Published May 15, 2026 09:58AM
Most of the world knows Jack Johnson for his mellow, feel-good songs like “Banana Pancakes” and “Better Together.” His is the type of music that stirs up memories and transports you to a happy place. But, long before Johnson was selling out stadiums, he was making surf films and surfing barrel-like waves on Oahu’s North Shore, where he was born and raised.
A new documentary about Johnson, called SURFILMUSIC, takes viewers back to the early memories and moments—mostly in and around the ocean—that have shaped him as a singer-songwriter. The film is a lens into Johnson’s evolution from surfer to filmmaker to musician. It’s also a celebration of friendship, freedom, wanderlust, collaboration, and taking creative risks. SURFILMUSIC is a snapshot of a specific era that will leave viewers nostalgic for analog experiences like listening stations at Tower Records and postcards written from far-flung locales around the world. The film is part of the Outside Days film lineup in Denver, May 29–31.
SURFILMUSIC starts in Johnson’s North Shore, Oahu home as he and his wife Kim dig through the old cassette tapes and photo albums that influenced his career. It’s been a quarter-century since Johnson, surfer and filmmaker Chris Malloy, and Grammy Award-winning director Emmett Malloy (Chris’s cousin) released their seminal surf films Thicker Than Water (1999) and September Sessions (2000).
Johnson and Malloy had set out to restore those original films. “Jack shot those on 16mm film,” recalled Emmett Malloy on a call with Outside. “I carried those rolls of film around in boxes all of these years like a badge of honor. I felt committed to getting these out in the digital era one day.” Early in the process of digging up the original footage, they decided that creating a new project from the old clips sounded like more fun than just enhancing them.
“It felt important to do it right,” said Emmett Malloy. The trio, along with Kim, combed through years of old footage, photos, scrapbooks, mini-discs, four-tracks, and Chris Malloy’s journals, which Emmett said, “formed the spine” of Thicker Than Water. Then, friends started to give them old-school material, like the Super 8 footage of Johnson in diapers, and their friends surfing the Pipe Masters.
“Once we started going through the old footage we started to make five-minute clips about water photography in Tahiti, or John John [Florence]—the best surfer in the world now—putting his leash on the wrong ankle when he was so little,” said Johnson. The original idea was to use those clips on social media to promote the remastered films, which premiered last year. But the shorts unfolded into SURFILMUSIC.
“If Emmett had said let’s make a feature-length documentary based around my life, I would have never said yes,” said Johnson. “Never, never,” agreed Emmett Malloy emphatically. But those short snippets tell the stories of so many of Johnson’s closest friends, including the late North Shore surfer and lifeguard Tamayo Perry, while also sharing his own journey.
SURF
Johnson would never call himself a rockstar. He identifies much more as a surfer. When he wakes up in the morning, he doesn’t always reach for a guitar. But he does think about where he can go surfing. “I’ve always surfed and I’ve always wanted to surf so it’s my through line through my whole life,” he says in the film. “Every other creative process kind of waxes and wanes but I’m surfing through that whole time.”
The hype around the new film made one of Johnson’s childhood dreams come true. At age 50, he finally landed on the cover of SURFER magazine. “I was pretty excited,” he confided on a call with Outside. “Most of the guys I grew up with had already been on a cover like eight times and were like, ‘Oh, you finally got one.’” Johnson’s childhood posse included surf legends including Kelly Slater, Rob Machado, Benji Weatherly, Shane Dorian, and the Malloy brothers Dan, Chris, and Keith.
In the nineties, this tight-knit group represented a new era of surfing and inspired pioneering surf filmmaker Taylor Steele’s flicks like Momentum and Focus and the 2018 Emmy-Award winning documentary Momentum Generation. Johnson hovered right on the perimeter, being a hard-charging surfer in his own right.
Most people assume Johnson’s laid-back tunes are representative of his persona. “I’ve been labeled Mr. Casual,” he laughed. “But you have to be competitive at Pipeline,” he said, referring to the North Shore’s powerful, barreling wave that breaks over shallow reef. “It’s not advertised, but Jack is a really competitive guy,” vouched Emmett Malloy. “Be it ping-pong or board games. It’s unsuspecting but it’s a fun energy to work with.”
At a time when friends were pitted against each other in the ocean, music became a form of connection and escape. “Everyone would pass the guitar around at night,” said Johnson. “It was something we could all do together without worrying about who was winning or losing.” When the waves were flat on the North Shore, they’d entertain themselves by playing music and making DIY films.
FILM
Johnson left Hawaii to attend college in Santa Barbara, where he met Kim. She was the first person to put a video camera in his hand and she convinced him to change his major to film. The couple went to Europe, bought a van, and started chronicling their travels on film.
When Chris Malloy got injured surfing Pipeline, he tracked down Johnson in Europe and asked if he wanted to make a surf film. They had both done some work for Steele, and with the confidence of youth, enlisted a few friends to travel to Australia, Indonesia, Hawaii, India, and Ireland. They set out with no plan, no sponsors, and no budget and created Thicker Than Water, one of the most influential surf films of all time.
“The level of surfing was so high in Taylor Steele’s films, and we were all fans of them,” reflected Johnson. “It wasn’t like we set out to make something better as far as surfing goes. But we wanted to try to make something that felt a little different and that shared what it felt like to be a surfer in this generation. It wasn’t all fast-paced and edited to punk. On the North Shore, life felt a little bit slower and we wanted to capture that.”
In SURFILMUSIC, a young Brad Gerlach, who starred in Thicker Than Water, says that the 1999 release was, “one of the first stories that surfers needed to hear to know what we’re all made of.” The film captured the camaraderie, adventure, and romance of surf exploration at the turn of the millennium through a fresh lens and that resonated with people.
MUSIC
Shortly after Johnson competed against OG Gerry Lopez in the 1992 Pipeline Masters contest, he had an accident at the infamous surf break. He knocked out his teeth and required 100-some stitches in his forehead. SURFILMUSIC shows a toothless teenage Johnson with a bandaged head commiserating about being landlocked with then-up-and-comer Kelly Slater. The injury in 1993 changed Johnson’s life trajectory and the traumatic experience inspired the lyrics to his song “Drink the Water.” “When you have to stay out of the ocean, you’re bummed,” he said. “You have to channel that into other outlets.”
It turns out that Slater had talent as a musician. In the film, Johnson shares how, at around age 14, Slater was the first person to teach him to sing his own lyrics. “I was still learning to play covers on guitar and had never seen anyone sing their own lyrics,” he said. “That was a big influence on me. When you hear your hero do something, it’s one thing, but when it’s a friend you feel like maybe I could do that.” When Slater left his four-track behind on the North Shore Johnson took advantage.
Johnson developed many of his lyrics during his time shooting surf films. “As I was looking through the lens all day and taking in all these things, when I’d get home at night I’d want to reflect on those things but in a whole new way,” says Jack in the film. “Emmett and Chris were supportive of me doing my acoustic noodlings behind certain scenes.” Those noodlings became the lyrics to his first hit songs. Slater shares in the film that Johnson’s music was already his crew’s favorite soundtrack before it became a hit on every national radio station.
Collaboration has been the heart of Johnson’s creative process, no matter the discipline. With music, he was embraced early on by G Love and Special Sauce, and shortly after by Ben Harper. “The intensity he puts into surfing was in the music, but with an ease I had never heard,” says Harper in the film. It’s no surprise that collaboration is also a central theme of SURFILMUSIC.
The film’s 17-track soundtrack was recorded with the guitar-singing brothers Alejandro and Estevan Gutiérrez, alongside a companion second album of original 4-track demos, which will be released on May 15. “The coolest byproduct of this film, other than rekindling old friendships, is creating new friendships with people like Hermanos Gutíerrez,” said Johnson. Emmett Malloy said that the emotional connection Johnson created with people like the Gutíerrez brothers, who went to his shows as kids, underscores the influence of his music.
His collaboration with the brothers led to the new song, Hold Onto the Light, inspired by the archival footage he unearthed of his late friend Tamayo Perry. ”I realized I was so lucky to have the footage of him, and I shared it with his wife and friends, but I had to let it go,” said Johnson. “There was something about holding onto the light of that imagery and projecting such a positive person into the world. It felt good as a friend to do that for somebody who gave us so much light when he was here. This film is really about expanding on that light with other people.”
Jen Murphy took her first surf trip to Oahu’s North Shore in her 20s and after went to see Jack Johnson perform on Kauai. She still has the DVD of Thicker than Water.
