Zen and Zero DVD

Our goals were of an economic as well as a journalistic and of course an athletic nature. The trip had to pay for itself, that's at least what our spirit of sportsmanship required, our surfing abilities should raise to the power of three minimum - and in the end, or so we hoped, we would come up with a story full of drama, adventures and philosophical diversions.

Hardly any sports can measure up with wave-riding in terms of its universal appeal. Surfing is full of ambiguous metaphors, the concept of the wave itself is one of nature's most fundamental and basic notions. We internalize its riches of meaning from our first steps, no matter if we inhabit coasts, valleys or mountains. The wave as a concept and a metaphor is deeply rooted in our cultural memory.

That said, it may sound a little less absurd that of all people five Austrians set out to research the phenomenology of surfing, the grammar of wave-riding. We just followed something of an anthropological impetus: Our project was from the very beginning that of a cross-culural analysis.

The fact that certain used car types would fetch several times the original Los Angeles price clinched the matter. Our goal was to research the myth of the surfer dude with what Austrian Author Robert Musil called "the exactness in emotional matters": An analysis with European sensibilities, without formulaic sentiment but a rather comic touch that would inevitably leave its traces in the film.

Between us and our goal lay 7000 miles of Central America. A long and winding road: From the deserted coastline of Baja California, through Puerto Escondido, the fastest beach break of the world, to the southern tip of Costa Rica, the end of the road. The beat of the ocean and the sublime psychological sensations of surfing would set the rhythm four our undertaking. We hoped our investigations would result in conclusions of a rather general, almost philosophical sort.

Our expectations on that end mainly rested upon the American Surf-Writer Allan Weisbecker. Weisbecker had lived the myth of the surfer-dude: He sold grass in the 60ies and 70ies, just to stay in the water and later wrote a book on his life that became a gernre-classic. Weisbecker's memoirs so much epitomize the lifestyle of a surf-Outlaw that Hollywood is turning it into a movie now. (Sean Penn will play Weisbecker, Dogtown's Stacey Peralta will direct). We visited Weisbecker in the South of Costa Rica, in Povones, counting on his eloquence and some of his elaborate wide-screen voice-overs.

In the end we discovered something that was in front of our eyes from the beginning: We had always called the project a zero-sum-game. We visited the ruins of the Mayas, a civilization that understood the concept of Zero long before the West. We spent three months on sea level, on level Zero, studying the lifestyle of surfers that is nihilistic at its core. We tried to reach a mental state that in extreme sports is referred to as the absolute Zero. We interviewed a surfer and author famous for a book named "in Search of Captain Zero":

Too many coincidences.

Nothing is not nothing, but the lack of something. An unfinished feeling.