These words may be dialogue spoken by Simon Baker as the salty surfer he plays in Breath — his new film based on Tim Winton’s award-winning novel — but they could be words spoken as himself.

From Ballina boy to Bronte dad, via a decade or two kicking goals in Hollywood, this devoted husband, father-of-three, surfer, actor and now director, is a man at peace. He’s reflective of his role as dad to two boys on the verge of manhood, and his own adolescence.

“I kind of left Australia in my mid-20s with this very personal, private dream that I’d love to come back and make films in Australia … and like all those great stories it kind of worked!” he says, smiling, almost in disbelief at his success.

All tousled sandy hair, unshaven, with a twinkle in his crinkly eyes and a lifetime zipping up wetsuits and waxing surfboards, Baker has managed what few do: to successfully combine his two great passions in life, filmmaking and surfing.

Breath is his directorial debut, a coming-of-age tale of identity and fear set against the backdrop of the magnificent West Australian coastline. Its Sydney premiere is at the charming Randwick Ritz cinema tomorrow night.

The red carpet at The Spot, which has its own Randwick version of the Hollywood walk of fame with bronze stars etched in the St Pauls St pavement, will host co-stars Elizabeth Debicki, author Tim Winton (also the film’s narrator) and the two young stars of the film, Samson Coulter and Ben Spence. Baker will be there, of course — it’s a hop, skip and a jump from his Bronte home — and will do a Q & A afterwards.

“Having been someone that has surfed since a very young age, and [as] someone that’s worked in the industry from my early 20s, they’re the two things that I’ve done most of my life. So it was a nice melding of the two,” he says.

It’s the culmination of a journey of a lifetime — 48 years to be exact — that has lead Baker here.

He grew up surfing in Lennox Head on the far north coast of NSW, married his childhood sweetheart and E Street co-star Rebecca Rigg (their first date was at Paddington pub The Royal), and hit the big time in Hollywood (LA Confidential set him on the road to stardom followed by The Guardian and The Mentalist).

Back in Australia, he bought his family home at Bronte in 2015, moving in with his wife and their three children, Stella Breeze, now 24 and studying drama at Yale University, Claude Blue, 18, and Harry Friday, 15. The couple still have a hideaway in Nashua in the Byron Bay hinterland and Baker can be seen many weekends in the surf at Bronte Beach.

He needed to direct this film, he says, after reading the book and meeting and grilling a few directors with his producer’s hat on. He knew he couldn’t let anyone else tamper with Winton’s work.

“Growing up surfing all my life, that element of our environment in Australia is something that is just in my blood,” he says of the adaptation, which pays tribute to his very Aussie childhood. “It’s been — in some way, shape, or form — gestating in me since I was maybe 12 years old,” he told Stellar Magazine last year.

“I made the movie that I wanted to make. I focused on an Australian audience really, people that I know and people I have experienced in my life. I made it to give to them and for them,” he says. “So yeah, I am really excited about showing it to Australian audiences, that’s the reason I made it. The audience is the other ingredient in all this!”

Morsels of a beachside childhood familiar to so many of us — rubber thongs, fringed terry-towelling bed spreads, styrofoam boards, the tiny cricketers from the Test Match board game — are served up in a way only an Australian could. The evocative material, the world he knew so well, needed to be treated with respect, he realised.

“This is a pretty personal story for me. Surfing is really the canvas of what this is painted on.”

The coming-of-age story follows teenage boys Pikelet and Loonie who form an unlikely friendship with Baker’s character, Sando, a mysterious and charismatic older surfer who pushes the boys to take risks.

It’s about self discovery, recklessness, boys becoming men, and the pressures and decisions that shape them. Baker has pulled some top talent for his first directing gig — a pale Debicki plays his wife, with Richard Roxburgh and Rachael Blake popping up as Pikelets parents.

Raised by his mum and stepdad, Baker says he pulled away from family at times during his upbringing, like Pikelet in the book. The community he gravitated to was the male environment at the beach.

“The 70s in Australia had this ideal of this negative masculine concept. I experienced that growing up in a lot of ways, but I also experienced tenderness in masculinity — it’s hard for me to articulate this — so surfing was the playground for that,” he says.

“There’s a lot of grey there. There’s a lot of goodness in people who are drawn as stereotypes. I’ve always wanted to explore that as a notion.”

The beach gave him a place to “figure out who I was”, and in the book he recognised the defining moment of stepping across the line from childhood to adulthood.

“For me it was the notion of the inverted hero’s journey — which is the thing that he does that defines who he is.”

For him the most powerful moment in the film is when Pikelet says, “I don’t want to do it.” “We all go through those moments in life, and we don’t really recognise them when we’re in it. But in hindsight we go ‘holy shit’, the time I just stood up to that was a profound moment in forming myself — my identity separate to my parents, separate to my peers, separate to my mentors. And this is why I wanted to make the movie.”

The breathtaking cinematography was shot on one camera by water cinematographer Rick Rifici.

Shooting on and in the water was “a nightmare”, Baker says, but he was determined to make something he hadn’t seen before.

“I have watched every narrative film that has ever had surfing in it — that’s just what you do when you surf, you see all of those films. The surf films always felt like two different movies, like there was the narrative film and there was the surfing part. And I really wanted to make use of the connection between land and sea with the story, to make sure that it felt like it was the same movie.”

That’s also why he cast the two young leads, who hadn’t acted before but had a lot of experience in the water. Baker realised it was a lot easier to teach someone to act than teach them to surf, but it took a year to find them. After a social media call out, he laughs, most of the videos were sent in by big sisters who had shot their brother on their iPhone.

Even once he found the boys, there was a dreaded feeling: “How do you stop them from growing?!”

Spence, who plays Loonie, “is one of the most instinctively natural actors I’ve ever worked with”, Baker says. But when the teenager came back for reshoots after filming had wrapped, he was a foot taller and his voice had dropped. “We couldn’t use a word of it!”

Baker, who made the film “for my kids and the child in all of us”, found directing a thrill.

“There’s no better feeling,” he says of the 37-day shoot in the remote area of Denmark, WA, within a small community. “That momentum, that excitement when you all feel a common goal.”

With his new baby now out in the world, he’s keen to direct again — just not straight away.

“I’ll wait for the wounds to heal, to forget!” he says, laughing. “I remember my wife Rebecca after she had her first child, when she was in labour with our second, she said, ‘Why didn’t you remind me?!’”

WHAT CRITICS SAID

Breath had its world premier in September at the Toronto Film Festival. Here’s what the critics say.

■ “There have been plenty of good surfing documentaries, but very few good dramas about the sport — a short list on which Breath instantly earns a prominent spot.” Variety.

■ “Observed with warmth and sensitivity, this is a rewarding coming-of-age drama that features terrific performances from two young newcomers in the central roles.” Hollywood Reporter.

■ “The most authentic representation of surfing ever seen on screen … the performances, cinematography, pace and feel of the whole thing — amazing!” Surfing World.

■ “Swelling with emotion … tender and resonant.” Screen Daily.

■ “A sublime adaptation of Tim Winton’s novel. Simon Baker’s debut feature is a knockout! It’s just beautiful.” Margaret Pomeranz.

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