Courtesy the Drag City Archives.

TP There is this generational punk way of being and we were really able to tap into that, especially when we spent time at the Fullerton skate park. I think a lot of kids that skate or that are drawn to that place are escaping from something. They show up there and they’re taken into this family when they’re as young, sometimes, as eleven or twelve. There’s a generation that’s a bit older than they are already there and so there are these cycles that go on. Those kids really look out for each other in that place. There’s a code of being as to how they all treat each other that has, as you said, an amazing amount of acceptance. There are all different types of people of different ages and what unites them all is really that place which is Fullerton, and specifically a municipal park that has a chain-link fence around the skate park that’s been shut down by the city. Skreech says in the film that his dad would drop him off there in the afternoons when he was eleven and he’d be there until three in the morning. To me, that says everything you need to know about where he’s coming from.

 

You see that in his relationship with Leslie, as well, as it starts to develop. He jumps over a fence and he tells this girl that he’s never seen before, “Your lips are so red, super red.” That’s when I realized there might be a shift in direction for the film. What is this? Because this is something about youth and two kids coming together in a way that I think is so much more original than these clichéd impressions we would have about how kids are interacting. There’s a gentleness to it and a surprising quality that’s better than fiction. If I wrote those lines of dialogue, they would write true, but people would think it was so literary and wouldn’t quite believe, perhaps, that those kids would say something like that.

 

PC True, but that’s the beauty, then, of articulating cinematically their story and that’s why all that high art, as you called it, fits perfectly fine. Because, in essence, you really don’t have to commentate since your camera is capturing that. It’s reflected in the editing, as well. Can you talk a bit about how you tackled this process with your editors, Jennifer Texiera and Lizzy Calhoun?

 

TP There wasn’t any editing being done until we were, ostensibly, done shooting. Most of the movie was shot over the course of nine months. I knew Skreech and Leslie were going on a road trip, or I knew that they were going to leave it all behind. So I thought that would be our stopping point. I’d been watching footage all along and I could also say that after the first day of shooting, I knew the kind of movie I was going to be making.

 

There’s a voiceover at the end of the film where Skreech talks about what his ideal world would be; he does this whole speech about freezing time. I don’t even really think he would be able to explain to you what he meant when he said that. He would just say, I don’t know; I was just saying some shit. But I was really fixated on that because, somehow, I thought it was essential to the story. It’s a youth movie, so there’s something inherent about the theme of fleeting youth. Everybody, on some level, wishes they could freeze time, to keep that moment endless. I was also thinking about it in terms of his relationship with Leslie and his relationship to his son. In my mind, I’d always been framing the movie as a love story, but I think, ultimately, it really is about this kid and this moment in time in his life. He was 23 when we shot it, going through a profound evolution. It’s not a “lovers on the run” movie. There’s another layer to this and so we picked up six months later with our cameras to capture that last chapter of the film when they return from their trip and are back in California.

 

PC The narrative trajectory, this moment in time that you captured, is remarkable. I think that has a lot to do with this magical “luck of the draw” in nonfiction filmmaking when the universe, somehow, conspires to bring certain people together to capture something profound and meaningful. It can’t really happen any other way. But it’s always a gamble.

 

TP Part of the instinct of wanting to make the movie was to make a certain kind of movie. His life could have gone in a lot of different directions and there could be a lot of different versions, but they all would have worked for me. Maybe some might have taken two years to shoot or if his life had gone another way, maybe we’d still be shooting now. There are stories in everyone’s life; you just have to find them.

 

I think part of the reason the movie works is that I didn’t overstay my welcome. I wasn’t in his face every day. I was really trying very hard to be agenda-less. Every time we shot, I would find things that I was excited about shooting. Every world he took me into was interesting to me because it was connected to him. I was getting at something that I liked. That was all I cared about. It wasn’t about, Oh, this movie will only work if . . . There were no imperatives about what we absolutely had to capture, whether it was some big skating competition or trying to track his competition schedule. I didn’t care about stuff like that—compete, don’t compete. It was all about gently observing until I felt like there was enough footage to capture something that had weight to it.

 

PC Just by virtue of using this method, somehow weight is added to every moment.

 

TP Yes, it’s a movie about moments and when those moments crystallize, you know? If it works, part of the reason it works is that the whole film becomes one big crystallized moment made up of these smaller crystallizing moments. I mean it wasn’t Machiavellian. I can look back and kind of see how this intuitive aesthetic formed that was true to the subject. And so shooting that way feels true to the subjects of the movie and is authentic to their story. There’s really no other way to make a movie about him.

 

PC Well, sure there is. There are infinite ways, in fact.

 

TP Yes, but it wouldn’t be the movie that I would want to see.

 

PC Is this the movie that Josh wants to see? When he watches this film about himself, what is that experience like for him?

 

TP I didn’t show him any footage while we were shooting because I didn’t want his behavior to change. At the same time, I think it’s a little different because the movie is also shot by him. He’s helping to shape the movie in a way that’s different. There’s an inherent collaboration between filmmaker and subject. But I never talked to him about what he was shooting and he never talked to me about what I was shooting. He would let me know about some place he was going to be and we’d go and shoot. A couple of weeks would go by and then he would give me a memory card and not tell me anything about what was on it.

 

I was really nervous to show him the film. And time had passed. The editing took a year. He doesn’t make movies, so he has no idea what that looks like. If he did know what it looked like, I think he, rightfully, would look at it as something totally crazy. Like, what are you doing with your life, man? (laughter) You add the fact that there’s a relationship that’s at stake in the film that wasn’t part of the movie going in. Leslie became a participant and a collaborator, as well. It’s a different relationship than the one I had with Skreech. The original reason I picked Skreech as a subject was that he was authentic and fearless and when he finally watched the movie, he was authentic and fearless. He came to the editor’s house to watch a final cut of the movie and he brought Leslie with him. I didn’t anticipate her being there.

 

When he saw his own footage, he started laughing, asking, Did I do that? What was I talking about? There were moments he didn’t remember. There was a fascination on that level. He was mostly concerned with Leslie feeling good about it, which I thought was really sweet. I really like the unspoken elements in this exchange. There was this collaboration that happened between two people that isn’t orchestrated; it just happens. The movie just lets that be. That goes back to your first comment about a film with a feeling between filmmaker and subject that’s just there; no one talks about it.

 

PC Both of you were working in the same vein in an intuitive type of communication. The only way that can take place, not just in this relationship, but in any relationship, is if you do come at it as gently as you possibly can. For a film director, for someone in that role, this is a challenge. But since this is your only experience, thus far, and it was a successful one in terms of what you meant to do, I’m wondering how this might inform what you do next? Because whatever that might be, just by virtue of being the next thing, there might, perhaps, be a bit more self-consciousness. I don’t know. There was freedom with having that tabula rasa that’s not anchored anywhere in your professional life—it’s just hanging there by itself right now. What has it taught you about yourself as a filmmaker, I guess is what I’m asking?

 

TP I never thought about making a documentary before I made this movie. While I was making it I didn’t think of it as a documentary. But the film had rules like any good film has rules, a point-of-view. One of the rules of this film happens to be that the story it tells is going to be absolutely authentic to its subject’s experience and that won’t be tampered with. The way in which it reflects what I might do next is that I like stories that are about characters that have some sort of poetry in them that they’re struggling to get out. I like movies that take you into worlds like this one, which happens to be a very specific California movie and it’s a very specific movie about youth. If I were to do a narrative film next or a documentary film next, the approach with my subject would be very similar. If you’re writing a character, you’re still trying to let that character speak for him or herself; you’re still trying to let that character lead you, intuitively, to a conclusion that’s original and unique. There was something about making this film that was particular to it. I haven’t made a film before. There was nothing I could show Skreech, so he had no idea what I was going to do. That makes me seem really crazy to people while making it. All they can have faith in is the vibe they get from me.

 

PC And your obvious commitment. Just as these people, individually and collectively are making commitments to certain things. They, too, are anchored in their commitments to this lifestyle, the people that surround them. The way in which a human being comes at making art is complicated and it’s so easy to trip yourself up in so many ways.

 

TP This point takes me back to that moment of meeting Skreech for the first time, because I can say that he didn’t, or doesn’t, have an agenda for his life that involves me. He’s not using this movie to change his life. There have been great movies about subjects who are using the movie that’s being made about them, but that’s a different kind of movie.

One of the things about reality television or YouTube or all of this stuff is that none of it has really been incorporated into the language of film. It’s as if there’s this implicit gross thing, this exploitation that goes on while these people are being filmed. I want to see something that is beautiful like Laguna Beach is beautiful, but doesn’t have the exploitation element, something that’s truthful and honest. It’s going to be a different type of kid. If you pick subjects that suddenly have paparazzi trailing after them wherever they go, it’s not really authentic anymore. What’s authentic is in the air beyond that.

 

PC What have you seen that’s been inspiring to you in that kind of “beautiful” way you speak about, something that, consciously or not, informed the way you chose to work on this film?

 

TP There are a lot of different answers to that question. But I think of this photographer named John Divola that did these portraits that are called the Zuma Series. He broke into this abandoned house on Zuma Beach on the Pacific Coast, and he took photographs of this house as it was being taken over by nature. It was changing over time. Through a window of this house, you can see the ocean. He paints the house himself, at one point, and other people sneak in when no one’s there and they leave behind whatever trash they leave behind. And he just keeps returning over and over to the house, continuing to document it. Probably what initially drew me to the photographs is that I saw them and thought, That’s fucking Southern California. There’s also something that’s almost primal and tragic in them because you’re watching something change. But the ocean remains. He gets at something powerful just by simply returning and observing it over and over and over again. He paints a wall, so he’s putting his own mark on it, but it’s the totality of the elements that amounts to a beautiful portrait of time taking hold.

 

Those were the kinds of things I was thinking about when I was making the movie. In terms of movies, what’s excited me recently are the earlier Lukas Moodysson pieces like Show Me Love, Together, and Lilya 4-Ever, those kind of youth portraits. When I met Skreech, I thought he seemed like a kid out of The River’s Edge (Tim Hunter, 1986)—you know, Over the Edge (Jonathan Kaplan, 1979), River’s Edge, suburbia movies type of kid. I think he reminded me a lot of Linda Manz in Out of the Blue (Dennis Hopper, 1979). Those are things that I thought about upon meeting him; I wanted to make a movie about a character like that. But I would never write that movie because I’ve seen ten versions of that movie done that way and they’re great. But there’s got to be a new way of doing it. It’s not like I’ve never watched documentaries, but maybe I could say Cocksucker Blues (Robert Frank, 1972)? (laughter) I like the way that’s done. It has art and a point-of-view to it. That’s what inspires me.

 

Dragonslayer opens at Cinema Village in New York on Friday, November 4th.

 

Pamela Cohn is a Berlin-based film producer, curator, freelance programmer and arts journalist.