Exclusive Interview: Sam Worthington on Drift

You’d think after being in some of the biggest franchises in movie history that Sam Worthington would have had a 4th of July weekend opening before. And yet after Avatar, Terminator Salvation and Clash of the Titans, it’s his Australian surfing movie Drift that actually opens this week. Available on VOD July 2, Drift tells the story of two Australian brothers (Xavier Samuel and Myles Pollard) who start a surfing business. Worthington plays JB, the drifter who helps them but also introduces them to the shady side of the business and surf culture.

We spoke to Worthington months ago because his busy shooting schedule would keep him working through the summer. Here’s the latest on Worthington’s upcoming films, including The Keeping Room, Sabotage with Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Avatar sequels. Drift will be in theaters August 2 as well.

 

CraveOnline: My editor wanted me to tell you Rogue is awesome.

Sam Worthington: [Laughs] Blast from the past.

 

It’s not on any VOD service so I haven’t even caught that one myself.

Great, I’ll have to get you a copy.

 

Thank you. So are you at a point now in your career where your casting helped get the movie Drift made?

Yeah, that’s pretty obvious. I’ve known Myles, the producer, the lead actor, for 16 years. He’s like my brother and one thing all of guys have always discussed is that we tried never to actually use my career to help further someone else’s career. We try to steer clear from that so Myles never really asked me to be a part of it until seven years down when he had developed the story and by then I kind of went, “Well, that’s a pretty decent little tale, a gentle family movie and I’d like to be a part of it if possible.” So I kind of then helped push it over the line but he’d done all the hard yards before that.

 

How did it feel for you to enter that phase of your career where you could do that?

Well, it’s the kind of thing, if you do something like Avatar, you kind of know you’re going to have a bit of weight behind you. That came out however many years ago, so you know when you do something like that and it’s that successful that you’re going to have a bit more power and it’s nice. But you’ve still got to find the right projects. You can’t just do it willy nilly.

 

Has the hoopla died down a little and let you get on with the work?

I always get on the work. That’s all it’s about. It’s never about the bells and whistles and the fame and the fortune. It’s always about the work. That’s the whole reason I do this job.

 

Have you been working pretty straight through the last five years?

Yeah, pretty much.  I did a bunch of movies back to back to back. I’ve done some big blockbusters and now I can be in the position where I can be a bit more picky and try to steer my career another direction and try something else.

 

Well, you were changing it up. You did The Debt and Texas Killing Fields. It wasn’t all Clash of the Titans.

There’s never a grand plan, you know what I mean? No one knows what movie’s going to work so you only just get compelled to the stories that jump off the page. That’s how I’ve been choosing. You can’t really choose by the size of the budget because that’s kind of silly. So I just choose whether the story’s compelling to me and then hopefully some are compelling to an audience.

 

Did filming on the water for Drift give you more cred with James Cameron?

Jim likes the fact that I kind of dive in no matter what, excuse the pun. I know with Jim, if I’m saying I’m at 20-30 foot swells several miles off the beach, he goes, “That’s my boy.” The whole thing about working with Jim is that you go be brave.

 

But in Drift you stay on the surface so now you need to go under, don’t you?

Oh, I went under, man. I went under a couple of times and now in Avatar when we go completely under, it’s going to be totally different, but that’s part of the adventure. Look at my job. I get to fight aliens, go to other planets, rescue the world. I get to do stuff I wouldn’t normally do in real life so that’s the deal.

 

Talk about filming that scene in the middle of the movie with the huge wave where you had the water camera.

The idea was, as I said to the boys, if I’m going to do this, I’d love to get out there. I’m comfortable in big swells. I’ve grown up surfing all my life, I’m comfortable out in the water because I respect the ocean. I said, “Look, the closer you can get me to an actual wave and get me right in the barrel, the better.” Several times I went over the fold and held under but you know you’ve got to pop back up again and you try and do as much as you can. Then it doesn’t pop the audience out all the time because they know that we’re in there.

 

Was it refreshing to do some practical stunt work after a series of visual effects movies?

Well yeah, but even on those visual effects movies you’re doing practical stunt work. That’s me jumping around like a fool on all those movies. That’s me standing on the edge of a building. We’re not on green screen stages all the time. Even when you’re on a green screen stage or in The Volume in Avatar, it’s more physically demanding than ever. Any action movie I think you underestimate how much you have to put into them.

 

That’s right. I didn’t mean to belittle the physical work on those movies, just to discuss the contrast.

It’s nice to not have to try and be in a tank. It was nice to actually get amongst mother nature because in Australia we don’t really have the budgets to do those effects. We really had to be practical about it.