Backs to the (ocean) Wall: Vincent Kardasik filming waves and resilience with ZEISS CP.3

1 August 2025

Surf fans around the world know Jérémy Flores: the most successful male European in surfing history, retired from world competition in 2021, he was behind the scenes of Kauli Vaast's Olympic victory in 2024. Between those two dates, he was also fighting a life-and-death battle against a brain tumor.

In his documentary Backs to the Wall, co-directed by Julie Kardasik, Vincent Kardasik retraces his friend's career and recovery, having filmed him winning the world's biggest competitions in the waves since childhood. Combining interviews with Jérémy, his partner Hinarani Delongeaux, and surfing greats such as Kelly Slater, with archive footage of competitions in and out of the water, he paints a portrait of a fierce competitor whose sporting career seems to have prepared him for his post-surgery rehabilitation.

Non-fans of action sports might be tempted to stay away from this one. But they would miss out on the poetry of these formidable waves and Jérémy's strength of character, filmed and listened to with an affection that transpires from the very first frames.

Thank you to Vincent Kardasik, director and cinematographer specializing in action sports and underwater photography based in Hossegor on the French Atlantic coast and winner of an Emmy Award for the cinematography of the HBO series 100 Foot Wave, for taking the time to tell us about the technical aspects of the film (shot with his ZEISS CP.3 series) and the personal challenges of the shoot.

Close-up of a man looking thoughtfully into the distance with ocean waves, mountains, and a surfer in the background, accompanied by the text "JEREMY FLORES DOS AU MUR".

VINCENT KARDASIK: Surfing and aquatic shoots in natural environments have become my core focus, without me realizing. I always wanted to pursue a career in film, and it just so happens that I grew up in the south-west of France (AN: Southwest of France meaning, Atlantic waves and warm enough weather for surfers to be grown!) and my childhood friends quickly became some of the best surfers in Europe, with Jérémy even becoming one of the best surfers in the world. He's the same age as my little brothers: when I first met him, he was 11. I was learning my craft on the beach and in the water, and I was starting to think about moving away from the traditional audiovisual approach I'd learned in school to do something more like what I'd seen in the United States.

ZEISS: What was your training?

I completed a BTS (advanced vocational training certificate) in audiovisual production as part of a work-study program. My work experience was at the CNRS, where I had the opportunity to assist a couple of scientific documentary filmmakers. The beauty of documentaries, whether they're about surfing or a scientific field, is that you can talk about a niche subject while targeting a wider audience than that niche. You can make a subject accessible to the general public without undermining its credibility.

What's great about the film is the dialectic between the subject matter, the very effective storytelling about determination and resilience, and the form, with a visual signature that has been developed over a long career.

I've always been attracted to cinema itself. What I liked about sports in the United States was that at most major NBA or NFL events, there were teams using film cameras—35 mm film at the time. They tried to tell a story. We were moving away from sports reporting and into film documentary. That's what I tried to do with surfing, living in the Southwest. I was lucky enough to start doing that with Jérémy when I followed him in 2007 for a series for Canal+, Une saison de rêve (A Dream Season). Even though we didn't have the equipment to match our ambitions at the time, we still put in a lot of elbow grease to get the best result possible.

2007 was the year of the 3.5, wasn't it? (AN: at the Gold Coast Pro, Jérémy's first world-class competition in Australia, the judges, having not seen his sporting prowess, gave him a score of 3.5/10, to everyone's surprise).

Exactly. I had the brilliant idea of filming this wave that the professional league hadn't seen at the time. That got me banned for a year. I had to film Jérémy in secret. I no longer had access to any kind of competition; I wasn't given a press pass anymore. At the time, Jérémy was 17, and I wasn't even 27. It was the first time I had followed a professional tour from start to finish, a big, well-oiled Anglo-Saxon machine. And there we were, a couple of Frenchies with our thick accents. From the very first event, we called them out for not seeing a wave that we had filmed. They weren't happy, of course, and they let us know. Both Jérémy and me.

Two photographers on a boat capture a surfer riding a large wave using professional ZEISS camera lenses and equipment.

Because video refereeing doesn't exist in surfing, does it.

(laughs) Now it does, following that episode and one or two others. They were tired of seeing us show up. We had a Panasonic HVX 200, a camera with the screen on the side, so we would go into the judges' room to show them the footage, which drove them completely crazy (laughs!). They couldn't take it anymore, so they ended up adopting VAR.

One thing led to another, and I ended up working with Chris Smith, an American director who restored the reputation of cinema-vérité in the United States. He won Sundance with a film called American Job. He hired me first to shoot the HBO series 100 Foot Waves, the third season of which has just been released. I've just become an executive producer. This series has given me more time, more resources, both technical and human, as well as logistical. With Backs to the Wall, which was financed by Canal +, we're working with budgets and timings that are completely different from what I have with HBO, but we've still tried to use that experience to get as close as possible.

Jérémy and I have been very close since we were young. I started filming him randomly. He was on the beaches I used to go to. We would talk before he went into the water, and sometimes we even surfed together. I wasn't the only one who thought he was extremely talented, as even the best surfer of all time, Kelly Slater, saw him as an exceptional surfer. I started collecting footage of him and storing it without really knowing why. He continued his career as a professional surfer, and I started working in advertising and in B-team filmmaking, etc. But we never lost touch. I always kept an eye on his career. When he told me about his illness and the potential consequences of his operation, the idea emerged to make a documentary, if only to leave a record for his children, in case he wasn't able to tell them what had happened to him later on. I didn't want to stick a camera in his face before the operation because we had no idea what the outcome would be, even though he was in the hands of the best surgeon possible. So, we started filming when Jeremy began to feel better and regain his concentration and speech. At first, it wasn't easy to see one of your best friends without knowing what tomorrow would bring. Emotions often came into play because we have this closeness that helps with the documentary but can also be a hindrance.

Did you reconstruct certain moments, such as the hospital examinations?

It's a bit of both. Jérémy requires significant medical care: he has to have an MRI every six months, he meets his surgeon regularly, and he works with a speech therapist and a physical trainer. There was already a significant human challenge. So, we didn't put any pressure on ourselves: when I was available, if it was possible to accompany Jérémy to appointments or speech therapy sessions, I would go with him. When I accompanied him to the hospital in Bayonne where he received bad news, I never expected it to happen like that. The sky literally fell on his head, and at that moment, as I stood there with my camera, I really wondered what I was doing there.

A man in a green sweatshirt sits on a bench in a modern indoor public space with people walking in the background, captured with clear depth and natural light using ZEISS optics.

Looking back, when I watch the film today, those images still hurt a little because I was doing my job, but I also feel that part of me, as a friend, should have put down the camera and said, "Let's go for a drink and talk about it..." In the end, we talked in front of the camera. It's part of our relationship too, but it's very ambiguous. It was the first time I had gone so far with someone so close to me. In general, in documentaries, you discover people and get to know them. On 100 Foot Wave, where we followed athletes for more than six months non-stop, a certain intimacy inevitably developed. After a while, the camera becomes part of their daily life. But with Jérémy, it's a bit the opposite process. It was the camera that intruded on our friendship.

Yes, it intruded, but then you say it became part of it.

Yes, it's part of it. I'm not going to lie to you, people are so used to seeing me with a camera that when I'm not filming, they ask me what I'm doing. (laughs) "Why aren't you filming today?"

A filmmaker operates a professional camera rig at night on a city street, using a ZEISS lens for high-quality video capture.

What was the filming setup? It seems like you've developed a pretty distinctive style in the way you film interviews, for example.

Yes, there is a signature style, literally. I was greatly influenced by Chris Smith's work, even before working with him. By evolving somewhat in his shadow, I tried to learn from him. Chris knows how to develop collaboration: he gave me a lot of freedom to express myself on his series and let me set the tone for the interviews. We reduced the equipment to the essentials because these are long shoots with a huge element of unpredictability due to the weather. I taught my cameramen to record the sound themselves. This allows us to be more mobile and intimate, and also to go places we wouldn't normally go with a team of two or three people. We need to work with compact, high-performance equipment that meets our technical requirements. On Jérémy's film, I was constantly juggling between two cameras, the Red V-Raptor and the Komodo X. I think they were developed to shoot together, as camera A and camera B. When it came to lenses, I couldn't afford the luxury of having someone to pull focus. I had to move around independently.

A man sits at a wooden table in a modern, well-lit living space with a glass of water and a plate of snacks in the foreground.

A woman sits at a wooden kitchen island in a modern, sunlit kitchen with ZEISS-quality clarity and detail.

I chose the ZEISS CP.3 series: I particularly like them because I like contrasty images with a noticeable level of saturation without degrading skin tones or altering very scenic landscapes such as in Tahiti, for example, where the light is sometimes very bright. The images have a certain look, but can be reworked in post-production and, above all, the lenses are compact. You need to have your right hand on the volume control of the lavalier microphone of the person you're filming and your left hand pulling focus. At the same time, I have a Sennheiser shotgun mic mounted as far forward as possible on the camera: it's constantly on the edge of the frame, which isn't a problem with a 50 mm or 85 mm lens—I'm more careful with the 35 mm. It looks artisanal, but it's a technique we've refined over three seasons. The result is acceptable, but it's not perfect either. A few years ago, I was very hard on sound engineers; now that I find myself operating the camera, setting the aperture, focusing, and recording sound, I tell myself that it's karma coming back around and that I should have been much more tolerant.

A man is being filmed in a modern, well-lit room with a ZEISS camera setup, and he appears on the camera monitor in front.

A man sits for an interview in a modern, naturally lit room with a wooden table, while being filmed by a professional camera setup with a visible monitor and boom microphone, showcasing ZEISS video production equipment.

Were you familiar with CP.3 lenses?

I've always loved ZEISS lenses. Very often, when I was looking for the equipment used to shoot certain feature films whose images I liked, I came across classics such as Master Primes and Master Anamorphics. As soon as the Compact Prime lenses came out, I saw them a lot on action sports shoots, either filming in the waves with my underwater housing or on the first drones that could carry cinema cameras. They were used a lot because they were very light. The CP.3 lenses weigh less than a kilo! When you're holding a camera at arm's length in very hollow waves of 1.50 or 2 meters, where you have to deal with the current and the only way you can move is with your legs and fins...

I thought to myself that they were simply going to change my life. I bought this set almost as soon as it came out.

Two snorkelers swim underwater in clear blue ocean lighted by sun rays from above.

A diver is swimming upwards toward the surface of the ocean, with light filtering through the water above.

How much does your equipment weigh with the housing today?

The housing alone weighs 4 kg, and the camera, stripped down to the bare essentials, weighs around 2 or 3 kg: the camera, the battery, a remote screen behind it, and the media. With the lens, which weighs a little less than a kilo, and the filters, we're looking at a total of 8 kg. We don't have any weight restrictions underwater: if the housing is "neutral," we can stabilize it. In waves, when I'm working half in the air and half in the water, it's much more complicated because I have to hold the housing at arm's length to keep it slightly above the water. Last year, for a feature film called 'Regarde', which is due to be released in September, I had long acting scenes to shoot in the water. It's really hard work staying stable while trying to keep yourself on the surface with waves constantly hitting you. You have to reduce the equipment to the bare minimum while trying to maintain a decent optical quality.

A diver in full scuba gear operates an underwater camera rig equipped with ZEISS lenses in a swimming pool.

A professional cinema camera with a mounted ZEISS lens rests on a dark surface outdoors, with a soft focus background of greenery and sunlight.

I guess it was the camera and lenses chosen by the film's cinematographer on that shoot.

Well, I don't know if I'm shooting myself in the foot or not. But living in the Southwest and constantly on the move, I find it very difficult to rent equipment. For example, I went away with Jérémy for a week of filming in preparation for the Olympics. So much happened that I came back two months later. I would have been ripped off by the rental company—especially if I told them I was going to film the waves at Teahupo'o, with potentially 2.5-meter waves breaking on the reef. So, since 2010, I've been buying my own equipment. The V-Raptor allows you to shoot in either full frame or S35 and has a very nice image quality. As long as you maintain decent exposure, it's easy to match it with an ARRI Alexa or a Sony Venice, which you see most often as camera A. It produces very little noise, even in low light, so you can add grain in post-production if it needs to accompany a 35mm camera. The CP.3 lenses have contrast and sharpness, but not too much. They're not all-purpose lenses, they really have a look, but you can match them in post with many other lenses. I've been using this combo for three years now on most of the narrative and commercials I shoot. Even if the cinematographer initially asks me to use the same package as the main crew, after a day of benchmarking in the water, we realize that by applying the right LUT, it matches very well. The Komodo X and the V-Raptor X also have a global shutter, which is an advantage for action shots because it eliminates rolling shutter, which tends to distort the image.

What is your shutter strategy for filming action and waves?

For narrative work with sound recording, i.e. at normal speed, I'll stay at 180° if conditions allow. As soon as there's too much movement, I ask the cinematographer if I can switch to 90° to try and maintain some texture. It's not for sharpness; it's really for texture. When I can use slow motion and shoot at high speed, I generally try to stay at 180° to keep the same motion blur feeling that you get in fiction, on the ground, and to avoid giving the impression that another camera has landed in the middle of the shoot. Motion blur—I'm speaking for myself as someone who films sports, but it's the same for car stunts or fight scenes—is something you constantly fight against because you want a sharp image, but you have to keep it if you don't want it to look like you brought in a TV camera.

A surfer rides inside the barrel of a large wave with mist and water spray surrounding him.

A powerful ocean wave curls and crashes, captured in sharp detail with vibrant blue tones.

The consistency of the look between the action sequences in the water and all the discussion and interview sequences is also quite spectacular.

I owe a lot to my colorist, who is also my co-director, Julie Kardasik. She trained with digital, from Digibeta, HI8, DV, etc. to RAW formats, which were a real pleasure to work with. For a project like this film, it makes perfect sense because there are 27 years between the first shot and the last. That's 27 years of technological change. There is footage of Jérémy as a little boy shot by his father on HI8. The first images I shot with Jérémy were on DVCam. I'm very lucky because Julie cut her teeth on all these formats, and when it came time to color grade the film, she had already reviewed pretty much all the types of footage we had to process.

How did you approach the processing of the archive footage?

At one point, with the post-production team at Upside we wondered whether we should try to upscale the archive footage to give it a higher quality look. The images from 2009 and 2010 that we shot with the Red One have aged very well. They were more concerned about the rest and some of the images recovered from television. Julie suggested that they do a first pass and homogenize the entire film, and we realized that all the lower-quality images had a narrative meaning. It was important that they stay that way. There are some shots that Jérémy shot with his iPhone on the beach before the operation, when I couldn't go with him. He said, "Do you mind if I shoot this with my phone? Because I'd like to talk to you about it." Those shots had to keep their texture; their difference has real narrative significance.

A man in a wetsuit and helmet is paddling on a surfboard in the ocean under a cloudy sky.

How do you approach the aperture in the water?

Everyone has their own methodology. In Team B, I first consult with the cinematographer to define the look of the scene. I review the footage shot out of the water to ensure that we are aiming for the same result. This is helpful in terms of framing and depth of field. I pull focus myself, so it's not always easy: most of the time, we agree on a stop between T4 and T8. I control the exposure with ND filters. There are no internal ND filters on RED cameras, but RED has developed a pretty amazing PL mount equipped with electronic ND filters that allows you to vary the exposure by a quarter of a stop. Scenes in water are usually long, they don't wrap up in ten minutes, and by adjusting the exposure with these ND filters, I can keep a fairly constant aperture throughout the day. Since they developed this, it's changed my life! I have a shortcut on the side of the camera to adjust the filter stops, from 2 to 7, and you can move it in quarter or third stops. In Backs to the Wall, I used the same mount and the same lenses for the interviews, but we found ourselves in changing light conditions. Since his operation, we can't ask Jérémy to sit in front of a camera for five hours, so we created a set and every day we put him in the same place with the same shirt, making sure he didn't get too much sun. We even gave him a day off sometimes so he could rest. In addition to the ND filters on the electronic mount, we also needed physical ND filters to really control our exposure.

Black and white image of a calm ocean with gentle waves in the foreground and a misty mountain range under a partly cloudy sky in the background.

Do you use any other types of filters besides ND filters?

Since I've been shooting with these cameras, I no longer use Black Promist and all those diffusion filters. I use a polarizing filter when there's a slight lack of contrast. But above all, I try to use very high-quality ND filters. This does justice to the unique contrast of the lenses and to my exposure. You really don't need polarizers when you're working in water, where you inevitably have more contrast than on land with the same amount of light, because the ocean acts as a reflector. But sometimes it's a little hard to get the cinematographer to understand that. They realize it themselves when we do tests.

Can we talk a little about the light in Tahiti?

It's harsher, we're closer to the equator. We're on an island, so we're surrounded by water, which means we're surrounded by a huge reflector. (laughs) Even in the mountains, the ocean always comes back. In the city of Papeete, you always see this very intense reflection entering your field of vision, emitted by the ocean. The light is beautiful and very diffuse in the early and late hours of the day, as everywhere, but in Tahiti, the location means that the light is much more intense at sunrise and sunset than on the Atlantic coast, for example. On the other hand, it's very harsh at midday, in terms of the light you have to filter and also in terms of working conditions. Overall, it's very contrasted. For advertising, for example, the contrast and saturation you get off the light and the flora are fantastic. Or even just the shape and reflections of the waves. In the context of a documentary, it's a bit too much at times.

Two people are sitting on a boat at sunset, with ZEISS equipment visible next to them.

For the final shots with Jérémy and his daughter at the end of the film, we just filtered and bounced light a little to bring out their eyes. There's a kind of magic that happens. I was shooting at full aperture at 35mm, T2.1, and it's a look I couldn't have achieved on the Atlantic coast. That's the magic of Tahiti. The rest of the time, during the day, we tend to use filters.

Three people, including a child on a tricycle, walk through shallow water during a calm sunset.

I imagine the lighting setup for the interviews was pretty light?

We used two points with flexible LED panels, which are easy to dim and hide, for example in a car. We used a lot of negative fill and scrims to control the light, mainly. We were looking for a natural look. Only Kelly Slater was available in the evening and at night, which required a slightly different approach. We had three hours with him, which isn't bad. Jérémy took much longer because we had a lot to cover, and also because we had to give him time and find a method to help him remember everything. His main interview took a whole week.

Is it indiscreet to ask you to talk about this method?

No, it's not indiscreet, it's something Jérémy talks about without batting an eyelid. At first, a month and a half after the operation, he could only concentrate for fifteen minutes at a time. Little by little, his concentration improved. Jérémy is a high-level athlete who is used to using his body, and when you get into something really technical or emotional, it takes a lot of energy. We realized that his memories could come back, but that we had to press the right buttons at the right time. What helped Jérémy the most was talking about a specific date, time, and reaction. For example, for the incident in Jeffreys Bay, which wasn't filmed much, we literally had to find the series, the name of his opponent, the exact scores, and the time it happened. With all these events laid out, his memory came flooding back and, for over 40 minutes, he told us exactly what had happened. All the other protagonists in the story had less precise memories than he did. He relived the feelings very candidly, almost as if he were there again, with the emotions of the first time.

A family of four enjoys time in the water beside a wooden outrigger canoe under a partly cloudy sky.

More intensely than before his operation?

I would say more candidly, because the intensity never left Jérémy. It's 100% or nothing. Some moments were very hard for him. He's my friend, I love him, but we pushed him a lot. Some afternoons after interviews, he would call me and say, "I won't be able to shoot tomorrow." I'm in bed, I can't read, I can't write, I'm exhausted, all I can do is cry. I don't know what's happening to me." And that's because we had definitely pushed the interview too hard. You know the constraints of filming. Time is money. We would give him 24 hours and, like the phoenix he is, he got back in front of the camera and we were off again.

I imagine all that work with you contributed to his recovery, his rehabilitation.

I don't know if he's saying that because he's nice and doesn't want me to feel guilty, but yes, that's what he told us. And the first time he saw the film, he saw a whole bunch of images he had completely forgotten. It exhausted him emotionally, but in a good way. After that, he spent 48 hours reliving his life.

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Backs to the (ocean) Wall: Vincent Kardasik filming waves and resilience with ZEISS CP.3

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