Extra’s” Adam Weissler spoke with Cage, who plays a man who revisits his childhood beach to surf with his son and becomes entangled in an escalating conflict with local surfers that pushes him to his limits.

Nicolas recalled his own childhood in California and visiting the Santa Monica Pier every weekend, wishing he could surf. 

He said, “I was quite young, but I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to get past the group that was surfing, or, you know, the line, if you will. It was quite intimidating. I had a lot of admiration for surfers and for what they do, but I also feared them as a young man because they were pretty jacked up, both mentally and physically.” 

Speaking about his "Surfer" character's journey, he said, "It's a human condition, it's a human story to think that you can repair things if you just work hard enough and buy back that house or it'll fix my marriage or it'll repair my relationship with my son... and that desire to belong, to belong to something, to belong to anything."

Lorcan also touched on the movie's themes and dished on doing some surfing with Cage while filming in Australia.

He explained, “It’s not really a surfing movie. It’s about a guy who wants to go surfing and all the obstacles that get in his way and… the time that he spends between being told he can surf and eventually, you know, the end of the film is actually the meat of the story.”

“I think the surf aspects and the localism aspects really kind of complemented the themes of the story,” Lorcan emphasized. “The belonging and ownership and being part of, like, a group of people, and almost like a cult.”

As for surfing lessons, the sharks were always on their minds! 

Lorcan said, “The great white sharks, there’s a lot of them down there, so it’s a little bit precarious. Once you start thinking about them, what’s underneath you, it’s hard to get out of your head.”

Cage agreed, “It’s in your head in a big way, and it was always on my mind, but the couple of times I did get up, I thoroughly enjoyed it.”

Nic also reflected on marking the 42^nd anniversary of his 1983 cult-classic movie “Valley Girl.”

He shared impact of the movie on him as an actor, saying, “It was immensely important to me. It meant so much to me because it was the first movie that I auditioned for as Nicolas Cage. I got the part and that was liberating and empowering and encouraging.”

Cage showed some appreciation for “Valley Girl’s” director Martha Coolidge, who gave him “encouragement” and “fortitude” to try different things.

He elaborated, “She just let it rip. She just kept the camera on and let me go for it.”