"These waves are for the big boys."
That's what aspiring pro surfer Anne Marie Chadwick is constantly told in Blue Crush, The 2002 coming-of-age tale disguised as a sports movie launched Kate Bosworth's career and inspired a generation of young women to paddle their hearts out. Inspired by Susan Orlean's classic Outside article about the surf girls of Maui, the film centers on a trio of friends—Bosworth, Michelle Rodriguez and Sanoe Lake—living together in a beach shack in Hawaii, working as hotel maids and struggling to get by, but living for the next wave all while raising Anne Marie's rebellious little sister, Penny (Mika Boorem).
Sure, the foursome struggled to even buy snacks at a gas station, but it was that us-against-the-world feeling that screenwriter Lizzy Weiss points to as one of the reasons Blue Crush has remained "so sticky" two decades after its release.
"It didn't make $100 million, but we're talking about it 20 years later," Weiss exclusively told E! News a recent interview," and there are a generation of young women who absolutely adore that movie and it's used everywhere. It's a pop culture phrase everyone knows. For me, it's the friendships."
"The fantasy of living in a shack in paradise with your best friends is the dream," Weiss continued. "They struggled, they partied, they argued, but they had each other's backs."
But it was obviously more than that. Each of the women were "fully formed" as characters, Weiss said. She pointed to Anne Marie having a job and struggling to make rent, training for Pipe Masters and starting a new relationship with visiting NFL quarterback Matt (Matthew Davis), while also dealing with the changing dynamics in her friendships with Eden (Rodriguez) and Lena (Lake).
"That was really important to me, that we can show a woman athlete, who was totally empowered but also wanted this boy to like her and how that fit into her future," Weiss explained. "I just thought that that's okay and that's real and we are allowed to be all those things."
When it was released in the summer of 2002, Blue Crush grossed a respectable $40 million at the box office and received mixed reviews from critics, who commended Bosworth's performance and the surfing scenes, but considered the plot predictable—which is a critique that director John Stockwell, an actor known for his roles in Top Gun and Christine, admitted he understands.
"When you make a movie like that, you're not expecting it to open Cannes or Telluride," he told E! News. "It has a formula and it does what it does well. Working within that formula, I was trying to upend certain established tropes. I really liked the execution of a lot of the smaller details, but at the end of the day, it was trying to satisfy a certain audience and I think it does that and it's held up."
Stockwell may not have taken the reviews to heart, but Weiss, relatively new to Hollywood at the time, was "devastated."
"When the movie came out, we were still in a world in which the majority of movie critics were men and a bunch of the top papers gave it sort of patronizing reviews," she explained. "I couldn't understand how they couldn't see it for what it was. Not every movie needs to be reviewed as, 'Is this an Academy Award contender?' Nope, not every movie is, not every movie wants to be."
Still, despite the scrutiny, Weiss said she was "proud" of the movie and knew even then that they had achieved "a perfect blend of cool and feminist."
"Look, imagine how strong the movie had to be to overcome that and still be this little survivor 20 years later," she said. "It's lightning in a bottle. Everything worked out. The actors are incredible, it's directed super well. It just hit."
Here, Rodriguez, Stockwell and Weiss take E! News behind the waves, revealing secrets about the making of Blue Crush, including how Bosworth had to fight to be cast, who almost drowned several times and if there will ever be a sequel...
The inspiration for Blue Crush came from Susan Orlean's 1998 Outside magazine article, "The Maui Surfer Girls," about group of free-living teenage surfer girls in Hawaii. The classic piece was "very slice of life," screenwriter Lizzy Weiss said. "It was this beautiful story of girls in surfing in a very pure way. It's called soul-surfing and it's not in a competitive-sport way."
To find someone to adapt the article into screenplay, Universal and Imagine asked several writers to offer their take on the story, and Weiss' idea won out. However, her initial vision for the story was "much different" from what ultimately made it to the screen.
Citing the 1988 Julia Roberts movie Mystic Pizza as an inspiration, Weiss explained that her initial script focused on "the summer after high school and it was the four girls, but it was Anne Marie deciding to leave the island to go to the mainland and the other girls, particularly Eden, were upset."
"I really wanted it to be about girls' friendships," she continued. "You have this time where your best friends are your everything and then when you make that choice to break away, it's hard and there's a breakup."
Director John Stockwell, who worked with Weiss on 2001's Crazy/Beautiful starring Kirsten Dunst, also recalled the original concept being "very character-driven," noting "there wasn't even a competition in it."
So what changed? According to Stockwell, producer Brian Grazer "really saw the need for a sports movie. I never saw it as that, but that's what it became."
Weiss pointed to the huge success of The Fast and the Furious for Universal in 2001 as the tide that changed Blue Crush's script.
"They started to think, 'Can we change it? Can we make it for boys too? Make it have more adrenaline and can we Fast and Furious it?'" Weiss said. "That's sort of the deal with Hollywood. It keeps adjusting and evolving, but I was up for it. I was excited."
While Stockwell didn't recall the Vin Diesel- and Paul Walker-starring vehicle being the "template" for the new Blue Crush, he did acknowledge that "when Michelle Rodriguez signed on, there was a desire to bring some of that audience over and some of that celebrity status."
After The Fast and the Furious became a surprise hit, Rodriguez became one of Hollywood's hottest young actors. But her decision to head to Hawaii without ever having been on a surfboard wasn't made from a professional perspective.
"To be real? It was a tumultuous early 2000s," Rodriguez said. "If you were from Jersey like me, you really felt 9/11 happen hard. And so for me, it was the great escape. I just really could not be home and I really needed to be part of the West Coast. I felt like it was time for a new life."
So, when the script for Blue Crush "landed" in her lap, Rodriguez immediately "fell in love" with Eden, Anne Marie's take-no-bullshit best friend and surfboard-maker.
"And three months hanging out in Hawaii learning how to surf? Absolutely," she added. "Who says no to that? You gotta be out of your mind!"
Blue Crush served as Kate Bosworth's breakout role, though Stockwell admitted he initially wanted to fill the entire main cast with real surfers. (Sanoe Lake, who played Lena, was the only competitive surfer who landed a major role.)
Ultimately, the search for their Anne Marie came down to six actresses, who were all surf-tested at Grazer's Malibu home to see who was at least comfortable in the water. Bosworth went to Hawaii, hired a surf instructor and packed on 15 pounds of muscle even before officially being cast. "She just went the extra mile to say, 'I could do this,'" Stockwell said. "I was really impressed."
It was that tenacity that gave Bosworth an edge over her competition, despite Stockwell initially not believing she was right for the role in one important way.
"Honestly, there was another actress—I won't say her name because she's pretty well-known—that probably, physically, was more right for the role," he revealed. "But we tested them all in the water and I think it was Brian who said, 'I know, but I think Kate's just got this drive.'"
While Bosworth took surf lessons prior to being cast as Anne Marie, Rodriguez decided to take a "learn as you go" approach to being in the water, which included riding the jet skis that tow the surfers.
"I got my driver's license through Fast and Furious and that's how I learned how to drive," the 44-year-old said. "Two years later, I'm learning how to ride a jet ski over massive waves, so I'm gonna use a little bit of it!"
"Michelle Rodriguez was insane on the jet ski," Stockwell admitted. "No matter what our water safety guy would tell her, she would just go wherever she wanted to and get into some really dangerous situations. She would just laugh and I would be like, 'OK, you can't do that again!' She's not the greatest swimmer, she almost drowned, but she always came up laughing and thinking it was funny. I don't think anyone on our team thought it was funny. She didn't get scared ever and she definitely nearly drowned many times."
In fact, Rodriguez recalled "almost drowning to death on Sunset Beach multiple times throughout the process." And she admitted she "ruined" what she felt is the best scene in the movie—Eden towing Anne Marie during a training session— when by looking "directly at the camera" after bringing Bosworth's stunt double, Rochelle Ballard, into a giant wave.
"I remember looking at Michael, who's just like, 'Oh, she ruined the shot! It was so beautiful!'" Rodriguez said with a laugh. "But dude, it was like a mountain crashing behind me. I couldn't do it!"
The movie ultimately serves up a realistic happy ending: Anne Marie doesn't win the competition, but she does score a perfect wave, nabbing the cover of a major surf magazine, a Billabong sponsorship and the guy, NFL quarterback Matt (Matthew Davis). But Stockwell revealed there was "a lot of discussion about, 'Should she win? Should she come in second? Should she lose? Should she die?!'" Stockwell felt strongly that Anne Marie should not win the contest, a sentiment Weiss agreed with.
"It didn't feel real necessarily," Weiss argued, that Anne Marie would be able to win against pro surfer Keala Kennelly, who ultimately ends up coaching her rather than competing against her.
"What the journey is for her is overcoming her fear, the nightmare of becoming injured, and she did," Weiss continued. "You don't have to get number one to win. You can win in a lot of different ways. And that scene where there are two girls in the water and instead of being at each other's throats, they support each other—I love that scene and we're showing you that you can do it different."
Weiss was quick to give credit to Stockwell for making the decision to "mix professional actors with locals," explaining that it gave the movie "a real authenticity and you can't fake that. That's one of the sort of secret sauce ingredients."
But it was a move Stockwell said he had to fight for, with the studio hoping to bring in extras from the mainland for small roles. And, he added, casting Hawaiian surfers like Brian Keaulana and Kala Alexander provided an unexpected but essential service.
"We couldn't permit or clear the water ever, so Pipeline always had 200 surfers out and the only way Kate was able to get a wave was if we were paying a lot of people to allow her to get a wave," Stockwell said. "Kala or Brian would say, 'OK, this next wave is Kate's wave,' and then if someone took off on her, honestly, they would get a beatdown and then everyone would learn, 'Oh, when Kala says this, we have to listen to him.'"
Prior to filming, Stockwell and Weiss both spent a considerable amount of time in Hawaii, scouting locations and getting a sense of the surf community that offered the duo key little details to add to the movie. (Weiss even took a trip to Hana to meet the surfers from Orlean's original article, "which was amazing," the writer said. "I partied with them and I stayed up all night and really got to know them. That gave me their way of talking, their way of being and their incredible style that was so different from anywhere on the mainland.")
Weiss pointed to the payphone that offered up the surf report as one of those little touches, as well as all the training Anne Marie does, including running underwater with rocks.
For Stockwell, who became an avid surfer while filming the movie and now lives in Malibu, he picked up on "a lot of the smaller details" regarding surfing that may seem "stupid" but are important. "Like how you carry your board on the land, when you put your leash on, how you enter the water, how you exit the water, just things that surfers would know," he explained.
Filming took place in Oahu, with Rodriguez saying the cast "had a blast" while making the movie.
"We got close real quick because we all had to stay together," she continued. "What a batch of strange weirdos. I mean, Kate must have been astonished. Here's a psych major who quit school to go be an actress and all of a sudden she's with Sanoe Lake and Michelle-f--king-Rodriguez and she's like, 'Who the hell?!'"
Admitting she was "burning the candle on both ends" and "crazy"—noting Lake was "pretty wild when she was a young, now she's a mama with kids and super solid"—Rodriguez reasoned, "I was in my 20s, so, for me, it's like asking a guy what he did in his frat days, you know what I mean?"
Still, what Rodriguez remembers most about her time making Blue Crush was spending time in nature "with really cool people" who also appreciated the beauty of Hawaii. "It was very hippie-like, with lots of beach hang outs with everybody. It was very beautiful actually. I love Hawaii."
Yes, filming in the water was definitely challenging for Stockwell, who ultimately brought in professional bodysurfer Mike Stewart to operate the camera after a Hollywood cinematographer was taken out by a wave, destroying an expensive camera in the process. But the director revealed that the hardest part of making Blue Crush was timing.
"The biggest challenge was getting the studio to understand that you couldn't schedule the waves," he explained. "I said, 'We're going to have wave coverage. If there are waves, no matter what is scheduled, we're going to go shoot in the water.' So that's what we did and we had a very flexible schedule."
And that openness to film based on the ocean led to some of the movie's best shots, according to Stockwell.
"Even in pre-production, if there were waves, I went out and shot," he said. "I would say, 'OK, this is costume test.' But I would send Kate and Sanoe and Michelle out and some of the best footage in the movie is from wardrobe tests. Universal hated that because they didn't have all their insurance in place, so they weren't happy that it happened, but it was the only way I could do it."
The studio initially brought in a second special effects unit and had plans to CGI everything, but it "turned out terrible," Stockwell admitted, so the only effect used in the movie was facial replacement to put Bosworth's face on Ballard's body.
"Honestly, it's not great," he added. "The effects are pretty bad if you slow it down. It was the same people who did Face/Off, that John Travolta and Nicolas Cage movie. But all the waves are real. Kate paddled out on some big days and I really wanted her sitting in the lineup, with the spray blowing off the back of the waves. She definitely could've gotten hurt or killed, so props to her for going out."
In 2017, Weiss wrote a pilot script for a Blue Crush TV adaptation that ultimately wasn't picked up to series by NBC. "It wasn't Anne Marie," Weiss, who created the ABC Family series Switched At Birth, shared of the project, "but it was Blue Crush the vibe."
Still, Weiss has hopes that another ride is possible for Blue Crush, especially given the love fans still have for it.
"It's always been a movie that over the years you would just realize, 'Wow, it really is sticking with people," she explained. "But now it's been a conversation. These girls are in their 30s, they grew up watching it in their teens and preteens. It shaped them a lot and it means something to them, so maybe there is a world where we would actually revisit with the same actors and characters, like a literal sequel."
During an Instagram Live in August 2020, Bosworth, Rodriguez and Lake all said they would be up for a sequel, and Rodriguez told E! News what she thinks Eden would be up to.
"I picture my character having had a kid already and having her own surfboard shop, where she sells the boards that she makes," she said. "And the girls, I mean, my God, there's just so much evolution that happens in 20 years. It would be great to explore that."
For Stockwell, he would love to explore the struggles for women in the World Surf League, including the pay disparity. Plus, he would be "able to do all kinds of things" from a technical level that weren't available in 2002. But he would also have his eyes on a bigger challenge: "I would go somewhere like Tavarua, just up the ante with an even sketchier wave."
Blue Crush is streaming on HBO Max.