A poetic homage to Australia’s early surf-culture with unearthed footage set to an original soundtrack. YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN HERE YESTERDAY combines hundreds of hours of lovingly restored 16mm footage with a salt-infused soundscape by Headland. This cinema poem tells the story of a wild community who took off up the coast and discovered a whole new way to live. Going back to the never-before-seen camera reels to ask the question – what do we keep and what do we leave behind? Featuring Tim Winton, Wayne Lynch, Bob McTavish, Albe Falzon, Evelyn Rich, Maurice Cole and many more.
As You Should Have Been Here Yesterday arrives in Australian cinemas on November 21, Nick L’Barrow spoke with the documentary’s director, Jolyon Hoff, about the evolution of surf culture over the last 6 decades, the restoration process for the 150 hours of footage he found, and the musicality of surfing.
Nick: Thank you for taking the time to chat today! I’d love to start with what the restoration process looked like for the film. How many hours of footage did you collect, and then restore?
Jolyon Hoff: Well, we ended up scanning about 150 hours of footage. And we had a young guy, Kade Bucheli, who was amazing. He spent 14 months full-time just scanning material. The trick of it was that we had to scan everything we could find before we could start editing the film! Otherwise, we didn’t know what we had because it was sitting there on film.
The process really started with the surf filmmakers that I knew, and finding out if any of this material still existed, the 16mm footage. So, we went into their garages and under their beds to find it. And a lot had been lost of thrown out. But we were able to collect all those reels we found, and then took them down to Kade at the studio, where he physically cleaned them and fixed up all the splices. Then he put them through a scanning machine, which all in all, took him 14 months.
The whole process was supervised by a guy called Billy Whitehall. He was the colour grader on The Lord of the Rings, and he did kind of an amazing job. But I think it’s fair to say that none of us realised quite how big of a job it was going to be.
Nick: Cutting 150 hours down to 80 minutes is an incredible feat! How did you find the footage that created that flow and rhythm that this doco most definitely has to its feel?
Jolyon Hoff: Yeah, it was difficult because it was all beautiful. It’s all absolutely stunning. We have so much great footage that we didn’t use, so we’ve started a YouTube channel, and a site called The Surf Film Archive, and now we’re sharing all of that material so that everybody can see all this incredible footage that has been saved.
But the process was difficult because there’s a whole lot of ways you could have sliced the footage. The angles and way you could have gone in on surfing were so different. But we chose this cultural angle essentially. We let the material tell the story.
It begins when the surfers started to leave the cities, and you see this naïve innocence in the footage. They’re going exploring and journeying, and it gets a bit more experimental as they discover new things and get a bit more confident. Then, of course, they go too far. Then somehow, in the 80s, it becomes this incredible commercial enterprise. So, we tried to let the footage, as much as possible, tell the story. And then we just wove the interviews around that.
Nick: What was the most interesting thing you found about how that surf culture evolved over those 6 or 7 decades that was discovered in this footage?
Jolyon Hoff: Oh, if I could specifically say one thing… I do think surfing is a sport that sells itself short, you know? It was the first youth subculture. This was the first time that kids were really breaking out from what their parents were doing, and leaving the cities, heading up the coast, and finding different things to do.
At the time, if you were a kid, your parents would just say to get a job down at the factory. That was it. That was what you did. And these kids’ kind of discovered something new and said, ‘No. We don’t want to do that.’
They experimented with healthy living and alternative lifestyles and Eastern philosophies, and not working for the man. So, I think what I find really interesting is that surfing was the real leader in the Australian cultural space. A lot of that stuff is deeply embedded in the DNA of what it is to be Australian, and the culture of modern Australia. And I think surfing can often forget that.
Surfing was right there with the kind of rebirth of Australian film culture and art movements. All of this was happening in the late 60s, early 70s. Surfing was there. And not only was it there, it was the leader. It was the there before hippies. The surfers were a working-class community. They could fix old cars and get themselves up to the coast. They were happy to camp on the beach, and just search for these waves. It was later on that those blueprints, or those journeys, were taken by other people, like the hippies. They really created the blueprint of modern Australia wanting to get out of the cities.
Nick: How much of that blueprint were you aware of before coming onto this project? And how much did your perspective of surf culture’s importance change or evolve as you were making the doco?
Jolyon Hoff: Well, you’re constantly learning. I feel like surfing is still very new. We have three or four generations of people in the water. You’ve got people that are 70, you’ve got young kids coming through. And I feel like I’m in the middle generation.
I grew up in the 80s, and my uncle had moved up to Lennox in the 70s, and I was just enamoured by surfing. It felt so progressive. It felt so forward thinking. It seemed like such an alluring thing to be a part of that I became so enamoured with it. So, I was aware of this movement.
But later on, professionally and as a filmmaker, so I became aware of the importance of telling these stories. There’s lots of great stories. Even with the Q+A’s we’ve had, more stories came out of those. That’s the thing I love about stories and film, that they can become kind of the centrepiece for a moving, vibrant culture.
Nick: I’d love to close out by complimenting how great this film’s score is. The way you and your composer match up to the musicality of waves is incredible. I’d love to know what that collaboration was like!
Jolyon Hoff: Murray Patterson is a musician. He’s a surfer. He grew up behind Lennox Heads at this beautiful and famous point break south of Byron Bay. So, he lives and breathes—he’s salty! I call him a salty musician because he lives and breathes surfing and music. He’s played in bands all over the place, all of his life.
He brought a loose collection of musicians, friends of his, to record the score and mixing. They just did a fantastic job. They’re quite well known in the surf world where they play along very intuitively to surf films. They’ll put footage on a screen and just play music along to that footage and get into a rhythm with it. And they were looking for the same kind of feeling of flow, but in a musical sense. They were magnificent, and Murray was a really key in guiding the whole film.
Thank you to Jolyon for his time, and to Umbrella Entertainment and NixCo PR for organising the interview. You Should Have Been Here Yesterday is in Australian cinemas on November 21.
