SHAWN DOLLAR is a big wave surfer from Santa Cruz almost unknown outside his circle until he surfed Mavericks in 2010 bigger than ever. Now he has just beat the record, in the Billabong XXL Awards, for the largest wave surfed by rowing through a 61 feet giant at Cortes Bank last December. He is also the protagonist of Nightdrive, a short film directe by Patrick Trefz for Savage Cinema.
NIGHTDRIVE is photographer and filmmaker Patrick Trefz’s visual renditon of Shawn Dollar’s anxiety-ridden mind the night before taking on a giant swell. Tossing and turning, the anticipation robs him of sleep. Consumed with racing thoughts of life and death, inevitable mortality, and the inconceivable sublime power of nature, Dollar appears crazed in an obsessed state of determination. Trefz interlaces actual footage of Dollar surfing Mavericks and cast as himself with eerie Hitchcock-like shots that make for a suspenseful fiction/non-fiction, narrative/non-narrative, dream/reality viewing. A soundtrack of hauntingly familiar audio mixed with an ambiguous monologue by German philosopher Erich Fromm sets the tone with intensity and intrigue. Characteristic of Trefz’s work, he takes his audience into an alluringly personal, intimate, and even exclusive world with a way of making viewers feel like they are getting a private tour into another’s human experience.
Patrick Trefz lives and works in Santa Cruz, California. Patrick is an award winning art, documentary, and action photographer and filmmaker. He has directed two feature-length documentary films, Thread (2007) and Idiosyncrasies (2010) as well as multiple music videos and shorts. Trefz’ photography is featured internationally, including Surfer, Big, Geo, and The New York Times, and he is the author of Santa Cruz: Visions of Surf City (Solid Publishing, 2002) Thread (powerHouse, 2009) and SURFERS’ BLOOD (powerhouse, 2012).

Voice over: “Is man an instinctive killer, fated by his genes to be cruel and aggressive? Or is he a product of his environment who, with proper conditioning, would be gentle, peaceful and loving? Perhaps the most notable advocate of the "instinctivist" theory is Konrad Lorenz (On Aggression), co-winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Lorenz found instinctive aggression in animals and suggested that man is similarly programmed by evolution. Behaviorist B.F. Skinner, conversely, has long argued that man can be conditioned to forsake his violent ways. Now Erich Fromm, 73, social...” Erich Fromm.

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