A Long Road and a Flowing Ocean Current
Michael Allen and the Tao of Producing a Film
I first came across Michael Allen on LinkedIn a few years ago, and what looked like a routine connection quickly turned into something harder to shake. There was a current running beneath his work that deeply resonated with me. His cadence was neither loud nor self-promotional, just steady and unmistakable like the Tao.
Michael does not fit neatly into a category. He has lectured on Taoism at an International Society for Chinese Philosophy conference and spent extended time moving through China while completing his master’s thesis in philosophy. His work carries the weight of someone who has actually lived the questions, not just studied them.
His book, Tao of Surfing: Finding Depth at Low Tide, stayed with me long after I put it down. When we connected for a deep, unfiltered conversation on my Great Books, Great Voices podcast in 2024, it was clear this was not just a book. It was the beginning of something that refused to stay contained. That thread has extended into his full-length feature film, A Long Road to Tao, now streaming on Storie TV.
Most creative projects are driven by urgency, deadlines, and the quiet panic of needing to prove something. This one was not. A Long Road to Tao took its time. It resisted pressure. It unfolded on its own terms.
More than twenty years in the making, the film is rooted in grief, shaped by Taoist philosophy, and carried forward by a kind of stubborn surrender. It is the result of someone choosing not to force the outcome, even when everything around him suggested he should.
The Book Before the Film
The story behind A Long Road to Tao begins not on a movie set but in a philosophy classroom and on the face of a California ocean wave. Michael came out of graduate school steeped in Chinese philosophy — Taoism, Confucianism, the rhythms of the Tao Te Ching — with a master’s thesis rooted in Asian studies and a plan, as academics often do, to write something serious and scholarly.
Life redirected him the way the Tao tends to redirect things: without warning and with perfect timing.
“My best friend ended up contracting HIV and died of AIDS,” Michael tells me, his voice carrying the weight of a loss that clearly has never fully settled. “He was like an older brother to me.
A wonderful human being.”
The duo had grown up surfing together, and when his friend died, Allen found himself holding two things simultaneously: the depth of that grief and an education in philosophy that was now, suddenly, no longer academic.
What emerged from that collision was not a scholarly volume he had imagined. It was something closer to a memoir, a journal of true life events with the Tao applied as both lens and lifeline. He described it to me in a way that called to mind Jack Kerouac’s On the Road or Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — both works where the writer captures experience as it unfolds, not as it is later interpreted from a safe distance.
“You’re capturing that moment,” Michael explains. “You’re not even having to think too much about it, but you’re capturing that experience as it happens right there and putting it on the paper. And so it’s a very Tao way of writing.”
The Tao of Surfing: Finding Depth at Low Tide became that book. And because it was so visual, so alive with image and movement, Allen couldn’t stop seeing it projected on a wall.
The decision to adapt the book into a feature film brought Michael together with his brother-in-law, Alex Carig, a film school graduate who would eventually become the film’s director. The two set to work on a screenplay together, and what followed was two decades of a project that refused to be rushed and refused to be abandoned.
“From the book to the making of the film was just a magnificent journey in itself,” he reflects. But as Michael attests the word magnificent didn’t mean smooth. It meant meaningful, and meaning, in Allen’s world, which is almost always earned through resistance.
What the filmmaking process taught him, he says, was that Taoism is not merely a philosophical framework for contemplation. It is a practical technology for navigating the unpredictable terrain of creative work.
“There are so many roadblocks that can come in,” he explains, “these obstacles that can seemingly stop you from your progress or your intention to continue to succeed. And by applying the Taoist concept of being able to flow like water, in order to recognize that an obstacle is something you can actually flow around seems so simplistic. And yet it’s so profound.”
But the deeper revelation was subtler than simply staying flexible. Allen talks about how he had to learn to listen to the film. Not to impose a vision upon it, but to attend to what it was actually asking to become.
“I don’t think many people actually listen to their film,” he says.
“More people will respond to their film by trying to force things into it, thinking it needs to have a certain direction. But when you sit back and actually listen to it and allow the Tao to flow, it then takes on a whole new meaning. It also allows one to eliminate stress along the way.”
In sharing that, Michael brings up something that the Tao Te Ching returns to again and again — this counterintuitive idea that yielding is not weakness, that receptivity is not passivity, that the river finds the sea not by forcing its way but by following the path of least resistance through terrain that keeps shifting. Michael was not learning a philosophy. He was living one.
The Year Everything Nearly Stopped
In 2013, Michael Allen and Alex Carig attempted to shoot the film. By any ordinary measure, it was a disaster. Michael doesn’t dwell on the details, but the weight of that year is present in the way he describes it — “a really heavy time,” “a nightmare,” a moment when they genuinely confronted the possibility of walking away. A lot of people, he tells me, have thanked him for not giving up when they hear about 2013.
“I said, well, I owe it to my best friend who died,” Michael explains. This, he says, was never purely a creative project. It was, at its core, an act of devotion to someone who deserved to be remembered.
Rather than abandon the film, Michael chose to hit what he calls the reset button. He went back to the script with a new mandate: keep the deep-level philosophy, keep the core story, but reimagine the entire approach. He wanted a European-style independent film — intimate, unhurried, visually beautiful. He wanted the best cast and crew he could find.
“We were so lucky,” he says. “We have this cast now that feels like family.”
The Tao, it seems, was not done with the project. The delay that felt like failure became the crucible in which the real film was forged. “The journey brought us more into Taoism,” Allen reflects, “and into the realization of what the film was really meant to be.”
Be Like Water, Especially Now
Somewhere in the middle of our conversation, Allen and I find ourselves in a different kind of territory, not involving the past, but the present. The anxiety of this political moment. The economic uncertainty. The social fractures that feel, to many people, impossible to navigate without choosing a side, hardening into a position, bracing for impact.
I ask Michael about the water metaphor, not as a filmmaking principle but as a way of moving through daily life when the current is rough and the shoreline keeps changing. He quotes a theme directly from the Tao Te Ching, almost reflexively, the way a musician reaches for a chord: water is the most powerful and also the most yielding of elements.
“In wu wei,” he explains, “it’s not about sitting back and doing nothing. It’s embracing what we call effortless action where we can move more gracefully through turbulent times. You have this awareness still, but at the same time, you’re not trying to force things to happen in a certain way.”
He pulls the ocean into our conversation because with Michael, the ocean is always there. As a surf photographer, he spends real time in real water, contending with real currents. “I have full, 100% awareness,” he says. “I’m so focused, and that awareness keeps me safe. But at the same time, I flow with the ocean current, and the waves, and all that energy.”
It’s here where the metaphor becomes physical, lived, and not theoretical. To be like water is not to be absent or limp. It is to be fully awake to what is moving around you and to move with it rather than against it.
“If you can move through the most difficult times with this philosophy,” he tells me, “it’s going to help you with every aspect of your life.”
The Work That Stays
I asked Michael what he’s working on now along with what books he’s reading and what roads he sees ahead. He talks about his work with Storie TV, the streaming platform that hosts A Long Road to Tao and through which he has found a new calling helping independent filmmakers get their work seen.
“Independent film is one of the most powerful things we have right now,” he says, “because we’re able to convey messages about all aspects of life in a really true format — short films, features, animation, documentaries. It’s an artistic form of expression.”
For Michael, this advocacy is continuous with everything else — the Taoism, the grief, the surfing, the writing. It is all about helping something true reach the people who need it.
This June he and the A Long Road to Tao team will be holding one-night screenings in Los Angeles and San Francisco theaters in June which is Pride Month. He’s also deep into Randy Shilts’ book And the Band Played On, which offers a look at the massive history of the AIDS epidemic,
The film’s conversation about AIDS awareness, with LGBTQ+ compassion, with hospice care, with the recognition that HIV is not a historical artifact but a living reality, is one Allen intends to keep having for a long time.
“A lot of Hollywood films go out, they’re in theaters for a few weeks, they go onto a streaming platform, and maybe you never hear about them again,” he says. “But our work is an educational piece. In fact, some universities are using our film in their classes. I don’t really see an end to it, because there’s always more to do.”
A Long Road to Tao, in other words, is not finished making its way through the world. It has just found its current.
The River Keeps Moving
At the very end of our conversation, Allen says something that lingers. He notes that his director, Alex Carig, has been listening to my show — The Daily Chocolate Taoist — and that it has genuinely helped him find more calm in his daily routines.
I tell Michael that the reason I get up at four in the morning to write is partly selfish in that it’s how I keep myself grounded, how the cathartic work of putting words down keeps me steady. He nods at this the way people nod when they recognize something true.
“We, as the individuals who want to help others, have to be in the best mental health position ourselves,” he says. “We have to tend to ourselves.”
This, too, is the Tao. Not the Tao as abstraction, not the Tao as bumper sticker, but the Tao as the oldest practical wisdom there is: you cannot carry water in a cracked vessel. Before you can help the current, you have to be the kind of thing that flows.
Michael Allen has spent twenty years learning how to flow toward a film that needed to exist. He lost a dear friend and turned that loss into art. He had a work setback in 2013 and let the failure teach him something better than success would have.
His work is now on a streaming platform, in university classrooms, preparing for theater screenings, helping other filmmakers, reading 600-page histories of an epidemic that the world would like to forget.
The road is long. The Tao doesn’t promise it won’t be. It only promises that if you learn to move like water, you’ll eventually arrive.
A Long Road to Tao is now available on Storie TV at storietv.com. The Tao of Surfing: Finding Depth at Low Tide is available in print and as an audiobook. A screenplay edition of A Long Road to Tao has also been published. Screenings in Los Angeles and San Francisco are scheduled for June 2026 with cast and director Q&As. For more information, follow Michael Allen’s ongoing work HERE.
Thanks for sharing this.