Director Bentley Dean’s career has included filming al-Queda camps in Kandahar, coups in Caracas, and a Kastom village in Vanuatu.
However, the key locations for his new film Facing Monsters are set to remain a mystery.
Dean was invited to dig deep into the psyche of his subject, West Australian ‘slab wave’ surfer Kerby Brown, for the project, albeit with one condition.
“The only stipulation he had was not to reveal the location of the breaks he surfed,” he told IF.
“That was the one thing that was off-limits.”
Surfing is not the sole focus of the feature-length documentary, which also covers fear, addictions, and family bonds as the audience is given an insight into what drives Kerby, and why he’s obsessed with pitting himself against one of nature’s most intimidating forces.
The project came about in 2016 when Red Eye Productions entered into a development agreement with Beyond West, who submitted the concept to Screen Australia the following year under the title Dark Water.
Producer Chris Veerhuis would come on board in 2019, but it wasn’t until May 2020 that Dean was contacted to helm the project following the departure of initial director Geoffrey Smith due to personal reasons.
He joined a creative team that comprised executive producers Frank Chidiac and Susanne Morrison, co-producer Sonya Rifici, DOP Rick Rifici, and editors Tania Nehme and Meredith Watson Jeffrey.
Amid a pandemic climate that led to many productions shutting down, Facing Monsters was given the green light, going on to film across the winter of 2021 before having its world premiere at Margaret River as part of CinfestOZ.
After using his two weeks quarantine to get up to speed on what had been shot so far, Dean then set about building a relationship with Brown, whom he first met at the break seen in the film’s opening.
“We eventually just hit the ground running and hed already told me how important this place was for him and so I thought, ‘Okay, let’s just start filming and that’s the way we’ll get to know each other’,” he said.
“There was a few seconds of, ‘Hey what’s going on?’, before he absolutely went for it.
“At the beginning, he was a bit shy and struggling for words because he wasn’t used to it but he ended up being extremely eloquent.
“The way he expresses himself in the film is very poetic and very thoughtful. Even his delivery is up there with the finest voices I’ve worked with in film.”
Harder to navigate for Dean and his crew was knowing the best times to film the Brown out in the surf, with big swell subject to specific conditions.
Once they had the type of waves they were looking for, the action was captured via 360-degree GoPros that offered a full scope of frames in edit and microphones that were able to record sound on the water.
The director said while the unpredictability of mother nature had proved a challenge, his “amazing crew” had been able to capture what it had been like to be out with Brown.
“That has to send a particular type of swell in the direction of the Southern Ocean to hit WA, but also has to be combined with winds being a certain way and not interacting with other localised storms, etc.,” he said.
“Sometimes the breaks he likes to surf won’t even break for a couple of years, so it was very clear to me right from the start that you had to be ready to go – you couldn’t have a big crew.
“It could mean travelling 1,000 km for a wave and even then there were no guarantees the wave would be good enough.
“Once you’re there, you also have to be good enough to capture that actual moment and those moments can be in the seconds.”
Madman Entertainment is distributing Facing Monsters via its sports division Garage Entertainment, with the film in cinemas from today.
Beyond Rights will handle distribution outside Australia and New Zealand and is in early discussions with a number of theatrical and SVOD markets.