RIDING GIANTS 5 OF 5

RIDING GIANTS PART 5 OF 5

A year's worth of shooting, interviewing, editing, re-editing, vacillating, hemming, hawing, debating, watching, thinking, revising, talking, meeting and phone-calling later, and we have what amounts to one of the best surf movies ever made.

Riding Giants is a documentary film in the same vein as Dogtown and Z-Boys, this time exploring the lives and passions of big-wave surfers from around the globe, though centering primarily on three epochs of big-wave surfing as seen through the eyes of their chief proponents.

"We've tried to infuse the story with the freedom of surfing," says my editor and soon-to-be Hollywood bigwig Sam George. "Big-wave riding is the backdrop against which the story of surfing is told in this movie," he says, adding that the greatest compliment he received at Sundance '04 was that most attending surfers said that the movie made them proud to be surfers.

An impressively thorough history results from this film, one that maddened George in the writing as he struggled to punctuate such an exhaustive history in the confining space of a one-and-a-half hour film.

But from lost footage of Greg Noll's epic day at Makaha, through Clark's pioneering at Maverick's to the most cutting-edge views of Hamilton and towing at Peahi, the film is said to be as representative a surf film as possible.