Surfing’s most prolific filmmaker talks about premiering his long-awaited Rob Machado profile, The Drifter. —Nathan Myers

SURFING MAGAZINE: We heard that a hand-held bootleg appeared on YouTube after the Bali premier of The Drifter — how classic Indo is that?
TAYLOR STEELE: Yeah, in Bali you can buy all these pirated Hollywood movies where someone gets up and walks across the screen. They set up a cheap camera in the back of the theatre and just shoot the movie. So to have someone do that to our movie gives me mixed feelings. I like that people really want to get it out there like a big time movie. On the other hand, a lot of people worked hard to make this movie high production. I want everyone to see it with its proper colors and sound. [BTW: the YouTube version was rapidly removed.]

What was the weirdest thing that happened during the Japan premiers?
Japan is so weird and futuristic so it’s more like what was normal. I love how different it is there and the people are cool and respectful. The weirdest thing was doing a promo where Rob, Jon Swift and I went surfing and they videoed us. That doesn’t happen where I get videoed trying to shred. A lot of pressure to turn on one-foot waves. It was comedy. Luckily, Rob was there to get the clips for them.
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Rob Machado’s had an interesting year. We won’t go into personal details because there’s no need to get all TMZ here, but we’ll just say it’s been an obvious time of growth and transition for him. Throughout the last year Rob’s been working on “The Drifter”, the much anticipated, soon to be released movie that chronicles a year of his travels primarily through Indo. Last week it won best film at the Ombak Bali 2009 film festival, but this seems to just be the beginning of the winning circuit for this Taylor Steele/Machado endeavor. We caught up with Rob when he was on some downtime in Cardiff.

FUEL.TV: You haven’t really surfed contests in the last few years but recently you popped up at the US Open in Huntington Beach. How did that go?
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Read the Full Story Here.

HUNTINGTON BEACH, California (Friday, July 24, 2009) – The Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP) World Qualifying Series (WQS) 6-Star Hurley U.S. Open of Surfing saw ASP Dream Tour surfers capitalize on the increased six-to-eight foot (2 metre) surf on offer to post impressive scores. Reigning nine-time ASP World Tour surfer Kelly Slater (Cocoa Beach , FL), 37, smashed the event’s highest heat total of 18.80 out of 20 in men’s competition while current ASP World Tour rookie and defending U.S. Open Champion Nathaniel Curran (Oxnard, CA), 24, posted the event’s first perfect 10-point-ride.
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Pierre gets to hang with sack lunch and even has a jam session with them and Rob, Pierre dedicated this song straight to rob and the memories they had at their secret sandbar in Hossegor.

Pierre and Sacklunch Video

Pierre lucked into a couple of photos with the legendary Rob Machado! I saw on a blog some where, a quote from Pierre about the chance meeting.. “ Ya Rob was awesome, though he is No Kelly Slater I was none the less stoked to meet him, I’m sure I will see Kelly somewhere soon , because I know he has to go to France for the contest and I live in Hossegor”
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