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| Simon Murdoch, one of the film's stars. |
PEATHEAD: What is “Almost Cut My Hair” and why might we care?
RYAN LOVELACE: It started as a project to compile all of the footage
I’ve gathered and shot over the years into something concrete. But then word
got out and people started to get excited and wanted to send me footage they had
stashed or had just gotten the week before. So, pretty quickly, it turned from
my project into 'our' project, something that involved a lot of people I've met.
Everything in the movie comes back to a relationship I have with someone—a
band, a photographer, a surfer, a surfboard—and it’s taken me eight years of
work to build those relationships through my boards.
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| Crafting Trevor's orange ThrougHull for Lakshadweep. |
Discuss the film’s shapes.
It’s just a handful of them throughout. Some sections
were filmed years apart with a different person on the same board. For instance,
there is a 5'3” t.Rev, which I originally made for you, and it was was handed
over to Trevor Gordon to surf in Lakshadweep. Later, he surfed it for a while back
home. Aubrey Falk also had a go with it. Then it got into the hands of Simon
Murdoch, who surfs it beautifully. Other main boards in the movie are Trevor’s
5'10" Piggyback, a high-performance twinnie shortboard, orange with a
little swallow tail. (Earlier in the film, there is a lavender version of the
same board, which was the first version of the Piggyback model.) Troy
Mothershead rides an 8’0” pintail v.Bowls at home and in the Bali section. Trevor
rides the same board in the after-credits section. That board now belongs to me,
and we are in heaven. The Rabbits Foot that Ryan Burch rode was a mistake. I
was shaping it for a regularfooter and realized a few hours later that I had
made it backwards, so I called Burch and told him he had a new board. I drove
it down to him and filmed him on it for two sessions at Seaside Reef. The Rabbits
Foot ridden by Ari Browne was taken with me to Australia in 2012; a friend of
mine told me a friend of his wanted to ride it in the finless division of the
longboard festival, so I said ‘sure.’ He grabbed it, said it made total sense,
then went out and rode it like they were born together. The footage was shot
during a three-month road trip from San Diego to El Salvador with his brother
and a few friends. The orange hull that Trevor rode in Lakshadweep was made
specifically for that trip and that wave. He wanted to ride it as an
alternative in case the surf wasn't pumping, so the days prior to the swell
picking up, that footage was shot of him enjoying some smaller waves and some
fun closeout sections.
What's behind the film name?
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| Lovelace making a Rabbit's Foot. |
I had the film about halfway done before I named it. I
was editing the footage of Trevor at Rincon on the Piggyback and needed to put
some music on so I could watch the waves together and feel it out as a whole. I
decided to play “Almost Cut My Hair” (from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Déjà Vu album), easily the most
important and overreaching song in my life because it’s always nice to listen
to. The second it started, I knew no other song would do, and that the movie's
name was there without question. “Almost Cut My Hair” is (to me) about not
cutting yourself short, to know that things are going to be hard, but to trust
yourself in knowing the right path and following it. In doing so, you can never
fail. The song has come to me many times in the past and has driven three of
the most significant decisions in my life. The attitude alone has guided me
numerous times, and I owe a lot of where I am now to the messages within the
song. It felt nothing short of perfect to name such a personal film, and I know
David Crosby would approve!