Ric Friar is, without a doubt, one of the world’s most interesting men. It’s as though he sees the world through a different lens, one that’s colored in a hue no one else’s eyes register. “It’s a life that sequences more like a feature-length dream,” reads the description of the film you see above. “A truly wild concoction of adventures constantly intersecting with equal measures of insanity and bravado, an unbridled grabbing of life by the balls.”
Way back when in the 1960s, when free love danced in the streets and soldiers died in sodden rice fields, Friar made a name for himself in the tiny world of big wave surfing. In ’66, the Great September Swell smashed into the Cribbar, a reef off the Towan Headland in Newquay, Cornwall. He, along with Peter Russell, John McIlroy, and Jack Lydgate, decided to throw caution to the wind and paddle out. They were among the first to surf those giant waves. What followed was a life of risk and reward. Friar, in his own words, “died more times than Jesus.”
Far more than just a surfer, though, Friar is an artist, a horticulturist, a pioneer of cannabis cultivation, and thanks to the Sydney Morning Herald, is nicknamed “the King of Poo.” See, back in the ’80s and ’90s, Friar made a mint off manure. More recently, the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries stamped their approval for his program that used hemp for everything from clothing to fuel.
Now, his film has won a mitt full of awards—and although the film is wonderfully shot and put together, the meat of the story is a life well lived.
Phenomenality from Lucas Jatobá on Vimeo.
