Mute: Nate Tyler on Breaking Necks and Owning Dance!

Because what else matters in life?

Nate Tyler’s movie twenty-minute film-ella Mute has appeared (you can watch it below).

And, watching Mute, which I quite like but have to admit didn’t alter my perception of performance surfing in the way Cluster did, it reminded me of the time Nate instructed me on the whys and wherefores of killing a man with your bare hands and, more practically, how to own a dance floor.

Murder on the dance floor and, literally, murder.

BeachGrit: Tell me about your beautiful dance. During any overseas holiday, you’re the owner of every dance floor.

NATE: My dad would call it Ecstatic Dance. My dad’s a DJ at Dance Church where a group of people gets together and just dances and moves however they want. They can roll off each other, roll on the ground, nobody’s judged and nobody’s embarrassed.

BeachGrit: Do you apply the same principles of Ecastatic Dance?

NATE: My mind is at ease and I’m dancing how I want.

BeachGrit: It must be a beautiful thing to see…

It’s really not.

BeachGrit: Did your SEAL bro really capture Sadaam Hussein?

NATE: No! He definitely didn’t!.

BeachGrit: It would be something to boast about…

NATE: Yeah, that would be a good one even if he did I’d never know. He’d never tell me.

BeachGrit: That would be classified.

NATE: That would be pretty classified.

BeachGrit: Has he shown you how to kill people?

NATE: I don’t put myself into any fighting situations but he keeps all that shit to himself.

BeachGrit: It would be helpful. To know how to slice throats or break necks.

NATE: You’d have to be really strong and really technical with all that.

BeachGrit: You must be strong as bear! Often, you’re mistaken for Craig Anderson, the Australian surfer. This doesn’t thrill you, at least according to the word on the street.

NATE: Yeah. I was in Mexico and they were amping that Craig was there but we never saw Craig. It was me the whole time.

BeachGrit: Did you tell them, “I had long hair first”…

NATE: I tried to tell them that. The ironic thing was, six months prior, Craig and I were at that exact same wave and the funniest thing is, people were sitting there and they’re, like, that’s Craig Anderson! And I would see that person later in the water and they’d come up and introduce themselves and then, like, act like I was Craig. And, I’d tell em, hey, I’m not Craig, and then they’d try and tell me, oh, well, Craig was here six months ago. And I was, like, “Fuck, so was I!”

BeachGrit: You’re one of the only surfers over six who doesn’t have an Insty account? Why no?

NATE: The ironic thing is, this week I have to do one. For sponsors, it’s such an outlet and I think it’s bumming ’em out that I don’t have one. I don’t have anything against it, but fuck, I never had a Facebook and I definitely never had a Twitter. I always think I keep to myself, maybe I don’t, but I definitely don’t like voicing it through the masses.