Balaram Stack on ‘Hail Mary’ and Why Surf Movies Belong in Theaters

Hail Mary starts off with footage of Balaram Stack in Tahiti in 2022, the same year he cemented his place in surfing history by winning the Vans Pipe Masters. The footage is beautiful, but familiar – picturesque backdrops, thundering barrels, slow motion. Then the movie quickly lifts back the curtain with an abrupt cut into home movie footage of young Balaram in New York, while his mother lovingly cheers him on. A quick montage shows us more archival footage both at home and in the water, set to an original score by director Ben Gulliver. We end up in Balaram’s childhood home, where he delivers a talking-head style interview that starts off with the story of his own birth.

While Hail Mary is very much a surfing movie, replete with explosive footage of Stack conquering heavy waves, it also turns out to be an incredibly personal story. The “Hail Mary” of the title doesn’t refer to one of Balaram’s trademark aerials, or his descent into a tube in Tahiti, Fiji, or Oahu, but rather his mother: Mary Stack. The film takes a long look at the entire life that has led up to Balaram’s current place in the world of surfing, and how Mary has been the prime mover the entire time.

Earlier this year, I went to cover the Capitulo Perfeito surfing competition, a Portuguese invitational tube-riding event in which Balaram made the final heat. The day after the competition, I joined him and a handful of other surfers when they went to Supertubos. As we sat in the sand in between sessions, I asked him about his experience making Hail Mary.

How’d it feel to come out with your first movie? Must be pretty exciting.

Yeah. It was hard to accept, honestly. It was really fun, but also hard to feel like you’re portraying what it felt like. Trying to cover every part of it, you know?

It’s really hard to talk about yourself. Which was cool about my mom being so heavily a part of it, because she was able to tell the story better than I ever could.

You talk about your relationship with your mom and how she helped you and your surfing. How did you come up with that concept?

I’d been sitting on the clips for like a year. I had all these clips and I was like, “Let’s make a movie of some sort with Ben Gulliver.” Then we started putting something together and then were like, “Let’s put a fucking real movie together. Like, full length feature.”

Then we had the idea to do a more documentary [style] and he interviewed me for like four hours on camera and just talked about everything from start to finish. Then as I told stories, it became evident my mom was kind of the base of them all. She brought me to the beach and got me into the contests, and everything.

So she ended up being a better candidate to talk about it. We got her on camera for like six hours. She told most of her life story, but she can speak for six hours about one part of that whole journey, so it’s really hard to accept the shortened version of everything.

You found it tough to pick what parts of it would represent you and your mom?

I wasn’t a big part of the editing process, so I was just real nervous about how it was going to come out.

It came out a lot simpler than I had anticipated. I anticipated all these different angles and what they would use on which parts, and then it came out and it was just way more simple. It was like, “Oh, that’s pretty good.”

Then our biggest fear after that was we didn’t want to have any slow parts, or parts that were too long. Especially with all the talking involved. It was like an hour and a half, to start. We got it down to around 50 minutes.

Do you feel like you learned more about your own relationship with your mom from examining it?

Yeah… I mean, I guess some stuff gets talked about more that didn’t get talked about in the past. More in depth. I don’t know. I think my mom and I have a pretty good understanding of each other. We’re pretty close.

What do you have coming up next? Where do you see yourself in the future?

I’d like to make more movies. It’s like, the funnest thing. Then that whole process of premiering it all, it’s fucking the greatest thing ever. Everything is so here and gone on the internet and premieres, you get to fucking party and hang with people and everybody’s so engaged in what you’re showing.

Essentially, as the movie went on, I was like, “If only I could just fucking premiere it as much as I could over like two years and then delete the thing.” So nobody could see it outside of that setting. Because it’s a fucking movie. You don’t want people seeing it on their phone.

Where did you premiere it?

New York. We did like 15 spots, but New York was huge. We did it at The Angelika Theater. It’s an old theater in New York. That was insane. We had like 50 people in the streets with a speaker, going to the bar after.

Then Hawai’i was a really good one. We packed out the small house. People couldn’t even get in, it was so crowded. Saw a lot of people that I grew up with as well, that got to come see it.

Must have been a pretty big moment to be able to show your friends a movie of you.

I mean it’s like my life story. It’s a pretty hard thing for me to comprehend. But it was fun.

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