Persistence of Vision — Dustin Miller interview

By Nick McGregor
Photos by Rachel Bardin

Plenty of surfers have moved to St. Augustine, attended Flagler College, and left with big dreams of making it in the cutthroat film and video world. Only a handful actually succeed on the international stage, while even fewer manage to transcend the narrow action sports field. Yet Dustin Miller has pulled it off.

He has experienced the best of both worlds: he’s traveled to Australia, Tahiti, Brazil, South Africa, France, Spain, and Hawaii with the Association of Surfing Professionals World Tour, while also tackling serious issues with a nonprofit.

Dustin has committed himself to using the most vivid imagery possible to tell as many interesting stories as he can. Drift gave him the chance to tell his own.

Drift: How old are you, where are you from, and how long have you been in St. Augustine, Dustin?
Dustin Miller: I’m 27 years old, I’m originally from Richmond, Va.., and I’ve lived in St. Augustine for eight years.

D: What brought you to the Oldest City?
DM: A girl [laughs]. My wife, actually – Angela. And Flagler College; I transferred here after my first year at Virginia Wesleyan in Virginia Beach.

D: We know you’re a filmmaker. Did you major in broadcast communication at Flagler?
DM: I was a business major for two years, but my friend Russell Brownley was messing around with this camcorder and showed me a couple of things on iMovie. I got a little Handycam, started making skate and surf videos, and ended up changing my major to film and broadcast.

D: Tell me about your production company.
DM: Right out of college I didn’t want to work for a news crew. I was stubborn – I wanted to shoot something meaningful, with a purpose behind it. My wife was pregnant, and I was working at Home Depot mostly for the health benefits, but my friend Nathan Lewis and I started Flesh Profits Nothing together in 2004. It took a couple of years, getting a couple of breaks here and there, but the day I decided I was going to do video full time was probably the coolest and scariest day of my life … besides having my two kids Salah and Silas, of course.

D: So you started out with skate and surf movies?
DM: Tory Strange at The Surf Station was my first client. We did these commercials where I talked him into letting us shoot three 300-foot rolls of film for three commercial spots. Tory’s definitely helped me out a lot.

D: How did you transition into non-surf projects?
DM: I was always more interested in people – to me, everybody has a story. I look at people and wonder how they got there, or why they’re doing what they’re doing, and I can’t stop thinking about it. From the get-go, it was about visually figuring out a way to tell people’s stories. If I was asked to go on a surf trip, normally I wasn’t the guy shooting the action – I was telling the behind-the-scenes stories by doing interviews.

D: You’ve told quite a few [stories] with To Write Love On Her Arms, a nonprofit dedicated to helping people with depression, addiction, self-injury and suicide issues.
DM: That’s really a big part of my life now. I’d see [TWLOHA founder] Jamie Tworkowski at The Surf Station when he was a sales rep for Quiksilver, and he did Young Life with my wife Angela before we got married. We were just acquaintances, but two years ago in Europe he was there with CJ Hobgood, and we really hit it off on the beach one day. A couple months later Jamie called me, we started telling stories and doing interviews, and there was such an amazing response, because I think video images are universal. The stories with TWLOHA involve heavy issues that I personally have never really battled with, so I’ve learned a ton and got to meet some beautiful, amazing people.

D: You’ve also journeyed to some far-flung places. What destination has presented the most challenges?
DM: Liberia was probably the craziest place. My friend Zach and his wife were thinking about adopting kids, and I was curious because that’s something my wife and I have talked about, too. I was picking his brain, asking questions about the process, and in the meantime I’m thinking, “This is such a beautiful story.” They got hooked up with an agency in Liberia and decided to adopt three sisters that needed a home. I told Zach, “I need to tell this story somehow. I don’t care how.” So he and his wife went to bring all three girls home, and the officials were like, “Oh, their passports aren’t ready yet.” The middle girl had some issues with her eye, so they were able to get her passport due to medical reasons, but Zach had to go back, and he said, “Why don’t you go with me?” It was nuts – I had to have a bodyguard to shoot. It was pretty wild helping Zach bring the girls home, without trying to look like “My Two Dads” [laughs].

D: A lot of your traveling comes with World Pro Surfers, where you help document the elite ASP World Tour. How did you land that gig?
DM: [World-renowned pro surfers and Satellite Beach, Fla., natives] CJ and Damien Hobgood really helped me out. My first real surf job was covering the Globe Sebastian Inlet Pro in 2006, and CJ and Damien were a big part of that [both are sponsored by Globe]. So we became friends, I went to Fiji with them, we did some funny commercials for their surf shop in Indialantic, and one thing led to another. When I first showed up, I only knew CJ and Damien, and then there was Mick Fanning and Kelly Slater, guys that were posters on my wall when I was in high school and college. And now I’m there to document their lives! With any story, you want to earn the respect, trust, and friendship of the people you’re shooting, so I spent a lot of time without a camera – I didn’t want to be that dude in their face. We do a lot of funny stuff, everything from Facebook sunset Tahiti shoots to going to game parks to racing rental cars on the beach.

D: Your World Tour work has led to a project with Dane Reynolds, who many consider to be one of the most progressive surfers in the world.
DM: Every dude that surfs has a man-crush on Dane [laughs]. I introduced myself in Australia and ran into him again in South Africa, but he ended up leaving early. Finally in Europe, where you can’t leave because you have to go to two contests in Spain and France, I really got to know him. We ended up hanging out every day, and we really hit it off – he had a bunch of old film cameras, and I had a bunch with me, and it turned out that we liked the exact same thing in surf films. He mentioned he’d like to talk to me about a project; on the outside I was like, “Yeah, Dane, that’d be cool,” while inside I was screaming. Dane’s pretty brilliant in my mind, so in terms of surf films this is pretty much about as big as I can dream.

D: Why the obsession with film stock?
DM: I love film, because it definitely kicks HD’s butt. I remember seeing Hallowed Ground, this old skate film, and where most skateboard films had the wheels-on-concrete sound, this one didn’t. At the time I had no clue what “film” was, but now I know – it’s shot on real movie film, not a digital binary code comprised of 0s and 1s. I was intrigued, so my parents bought me a Bolex camera for Christmas, and I made a short film about my wife’s little brother and his friends as a senior portfolio/ independent study at Flagler under Jim Gilmore. He really pushed me to tell a story, and it ended up winning Best Florida Documentary at the 2004 Melbourne International Filmmakers Festival. Everybody at the time was shooting the same HD camera with the same setup, and I really desired to be different.

D: Being behind the camera most of the time, do you still have time to skate and surf?
DM: Actually, I hardly skateboard at all – I’m horrible, and it scares me to fall and get hurt. I started surfing in high school when I was living in Richmond, driving two hours to Virginia Beach, so moving to Florida was like a dream – when I moved to St. Augustine and could ride my bike to the beach, that was the greatest thing since sliced bread. But I’m still not that good. People are like “Aw, you get to surf these crazy locations.” But I’m either working or it’s 6-foot Teahupo’o [a particularly heavy spot in Tahiti]. CJ will be like, “Grab one of my boards,” and I’m like, “I’m not grabbing one of your boards!” Australia’s really fun, and I’ve surfed a couple times in France. I tend to stick to the mellow beachbreaks.

D: Having two kids, do you think St. Augustine is the place for you and your family?
DM: Yeah, we have zero plans to leave, unless God leads us elsewhere. We have a house and a lot in St. Augustine Beach, and my daughter Salah’s starting kindergarten next year. The community really makes it, because there are so many amazing folks here. We never count out leaving – we’ve talked about living in Australia – but we just love the people here in St. Augustine.