“The whole idea for the movie came to me at a unique moment in time when the economy had collapsed and it felt like the whole of the United States was at a tipping point,” the filmmaker recalls. “It just came to me all of a sudden that it was all turning out like what the punk generation was talking about – the decline of the Western civilisation. The skating part of the film was secondary because I never thought about making a movie about skateboarding – it just happened to be that Skreech had a skateboard. But I was drawn to him because he seemed to be one of those kids of the generation that the punks were talking about, he is actually living that decline. The film really turned out to be, in my opinion, about this kid who writes poetry and rides a skateboard through this decay of the future.”
The film itself also turned out to be a much grander project than Patterson had initially hoped or planned for it to be. Originally inspired by a desire to make a low-budget, almost-reality-television-like documentary combined with elegance and high art, two years later Patterson had created a deeply authentic and real piece of footage, but also a film which raised so many questions about the current generation of American youth.
“The ambition was to make a new style of a movie coming from someone living in the age of reality television and YouTube. I mean, YouTube and all this stuff, that’s not really reality, but it’s weird un-cinematic footage and I wanted to somehow try to mix these two forms – the roughness of the YouTube style with some elegance but keeping the whole thing visually appealing. When I watched the film back, the thing that struck me was that we could have ended up making all these other movies from the footage that we captured! On one of the locations – the bit with the cleaning out of the abandoned pool at this former casino in California – we found out about this really interesting story. The casino had burned to the ground but the swimming pool was still left so we were filming and suddenly this old lady comes out screaming she’ll call the cops. As a filmmaker I had to get her permission for us to use the pool and be in the movie so I had to calm her down. It turned out she’d lived at the casino since the ’40s and it used to be this spot where Hollywood people would go to a lot. She was like, ‘Yeah John Wayne used to come here and fuck all my cocktail girls!'”
For Patterson, hearing about John Wayne’s exploits sounded like a whole potential movie on American mythology itself, an idea that the young director hasn’t scrapped just yet.
“What are the chances, though? You sneak into this abandoned property out in the middle of nowhere in regional California, and the place is haunted with secrets and this glamorous past. It was amazing how these forgotten spots all seemed to have so much history behind them. It was an incredible analogy to what once was. Obviously, it was all thanks to Skreech because he is an incredible location scout, so he’d take us to places that were really exciting and that hadn’t been discovered before. The swimming pool at the casino was a highlight for me, and so was the last drive-in theatre in Southern California.”
As fascinated with regional California as Patterson was, it was the lifestyle of his leading man Skreech that captured his imagination more than anything. Aside from traveling around the US in search of perfect skating spots, drinking beers, smoking bongs and just hanging out with his girlfriend also made up Skreech’s regular daily activities. In many ways on-screen it appears the subject’s life is going nowhere fast, yet in other ways, as Patterson notes, Skreech is the star of his own world and he doesn’t seem to mind at all.
“There’s a band called The Adolescents who were playing at a house party in Chino, California. It’s basically a suburb outside of LA and the whole thing was like something out of those youth movies you grew up watching where American teenagers are getting drunk and listening to punk music. I mean, talk about being true to your roots – the dude was 50 years old and still playing punk in some kid’s driveway! That’s how I first met Skreech and I realised there was a whole new kind of movie to be made about these kids. Skreech is just walking through the party, he’s so totally at home with it, and you realise he’s the star of this world, and to some people it may all seem hopeless but to him it’s perfect.
This movie is not some kind of summation of his entire life – he’s only 23 years old – but I feel like it captures what’s authentic about him in that moment. His entire attitude seems to be that he doesn’t care and this is his life and this is what he’s doing right now and that makes him so authentic. So now that the movie is done, I love him and his girlfriend, they’re good people, and in many ways as a spectator, I’m rooting for their lives to be awesome in the end.”
