There was a time when setting foot inside the local pub while away on a surf trip – in some dusty corners of the country, anyway – you were really taking your chances. Once the highways straightened, the locals became less-then-welcoming to visiting surfers, especially ones carrying cameras. There’s the moment where the door swings open and the front bar falls quiet, heads turn, and a single voice growls, “Who are these c…s?” Harry Bryant has walked through plenty of front bars but has become a master of disarming the situation, even with the most sociopathic of local drinkers. Five schooners later, Harry is in amongst them: laughing, telling stories, ordering rounds. It’s a rare but valuable life skill to possess, and Harry has used it with great success in pubs between Nundroo and Limerick.
“The whole thing stemmed from the first few trips I did with Big Dav,” offers Harry on the pub scene in his new movie, Motel Hell. “I found myself just going into certain pubs and finding myself in these scenes where I’d kind of attract these real charismatic people. That was when Dav started saying, ‘Ya know, maybe we could somehow capture that and use it in a movie.”
In Motel Hell, the pub becomes a character and we’re in the front bar of Harry Bryant’s mind. It’s a strange joint. Somewhere between Wake in Fright and Mad Wax, the movie starts in the kind of remote desert pub Harry has spent too much time inside in recent years.
The idea for the film burrowed its way under Harry’s skin during a bunch of desert trips during the lockdown period. “That’s where it all kind of began. We started filming around three years ago when the lockdowns were in place, so that was our zone down there. We were going down there while the world was in this crazy, bizarre time and it was almost like the plot came from those trips. You go down there and it’s a very trippy place regardless of what you’re smoking or drinking. You’re in the sand dunes and you’re cooked from the sun and surfing so much, you don’t have reception. You’ve got no connection to civilisation and you don’t know what’s even going on in the outside world. Your mind for sure plays tricks on you down there. You’d wake up from hallucinating dreams where you’re bumping into your mates, your surf buddies from across the world, in all these places you couldn’t go at the time.”
The fever dream feel of the film also has a lot to do with the man who made it. “He was the full-blown, aggressive power booger,” is how Harry sums up Dav Fox’s bodyboard pedigree. “Still is.” But more than anything, Big Dav has been responsible for bringing together the fringe ends of boog and surf culture and holding them together like two live wires. Through his Drag softboard label and the accompanying films, he created a disturbingly dangerous cultural stream that suddenly made mainstream surf culture seem piss weak and sold out.
This is how Surfing World described the Drag films back in 2018. “It’s Drag’s films though that have become the portal into the strange world of softboarding. Filmed by Big Dav and Maddog, they feature bodyboarding and softboarding, but mostly weird voyeuristic shots of Australian beach life, a menagerie of cooked characters with bad teeth and bad sunglasses going about their days. ‘You’d think there’s a lot of work going into finding those specimens,’ offers Maddog, ‘but truth is when you live in Bellambi it falls in your lap really.’ Dav adds, ‘The challenge is to actually find enough surfing footage to give people a reason to watch the weirdos.’ All of this goes down with a ripped off soundtrack that jumps from Billy Idol to Primus, and the end result is a lo-fi, conspiratorial window into the dark suburban horrors that happen every day on beaches near you. You feel something bad has happened to bring us here, but you’re not sure what. And who the hell are these people? It’s joyous in parts, but in other places feels like a kidnap ransom video.”
Harry has surfed a lot with bodyboarders in recent years, and his surfing life has changed as a result. “Especially where I’m living now, it’s such a huge bodyboard community down here and surfers and bodyboarders… that whole staunch kind of era where they hated each other has well and truly sailed.”
Motel Hell feels a little like a bodyboard movie, just without bodyboarding. For a major surf film, it feels underground because they’ve done it in an underground, bodyboard style. This is how Wade Goodall, who features in the film, describes that style. “They’ll surf Port Macquarie, get up the next morning and drive to South Australia. Six of them in a Mitsubishi Lancer and they’ll stay down there for weeks, surfing and eating beans. They don’t give a shit. They’re fucking hardcore.”
And the other thing is they don’t tell anyone. “Going to Ireland for instance,” offers Harry, “Dav had been there 10 years prior on bodyboard trips and was so welcomed back there because they’d been as secret as fuck. That whole bodyboard mentality. It’s like, we’re not here to blow the spot up and we’re not here to go live on the Gram and tell everyone where we are. We went to Ireland twice filming for this video and there’s been nothing online. Nothing.”
While Motel Hell feels like a bit of a pushback against slick, mainstream, 4K surf culture, it also sat squarely opposed to the modern churn-and-burn content model. “You could easily just release a 10-minute hype reel of the best surfing you’ve done,” says Harry. “But for someone like me, I’ve also had all these crazy experiences around the world, and bumped into all these characters, and it was like, let’s take our time and turn it into more of a story.”
And there was no shortage of stories. Harry has been chasing swells with mates for the past three years, and anyone who has spent time on the road with Harry knows that means all sorts of general mayhem. “Every single trip we did for this movie, there was an element of chaos – someone fucking snapped their leg, or someone almost died, or our car blew up and we got stranded somewhere. There’s so much of that kind of stuff that went on. Looking back at all these moments and the backstory to all of them, when shit hits the fan, that’s what you end up remembering.”
“That was the first morning we got to Ireland,” explains Harry of a photo of him and Wade about to jump off the rocks into giant surf. “We got off the plane super late the night before, had all these troubles renting a car. It was a long story, but we ended up getting there at 2am. We knew the swell was going to be filling in through the day and we kind of woke up, looked at the waves and it looked kind of small. I was like, ‘Maybe we should just go for paddle and shake the plane legs off.’ When we pulled up it was like four foot, by the time we put our wetties on it was six foot, then by the time we’re down on the rocks about to paddle out, it’s like 12-to-15! But going on a surf trip to somewhere like that and then getting thrown in the deep end straight away was almost a bit of a blessing really.”
And of course, if you’re going to make a surf/pub movie, then Ireland is a no-brainer. “We actually ended up being in Ireland for St. Patrick’s Day, two years in a row,” says Harry. “They like their pub culture over there. It actually brought a tear to the eye because they have the Irish trad music wherever you go. You’ll just be surfing and its absolute belting weather outside, freezing cold, then you’ll just dry off, walk into a pub, there’s a fire going, the ceiling is so low you’ve almost got to bend down to go to the bar, but there’ll be a little round table in the corner with Guinness pints and four or five local lads playing the fiddle and just breaking out in song. I have blood on that side of the world – I’m half Welsh – so I’ve felt a bit of a magnetic pull to that side of the world for a long time. Ireland was on my hit list of places that I always wanted to go.”
The movie features an ensemble cast of Harry’s good mates, all familiar faces – Wade, Craig Anderson, Dion Agius, Shaun Manners – but there was one last-minute call-up who starred. “Eithan Osborne phoned me up,” recalls Harry. “He’d just been knocked out of the contest at Narrabeen and he said, ‘I might come down to the South Coast.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, no worries.’ He got the train down and I picked him up, then the next day we rented a trailer, filled it full of camping gear and set off driving 24 hours across Australia. We fully kidnapped him. It was a real eye-opening experience for Eithan. He hadn’t seen a whole lot of the country and to pretty much see half of it in the space of two days, he handled it really well.”
The real test however came when they hit the desert coast. “Eithan was really keen to surf some juice and I could see he had a bit of fire in him. Well, one day the waves got pretty much as big and as gnarly as the waves get to paddle. He said to Tom (Robinson, photographer) while we’ll getting our wetties on, he’s just like, ‘I’m quietly fucking shitting myself right now.’ But instead of sheepishly paddling out and feeling out the lineup, he literally paddled out and sat deeper than anyone and was just swinging and getting absolutely obliterated. It was just a full shock for him being so far away from civilisation. He was sleeping in a swag for the first time and we’re cooking meals up every night by the fire, and then to then be thrown out into the deep end in some real schiz slabs, it was a full trip. But he just took the bull by the horns.”
If you’re going to channel cult classic Aussie cinema, it helps to have a cameo from a cult Australian actor… one of those guys who is so ‘cult’ you don’t know his name, only his characters. “I used to live next to this coffee shop in Wollongong and this guy would go there every single morning,” recalls Harry. “He was such a familiar face, but I couldn’t put my finger on who and where and how I’d seen him.” It soon clicked. He was Keith George out of Chopper (“Keithy seems to have done himself a mischief”). Harry would only learn later his name was actually David Field.
“Dav reached out to him, and he was like, ‘Hey, we’ve got to shoot this pub scene, would you be interested in coming to give us a hand with it?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah mate, for sure. Keen as.’ Dav goes to me, ‘I got Keithy George coming along to do the pub scene.’ I’m going, ‘Wait, Keith George from Chopper?’ When he rocked up, he was such a legend. He knew exactly what he was doing and soon as the camera started rolling it was like game face proper and I was staring him in the eyes delivering lines. It was pretty crazy.”
As far as a moral for the story, Harry had to think for a second. “Just go. Just go and experience it and don’t put so much emphasis on scoring waves. Go and immerse yourself in some far-out place and go and talk to a bunch of crew and go and do a bunch of weird things. When I’m an old boy I want to be able to sit back in a nice leather armchair, having a nice cup of tea and just think about all these bizarre, crazy rogue places that I’ve been to and all these whack experiences I’ve had along the way. Scoring waves is a huge bonus.”
We put it to Harry the front bar of the Nundroo Hotel might be a more likely retirement plan for him, living in a corrugated iron shack behind the dunes. “Yeah, that’s probably more where I belong to be honest.” – SEAN DOHERTY
