The trailer to the new windsurfing movie ‘Nine till now’ starring North/Fanatic rider Marco Lufen dropped just a few days ago, giving an idea of what to expect from the final result: a high quality image film about one of the most popular freestyle windsurfers. The production company ‘Hometown Creations’ is new to the windsurfing scene and watersports in general and the challenging shooting period was a rather short one. We talked to Marco and the boys from Hometown Creations to find out more about their inspirations, motivations and most memorable moments.

 M A R C O  L U F E N

EFPT: Marco, the windsurfing world is waiting in anticipation for the release of your new project ‚Nine till now‘. Can you tell us some hard facts about the movie?

Marco: Hey EFPT, thanks for having us as an interview partner, we highly appreciate it. The project was entirely filmed in South France, Leucate. We filmed on a total of 12 days, which was quite intense for all of us. Hometown Creations is a newly established company of two friends of mine Jan-Eric and Alex. Well they needed an image film for their company and we anyway wanted to do a project together for a long time. As there hasn’t been any windsurf movie about myself, it became obvious what we actually wanted to do. A portrait in form of an image film for Hometown and me.

EFPT: So why the name ‚Nine till Now‘?

Marco: I started to windsurf when I was 9 years old, that’s why we called the movie “Nine till Now”, as it seemed suitable for what we wanted to produce.

EFPT: In the past years, the quality of windsurfing movies has been stepping up big time. What will make your movie stand out?

Marco: Well first of all the quality is just insane! We focused on delivering a product, which is not as any short-clip out there on the world wide web. According to me we produced clip with epic quality, considering the amount of budget we had! We are looking forward to hear any Feedback positive as well as negative. We just want to know how you guys like it! Feel free to comment on the movie and share it, if you like it!

EFPT: Why did you choose to work with ‚Hometown Creations‘?

Marco: Well, as already explained Alex and Jan-Eric are two of my friends with who grew up with and graduated from High School. They are highly motivated and super creative! Adding to that they are just awesome people and we had an amazing trip, with lots of fun!

EFPT: What was your favourite part of shooting the movie?

Marco: My favourite part was when we shot in Port la Nouvelle, a spot which makes every passionate freestyler melt in about two seconds, as it is flat like a pancake. We arrived there at 5 in the morning to catch the best light and nobody else was there. That was just amazing: PD!!!

EFPT: Any more particularly mentionable funny/ scary / challenging moments?

Marco: When you watch the movie, you will come across a SUP part where I am paddling around the Cap Leucate. I started paddling out there at 4:30 in the morning which felt kind of uncomfortable, as there was NO LIGHT and I had to paddle out for quite some time (30 min).

 

H O M E T O W N  C R E A T I O N S

EFPT: Can you tell us a little bit more about ‚Hometown Creations‘?

Hometown Creations: Hi, we are Eric and Alex, two young filmmakers who wanted to go on their very own path. In order to do so we started Hometown, which we wouldn’t describe as a normal production company. Our vision is to be able to call Hometown a collective of awesome people, creating art by telling all different kinds of stories. Meaning that the work we do is driven by passion. Besides films about all kinds of sports we want to focus on documentaries and commercials.

So to make it short: We love playing around with fancy camera gear in the most beautiful places in the world and hopefully will make a living out of it.

EFPT: Who had the idea for the movie ‚Nine till now‘? Was it work in progress or did you have a screenbook? What inspired you?

Hometown Creations: The original idea already existed for many years. You have to know that the three of us went to school together. I think we started to do our first filming projects when we where about 16 or 17, but we just didn’t know that Marco was that good. So we filmed BMX or Ski films but never anything about windsurfing. When we finished school Marco told us that he is about to travel the world and become a Pro. This surprised us, but also created an idea within a second. I mean we had a fucking pro as friend?!

I wouldn’t say that we had a storyboard, since we wanted to make the film as authentic as possible. Okay we have to admit that Marco is normally not up at 4:30am, but yeah, it’s all about the show right? Creating a portrait of the person Marco Lufen was most important to us. Besides that we intended to reflect the current situation of the sport – that it’s not just about party, beaches and fun.

EFPT: Is it your first production in the windsurfing scene?

Hometown Creations: Yes and we love it! It’s actually our very first project filming any water sport in general. We never considered it a problem though, because we thought of it as an opportunity to create different unique content, which hopefully was never seen before. Marco was a bit more concerned about this fact, but I think in the end we managed to satisfy him.

EFPT: Marco has the reputation to be amongst the most professional sailors on the tour. How was it to work with him?

Hometown Creations: Since we know Marco like forever it felt like a road trip with a friend. I think everybody who knows him can prove that his spirit is just making it easy and fun to be around him. Still we had to shoot an entire movie within two weeks, so there was decent pressure on us all the time. If we didn’t get the shot we needed because the weather didn’t allow it or the ideas of what to do next weren’t matching, we had little crises from time to time. However, no progress without discussions. And to be honest all these things made this trip special.

EFPT: Any mentionable funny/ scary / challenging moments from your side?

Hometown Creations: The Trip straight away started off rather scary when we filmed Marcos first moves because this crazy guy came extremely close to the camera and our heads. We are still pretty sure he tried to kill us.  Besides that I guess we were quite lucky as we ran into Julien Taboulet, who offered us a place to sleep in his surf school, which made our work and this trip in general way easier and probably also better (our original idea was to sleep in tents for the whole time and charge batteries with a generator.)

To point out specific, memorable moments is very hard. We had so many. As we watched the sun rise and go down, we had awesome dinners prepared by director and chef cook Eric on a little camping cooker. We laughed a lot and we met so many good people.

EFPT: Sounds great! So what is the next big project?

Hometown Creation: Besides some secret film projects we are currently planning, to let Hometown become what we want it to be: it is a huge project by itself. We have so many ideas of what we wanna do, but right now we have to fill up our savings again, to be be able to push the quality further.

So you will hear from us again pretty soon, we hope! We are looking forward to any future filmmaking adventures.

W A T C H  T H E  M O V I E

NINE TILL NOW – a portrait about Marco Lufen from HOMETOWN on Vimeo.