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EMILY RIEMER: Can you explain the premise of Islands in the Stream and how you came to make the film?

T.J. BARRACK: Wes and I have known each other for a long time. We went to high school together and we decided to put together this production company called "Little House". Islands was our first movie. We came up with the idea that we wanted to go to Tahiti because it’s a place we both wanted to see and thought it would be beautiful. So we put together this kind of diverse group of surfers that we liked and we thought covered a lot of different aspects of the surfing world, and we went out on the trip. And, Wes, if you’d like to expand on that…

WES BROWN: We put it together and we filmed it, with the help of Larry Haines, our water cameraman. But, no, we filmed it, we wrote the script; we got the full hands-on experience. We also got back and edited it ourselves too. Put the film together and everything.

T.J. BARRACK: It was a dream come true for both of us and something we had always wanted to do. We really did everything half and half: produced, direct, write, edit. Wes does more of the physical editing and I tell him what I like and don’t like and he’ll say 'yes' or 'no'.

WES BROWN: (Laughs) I’m just a little monkey. He says tap, and I do it. So we really worked well together. We were friends and we didn’t know how it would go working that closely together and sharing a lot of the creative responsibilities, but it went off without a hitch. Everything went smoothly.

T.J. BARRACK: We’d also both worked on different projects before. This was the first time that we totally had the responsibilities on our shoulders.

T.J. BARRACK: Well, that’s the plan.

T.J. BARRACK: Well, in a documentary, you have a certain guideline that you want to keep to and you have a script as far as what kind of questions you want to ask somebody, and where you want to go. But when you’re somewhere on location things change, and the route that you thought you were going to take can completely be different. So you have to go by the seat of your pants and just go with it. You don’t know where you’re going to be or what’s going to happen.

WES BROWN: Thr weather. Depending on the swell--that's the direction that the waves come from--it can be a story from a local person that you want to go check out. A piece of land that you’ve heard about.

T.J. BARRACK: We had concepts of ideas we wanted to explore with all the surfers, but a couple of them Wes knew from beforehand. You spend more time with them you kind of get an idea of who they are and where you want to go with it. A lot of it had to do with waves too. For a couple days, when we were out on the boat trip in the outer islands, it was totally flat and we didn’t have any waves. And we were kind of looking at each other like, how do we make a surf movie without waves. And finally, we got some. But it’s all--it's a documentary like that; a lot of it is just your subject to what nature gives you.

T.J. BARRACK: Yeah, exactly.

WES BROWN: That’s exactly it.

T.J. BARRACK: It was Wes and I in a small dark room for about a month and a half. And we shot everything and we took a couple weeks off and just let it sit, because we had to collect our thoughts. And we had kind of an outline of what we wanted to do. But just like putting a puzzle together, and Wes is very talented at doing that and we just kind of sat down and tried a bunch of different things and just kind of pieced it together.

T.J. BARRACK: Yeah. I had always been interested in film. In school I did some small things, but I was mostly into writing. And Wes and I, since high school, had always talked about doing something film-wise. And then, when I got out of school, I worked for an investment firm and started doing commercial videos for them. I wanted to do something creative, and Wes and I got together and said let’s go for it.

WES BROWN: And for me, I was just going off and making Step into Liquid with my dad (director Dana Brown) and it was either time to continue going to school or learning, stuff like that, and T.J. was kind of trying to start this company. We were both at a good time in our life to do it so we did it.

T.J. BARRACK: Um, it was really half and half. It was all a collaboration. We’d sit down and kind of hash things out and refine it down to what it is in the movie.

EMILY RIEMER: In the end credits, you give special thanks to Tom Barrack, Dana Brown, Bruce Brown and Brett Barrack. This was a family affair! Did they do anything specific to earn the 'thanks'?

T.J. BARRACK: (laughs) I’ll do the Barracks. Tom Barrack’s my dad, and he just supported us through the whole thing. He had kind of a silent executive producer role but just helped us get off the ground. Brett Barrack is my younger brother. He came out on the trip with us for about a week and a half and just kind of P.A.'ed for us a little bit.

T.J. BARRACK: Both.

WES BROWN: It was just kind of an homage to our parents. We both kind of felt like we wouldn’t be there unless for them, [and wanted to give them] thanks for just being there emotionally. Occasionally, we’d get advice from them, but that was about it.

WES BROWN: I think that’s one reason that they said that they would go is because they knew that we wouldn’t put out a bad product. But as far as filmmakers, they didn’t know what me and T.J. would do exactly. They knew my family would be involved so it wouldn’t be a bad product. But as far as their own thoughts when they got down there, they were a little hesitant, I think, just because it was such a diverse group of people. You know, we had an established world-champion woman, we had a young, freestyle Hawaiian, and they were a little timid about what was going to happen.

T.J. BARRACK: We really made a conscious decision to make it a very diverse group. We went into it knowing that we were going to be at the contest at Teahupoo and kind of show that contest’s professional life a little bit and to contrast that with guys who didn’t compete and were more into soul surfing. And we just kind of wanted to explore the ways that people are professional surfers. You know, Layne and Tom who are the ultimate champions and Donovan who never really competed and just kind of cruises around the world, and Mark and Tamayo who are kind of in the middle you know, do compete but also just kind of travel around and are younger, and we just wanted that diverse group.

WES BROWN: It would appeal to all different types of surfers. And two, we know how we think of surfers, but we don’t know how Tom Curren or these other people would think, and they’d give a whole different point of view that we would never think of.

WES BROWN: You know what? I’d known Tom since I was probably ten. I mean, not closely, but I had been to family birthday parties and his kids’ parties, so I’d known him for a long time. So that was that. And Layne I’d known through Step into Liquid, probably since 1999, so I’d known her for about four years.

T.J. BARRACK: (laughs) I didn’t know any of them before the trip.

T.J. BARRACK: Yeah, we chose it. We knew that it was going to be a huge part of it; we really wanted to nail the music. We worked with a music supervisor named Jeremy Clements, and Wes and I had a few songs that we knew we wanted to use, that we kind of had mapped out, and then, with Jeremy, we sifted through a lot of local music and some of our friends who had bands wrote some stuff and we picked some songs from them. It was a fun process.

WES BROWN: We basically pulled out all of our strings. We knew how important it was, and we had to get through a lot of bad music to get to the good stuff.

WES BROWN: It basically just depended on what that mood that part of the film needed to be.

T.J. BARRACK: A lot of surfers compete and do films at the same time. Which is a great way for them to publicize themselves and the companies that sponsor them. In Layne’s case, I think that had a lot to do with her relationship with Wes and she was great through the whole trip, and a pleasure to work with, and I think that was because of the relationship. And then the rest of them, I think, you know, it’s an opportunity to surf waves they haven’t surfed before, and meet people that they don’t know, and just be involved in what we tried to make a fun experience for everybody.

WES BROWN: Basically, there are two ways to make money in surfing. One is to compete and one is to travel. A lot of the guys travel, they travel and they do photo shoots and stuff. But really, if they want to expand as far as getting themselves out there, how much does a picture do? It does create, but it doesn’t really show who they are, or how they feel, or what they think, or any of that. So if they know a filmmaker will do a good job exposing them, then it’s a good platform for them to do it on.

WES BROWN: That’s a tough question, because on one hand, I’d like to say that surfing is too commercialized. But on the other hand, that’s the same thing that feeds the beast. They have to do that, in order to make more money. A lot of people in the industry feel you’ve got to keep a core, you don’t want to sell out. On the other hand, every company eventually sells out because money ends up taking over in some way or another.

WES BROWN: A lot of guys, even if they aren't the best, just want to free-surf. They eventually want to prove that they’re the best, you know. I’m kind of rambling. What do you think, T.J.?

T.J. BARRACK: Yeah. I think that today in surfing, you can be either the tour obviously is the playground for the best surfers in the world and what they’re doing now is phenomenal. But at the same time, you have guys like Dave Rastovich and Donovan Frankenreiter, guys who are unbelievable surfers and travel the world and don’t feel the need to compete. And there’s that balance there where there’s guys doing that and there’s guys who are competing. And I think it just boils down to the individual and what they want to get out of surfing. So I think both options are there for them.

WES BROWN: Like, just on a personal level. Me and T.J., like I don’t like going out in the lineup and competing with a bunch of guys. I’d rather go surf by myself away from everybody and just enjoy it, you know. That’s the way, I’d like to think, if I were that good of a surfer, that’s the way that I would do it. But I don’t know. I don’t know.

T.J. BARRACK: No. I don’t think that was our intention. We did want to show the difference, when a competition comes in. The whole circus that comes into town. But we didn’t try to make it…

WES BROWN: There wasn’t an intention of doing that. Just the purity of the life there really was, you can really get lost there, and you can start to see, "Hey, I don’t need a computer, I don’t need a cell phone." Life could be more simple. But there wasn’t a deeper social message in it.

T.J. BARRACK: Well, maybe in Teahupoo, which is, I guess, really the only very rural scenario that I’ve seen. But the people really seem to enjoy it. It opens up a lot of businesses and brings in a lot of money for them. And there’s still that small, Polynesian aloha that emanates no matter how many people are there, you know. Everybody is really warm. People open up their houses for surfers and photographers to stay in. It’s one big community. And so I went into it not really knowing how I would feel about it. But I thought it was fine. And there are still so many places that are unknown. And we also made a conscious decision not to give any of the names of places that we went to later in the movie.

WES BROWN: Yeah. We renamed all the places with our own little nicknames.

WES BROWN: Well, for one, we promised our guide down there, you know, that really, do cherish that fact that nobody knows where these places are. That we would respect that and not tell people the names. And because, you know, all of the sudden, you’ll get, at all the places, a hotel and five charter boats that go out there once a week. There’ll be one surfing spot on the island because there are reef passes and it’s a little community with people who live there.

T.J. BARRACK: We have a distribution for it through Monterrey. We were accepted to the wine country film festival last year, in 2004.

T.J. BARRACK: Yeah. And we were just at X-Dance film fest at Sundance.

WES BROWN: Well, we hope that Islands has legs and will keep on going, you know? I think with a traditional surf film, it’s not dated with music and not dated with certain surfers. So I would like to hope that it will keep on growing and people will keep on seeing it, and it will become an established movie. It’s our first film, and that’s what we hope. We don’t know yet. We’re gonna keep on making more. And hopefully keep on getting better.

WES BROWN: Well, I’m a big fan of Kate Bosworth.

T.J. BARRACK: You know, I think it’s good, I think any publicity is good publicity for the sport and I don’t think anything is necessarily bad for the sport of surfing. You know, I think, I don’t know…

WES BROWN: There’s always going to be that surfer, "Hey dude," type of role in the Hollywood films. And I think it’s getting way less, you know. It’s not as bad as it was with like the Spicoli’s and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. So it’s better. It’s getting better. But yeah…

WES BROWN: Yeah, because now surfing has become a lot more global and a lot of people that surf aren’t just dope-smoking high school kids. They’re lawyers and real estate agents and politicians. A lot of people surf now, so I think it’s… [Trails off]

EMILY RIEMER: ... a legitimate career today?

WES BROWN: Yeah. A lot of people that surf now make a lot more money than people who sit in offices.

WES BROWN: Out at Sundance, we won, we got the part of the Fuel Experiment, which is something that Fuel TV’s doing. They’re going to be doing a TV show on us. And then they gave ten directors a hundred grand to make a film.

WES BROWN: Yeah. It’s exactly like Project Greenlight.

T.J. BARRACK: And we also, besides that, have another surf film that we’re going to be filming down in Peru.

WES BROWN: That we’re doing with Monterrey.

T.J. BARRACK: And we’re doing that, actually, next month, in March, we’re going down there. And then the Fuel Experiment will follow that.

WES BROWN: Right now, it’s just entitled The Peru Project.

WES BROWN: Barrack?

T.J. BARRACK: Well, it’s going to be a documentary style. Again, we have a bunch of different surfers coming down and we’re just going to kind of explore the Peruvian lifestyle and there’s just an unbelievable amount of untouched coast and we’re going to try to find some remote spots that people haven’t been to before. And there’s a theory that the Polynesians actually originated from Peru, and they sailed out of there, and that surfing may have its origins there. So we’re going to try to explore that as well.

WES BROWN: The premise of that is Mickey Dora, who is, you know, a legend in the surfing world, before he died wrote an article called ‘The Aquatic Ape" in which he talked about how he felt surfing has lost its soul and had become too corporate. And he wrote these guidelines for what he felt would be a pure surf contest, to be held at Jeffreys Bay in South Africa, where guys would shape their own boards, and a bunch of things like that. So, our idea is to bring that to life.

T.J. BARRACK: Yeah, I think we’re going to hold it under those guidelines and the thought, as of now, is to highlight two surfers as they go through the process of making the board. And we’ll also explore Mickey Dora, the person that he was and then end the film with the contest in Jeffreys Bay.

WES BROWN: The contest will be more of a way to string the story through the film than the actual whole point of the film.

WES BROWN: No, no. I mean we just found out that we were finalists.

WES BROWN: Yeah, definitely, our plan is to not just do documentaries. We have other plans to do other films in the sport domain. And then, eventually, the plan is to do features.