“The Toll That Takes on Your Life”: Chris Smith Rejects Sports Documentary Label for Hit Surfing Docuseries ‘100 Foot Wave’

For three decades, Chris Smith has profiled oddballs, eccentrics, and mavericks. Smith’s first documentary, American Movie—a darkly funny but profoundly human portrait of an aspiring filmmaker struggling to complete his low-budget horror film in small-town Wisconsin—won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1999. Ten years later, in a four-out-of-four stars review, Roger Ebert called Collapse, Smith’s portrait of Michael Ruppert—a former LAPD officer turned controversial thinker warning of global societal collapse—the most frightening thriller he had ever seen. 

Fuelled by several hit streaming documentaries, Smith’s career has roared back to life in recent years. In films exploring figures as varied as Robert Downey Sr. and Vince McMahon, and even Billy McFarland, the con-man organizer of the Fyre Festival, Smith has illuminated the human condition by paying careful attention to the thin line between ambition and obsession. 

His latest project brings his characteristic narrative intensity to the death-defying world of big-wave surfing. 100 Foot Wave follows legendary surfer Garrett McNamara and a crew of elite adventurers as they chase one of nature’s most intimidating challenges, the mythical hundred-foot wave. With jaw-dropping cinematography and intimate behind-the-scenes access, Smith captures not just the awesome sublimity of surfing big waves, but the intense mental and emotional toll exacted on those who risk everything to conquer them.

A lot of the show is set in Nazaré, a Portuguese fishing village turned big-wave Mecca, but the third season (currently airing on HBO) takes viewers to surf spots all over the world, from Cortés Bank (a remote offshore break in the Pacific Ocean with waves so huge they show up on radar) to the Moroccan port city of Safi and the Eddie Aikau Big Wave Invitational in Hawaii. 

Documentary spoke to Chris Smith about surfing as religious experience, the humanistic core of his artistic practice, and the curiosity about the unfamiliar that is essential for documentary filmmaking. This interview has been edited for clarity.

DOCUMENTARY: Have you ever been a surfer?

CHRIS SMITH: [Laughing] No, no.

D: So, I’m thinking about unfamiliarity. You made this film in Hindi called The Pool (2007), and it’s not a language you speak. And here, you’re not a surfer. Are you, in some ways, drawn to the unfamiliar?

CS: I mean, I didn’t intend to make a movie in another language. I just got there [to Goa, India] and the actors we wanted didn’t speak English. So, you know, that was just a consequence of the circumstances. But I am definitely interested in people that do things in worlds that I am unfamiliar with. I would hope a lot of people are curious to learn about other people who inhabit different worlds than the ones that they occupy, right? I’m a very curious person, so I’m interested in everything. So yes, I wasn’t a surfer, but I was interested in understanding the community of people that we ended up filming for the show. I was interested in this town of Nazaré in Portugal that’s become this sort of hub for people from all around the world that serve giant waves.

D: I read an old interview of yours where you were asked about the overarching theme of your documentaries, and you said, “Me, I’m the through-line.”

CS: [Laughing] That’s a great answer.

D: But I’m wondering if that’s actually the line that runs through your films, that curiosity about the unfamiliar…

CS: I feel like a lot of the subjects of the documentaries are somewhat outsiders, right? These are people that have chosen their own path that is different from everyone else, and I’m interested in questions like, how did these people end up in that position? What extraordinary things are they doing? What are they choosing to focus on and why?

D: 100 Foot Wave is usually classified as a sports documentary. Is it a sports documentary?

CS: No, it’s not a sports documentary. It’s a human drama. It’s a story of the human spirit. To me, it was never about surfing. It was about almost everything else that’s around surfing, everything that forms the backdrop to this world of big-wave surfing. In Nazaré and all around. I mean, this season we went all around the world, to Morocco, Ireland, Chile, Fiji, Hawaii, Cortés Bank in the middle of the ocean. We went everywhere, it was an adventure. But the thing that was interesting is, when the show started and we knew a lot less than we do now, the first question we got about the project was “What if they don’t get the 100 foot wave? What if that doesn’t happen?” And very quickly we learned that didn’t matter, that’s not what the show was actually about. 

When we started, Garrett McNamara called and was like, “I’m gonna surf a 100 foot wave.” Without really understanding that world, that was our entry point, but it quickly became obvious that that was not what the show was about. I think that’s the reason that the show has endured for three seasons, because it’s about people, it’s about the human spirit, it’s about everything that comes with trying to achieve something extraordinary and the toll that takes on your life.

D: One of the surfers says in the first season that surfing is like dancing with God.

CS: All of the characters in the show are so connected to the ocean, in a way that feels somewhat spiritual. One of our characters, CJ Macias, talks about how, if you think of the ocean and its surfers, these waves are always coming, and it’s you who have to make the choice of which waves to take and which ones to not take, of what path to follow. And that is such a reflection of our life on land. We’re all always confronted with opportunities, and our choices are what define us.

D: Is surfing a sport at all? Sometimes it feels closer to 19th century adventuring, or mountaineering. Is it a quasi-religious experience almost, somewhere between sport, performance art, and ritual?

CS: I feel like it’s much more than sport. But then again, I’m very close to it. Most sports, you can pick a time and a place for them to happen. And surfing is not that way. It’s very much connected to the earth. You are at the mercy of Mother Nature. Yes, other sports can be snowed out or rained out or something, but for the sport or the event to actually take place, you are not completely at the mercy of the planet. And I think that’s very different [with surfing] from most other sports.

D: Sporting contests, and documentaries about them, seem to have readymade narrative rhythms, like anti-climaxes and climaxes, redemptions arcs, the underdog triumphing. Is surfing similar, and does that make it easier in some ways to make a documentary about it?

CS: There’s a dramatic tension built into most sports, which, I think, makes them more predictable. But surfing is much more unpredictable. It has its own rhythm, its own way of being, and we had to adjust and adapt in a similar fashion while making the show.

D: Surfers seem to document their own practice obsessively. You probably had hundreds of hours of footage…

CS: Between the stuff we’ve shot and the stuff they have, thousands of hours!

D: Does that make it easier, or is it harder to decide what to keep and what to throw out?

CS: It’s a very challenging show to put together. There’s a lot of people that work on 100 Foot Wave to make the show what it is. I’m here speaking to you, but I’m just one of many, many people that help. I think the last time I went to Nazaré we had dinner with 18 people that were working on the show over there. There’s a huge team of verité cinematographers that are basically living with the surfers from morning to night. 

It’s an incredibly labor intensive show to make because it is so unpredictable. It’s not like most sports, where you can say you’ll follow this game on this date and this game on that date and we’ll be there two days before. You have to be there through the entire season because you never know when things will happen. 

D: How long exactly?

CS: The team has to be there from the end of October to early April. There’s around six verité cinematographers that are following the characters. And on big swell days we’ll add drone operators and a water cinematographer and a few land operators shooting the waves from the land.

D: And how did you decide on that crystalline Philip Glass score?

CS: When we first started working on the show, we were editing, trying lots of different things, and one of the editors laid some Philip Glass music over the scenes, and it just immediately sort of made sense. His music is so powerful and beautiful. It felt like it was combining with the imagery from the ocean perfectly. It was such a natural fit in terms of capturing the soulfulness of the experience, and it just felt right.

D: You’ve worked across a lot of documentary sub-genres, like verité, satire, and long-form narrative. In an age of misinformation and deepfakes, do you still see documentary as a tool for truth?

CS: It’s a good question. It goes back to the fundamental question of documentaries. Once you’re shooting an amount of footage and cutting it down, it’s already a subjective process. Our goal is always to mirror the experience that we had, or the things that we saw, and we’re trying to translate that as best we can. I don’t think anyone can deny that it’s a subjective process unless you post everything that you shot. But even then, if you did that, there was still an edit process of just what you chose to film. 

In a world of advancing technology, there is still something that feels very humanistic about a documentary. It’s people filming people, cutting together human stories, right? You hope that still has value. When I was younger and watching movies, I always found documentaries to be the most interesting—the stakes were higher. These were real people living real lives that had real consequences. For me personally, that always resonated in a way that narrative films didn’t. 

D: Am I right in thinking you seem to be particularly drawn to profound one-on-one relationships? For instance, there’s that particularly sweet friendship between the two surfers Justine and Tony in 100 Foot Wave. Or the strange and intense relationship between Jim Carrey and Andy Kaufman in Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond (2017). Or the father-son relationship in Sr. (2022).

CS: Honestly, you look at the world and you try to find what’s interesting. A lot of it is instinctual, it’s not that I’m setting out to say, “I’m going to avoid that story over there in favor of this story about a one-on-one relationship.” It really is just about trying to capture the best stories, to do the best storytelling that we can based on the world that we’re in. Also, we follow a huge community of people in Nazaré, so certain episodes will focus on certain characters just so that you can actually understand and sort of go on an emotional of arc with them—that’s definitely important, rather than, say, an ensemble where you’re just checking in with people now and again and you’re not really getting invested in anyone. But it’s probably more a consequence of storytelling than it is a thesis.

D: You’re shooting a documentary over many years, you meet all these people. Do those relationships endure over time?

CS: In an ideal world they do. In reality it doesn’t always work out that way. We make a lot of projects, you know? I have very close, old friends that I barely see or stay in touch with because I work a lot. So, would I like to stay in touch with everyone that we film? Yes! But does it always happen? Not necessarily. It’s a consequence of the amount of stories that I’ve been a part of, it would be almost impossible to stay in touch with everyone. I just try to call my mom once a week, and that seems like a big achievement. But if I ever find myself in the same town as somebody that I filmed, then yeah, it would be great to catch up.

D: Finally, will there be a fourth season?

CS: We hope so. We’ll continue to film and shoot and tell the story as long as [HBO] let us. It’s been an incredible journey to see how the show has unfolded over the last five or six years. It was something I could have never expected or predicted. I’m so grateful and happy that it happened.

Sudipto Sanyal is a writer in Bangalore.