"These waves are for the big boys."
That's what aspiring pro surfer Anne Marie Chadwick is constantly told in Blue Crush, The 2002 coming-of-age tale disguised as a sports movie launched Kate Bosworth's career and inspired a generation of young women to paddle their hearts out. Inspired by Susan Orlean's classic Outside article about the surf girls of Maui, the film centers on a trio of friends—Bosworth, Michelle Rodriguez and Sanoe Lake—living together in a beach shack in Hawaii, working as hotel maids and struggling to get by, but living for the next wave all while raising Anne Marie's rebellious little sister, Penny (Mika Boorem).
Sure, the foursome struggled to even buy snacks at a gas station, but it was that us-against-the-world feeling that screenwriter Lizzy Weiss points to as one of the reasons Blue Crush has remained "so sticky" two decades after its release.
"It didn't make $100 million, but we're talking about it 20 years later," Weiss exclusively told E! News a recent interview," and there are a generation of young women who absolutely adore that movie and it's used everywhere. It's a pop culture phrase everyone knows. For me, it's the friendships."
"The fantasy of living in a shack in paradise with your best friends is the dream," Weiss continued. "They struggled, they partied, they argued, but they had each other's backs."
But it was obviously more than that. Each of the women were "fully formed" as characters, Weiss said. She pointed to Anne Marie having a job and struggling to make rent, training for Pipe Masters and starting a new relationship with visiting NFL quarterback Matt (Matthew Davis), while also dealing with the changing dynamics in her friendships with Eden (Rodriguez) and Lena (Lake).
"That was really important to me, that we can show a woman athlete, who was totally empowered but also wanted this boy to like her and how that fit into her future," Weiss explained. "I just thought that that's okay and that's real and we are allowed to be all those things."
When it was released in the summer of 2002, Blue Crush grossed a respectable $40 million at the box office and received mixed reviews from critics, who commended Bosworth's performance and the surfing scenes, but considered the plot predictable—which is a critique that director John Stockwell, an actor known for his roles in Top Gun and Christine, admitted he understands.
"When you make a movie like that, you're not expecting it to open Cannes or Telluride," he told E! News. "It has a formula and it does what it does well. Working within that formula, I was trying to upend certain established tropes. I really liked the execution of a lot of the smaller details, but at the end of the day, it was trying to satisfy a certain audience and I think it does that and it's held up."
Stockwell may not have taken the reviews to heart, but Weiss, relatively new to Hollywood at the time, was "devastated."
"When the movie came out, we were still in a world in which the majority of movie critics were men and a bunch of the top papers gave it sort of patronizing reviews," she explained. "I couldn't understand how they couldn't see it for what it was. Not every movie needs to be reviewed as, 'Is this an Academy Award contender?' Nope, not every movie is, not every movie wants to be."
Still, despite the scrutiny, Weiss said she was "proud" of the movie and knew even then that they had achieved "a perfect blend of cool and feminist."
"Look, imagine how strong the movie had to be to overcome that and still be this little survivor 20 years later," she said. "It's lightning in a bottle. Everything worked out. The actors are incredible, it's directed super well. It just hit."
Here, Rodriguez, Stockwell and Weiss take E! News behind the waves, revealing secrets about the making of Blue Crush, including how Bosworth had to fight to be cast, who almost drowned several times and if there will ever be a sequel...
Blue Crush is streaming on HBO Max.