John John's best movie part?

That golden period. All collaborative artists have ’em. It’s only years later, upon reflection, that we can trawl through their work and call it. Kai Neville is a 36-year-old filmmaker who owned the performance surf film space from his 2010 debut Modern Collective all the way through to his magnum opus, 2015’s Cluster.

But for Kai, it was his second film, Lost Atlas, made in 2011 and shot entirely on his little Canon 7D, that built his reputation into a profitable exercise (Red Bull used Kai for Jordy Smith’s bio movie Bending Colours).

Seven years later, it’s still his masterwork. It came at a time when he had John John Florence, Jordy Smith, Dusty Payne and Dane Reynolds in his pocket and more than eager to nail clips.

Until Lost Atlas, the world only had a shadowy idea of how good eighteen-year-old John John was.

Kai showed us.

This section was the close to Lost Atlas. It was filmed on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, and typical of Kai’s ruthless editing, comes in at under three-minutes.

No slow-mo, no fades, no motion graphics.

Just a face-full of ultra-hard surf candy and, I’d posit, John John’s best-ever movie part.

Come to the adult learner capital of the world! Hossegor!

In my more lucid dreams, I see myself living in the French town of Hossegor, there in the Bay of Biscay’s starboard quarter. I have a house at the base of the sand dunes at Les Culs Nuls and three refined surfboards to suit the varying beachbreak conditions.

Sometimes the waves are very small, sometimes too big, but like the fairytale with the kid and the animals, mostly the waves are just right.

But then I climb the dunes and the tableau is ruined by the rude wind of thousands of adult learners from all over Europe. You’ve never seen such a thing!

As the Australian shaper Maurice Cole, who put Hossegor on the map surf-wise, told me last year, “There are more people in the water than you’ve seen in your life. Here, there are 1,615 people down at Siegnosse taking surf lessons. It’s in the newspaper. It’s incredible. Being really small, every hundred meters, there’s a fucking surf school. I went out the other day, offshore, nearly shoulder high on the sets, and there were 60 people out, and no one could surf. The only thing keeping me laughing was riding a longboard and playing the slalom course, much to the distress of the other bastards. And, pretending that I couldn’t surf. I’d do an “el spazmo” and people were throwing their boards away in horror.”

Of course, if you’re Leo Fioravanti, the twenty-year-old former WCT surfer who relocated to Hossegor from Italy, and whose step-daddy is Kelly Slater’s keeper, Stephen “Belly” Bell, you have the necessary skills to navigate this slalom course.

In this pleasingly short edit, we see Leo’s hurried smears, his reconstruction of lips and his transfer of weapon from box to pocket.

There’s an innocence and a frankness to Leo’s surfing that, I predict, will enable him to poke and cut his way back onto the WCT.