STACY PERALTA: Oh that’s great, I’m stoked.

CHRIS NEUMER: They asked if I wanted to see it and I said sure. I popped it in and it was all this surfing stuff, and I was like wow. I think I was the only one there asking about Bruce Brown and stuff.

STACY PERALTA: That’s great! So you saw the tape and then you saw it again

CHRIS NEUMER: Some of the surfing stuff. You said you were surfing at Cove Pier. That was like wow!

STACY PERALTA: Yeah pretty amazing, huh?

CHRIS NEUMER: You know I went through a jetty once on a body board, but by accident, I promise you. Did you do a lot of the surfing?

STACY PERALTA: Tons of surfing there, but that wasn’t me in the shots. That’s a dangerous place to surf. I snuck in there to go surfing when I was fourteen and got my life threatened.

CHRIS NEUMER: Wow! And at fourteen you were a local back then.

STACY PERALTA: Well, at fourteen I was working my way up, I still wasn’t in there yet.

CHRIS NEUMER: Huh. Now there are no West Coast locals. To the best of my knowledge there are no East Coast locals either. And I haven’t actually gone surfing on the West Coast. But, now how does that work? You’re fourteen, they know you, and they tell you to get the hell out of there?

STACY PERALTA: It’s really, I mean Charles Darwin could have done a perfect study on this, it’s really the survival of the fittest. The surfing situation, as you know, is that there’s only so many waves in the set.

CHRIS NEUMER: Hm mm.

STACY PERALTA: There’s only so many sets in a day before it gets blown out. The best guys are gonna get the best waves out there. If you don’t become one of the best guys, you’re not gonna get any waves. At certain beaches, like the Cove, the jumping off point is so small that there can’t be a lot of guys in there because it gets too crowded and it can be really dangerous. So if you’re a kid, unless you were really, really good you weren’t allowed in there. So all of us had to work our way up until we were about fifteen, fifteen and a half, and then we were starting to be recognized and they started to say ok we’ll let you in here. It’s just performance-based.

CHRIS NEUMER: You know it’s interesting. You talk about how there’s a finite amount of waves, and X amount of surfers. I’ve been surfing, and it makes perfect sense, but I had never really thought of it like that.

STACY PERALTA: Oh, yeah. And you’re dealing with something that is very, very precious. The wave has traveled thousands of miles and you’re riding the last expression of that before it dissipates. And so there’s only so many of those… [Cell phone rings] …you want to get to it before that guy next to you gets it.

CHRIS NEUMER: Yeah.

STACY PERALTA: [Cell phone stops ringing.] What were we talking about?

CHRIS NEUMER: I don’t know. I think we were talking about Darwinism. Oh, you were saying that a waves is a wonderful treasure.

STACY PERALTA: Well, it is. It is a treasure. And every wave is so individual and so unique that and no two are the same that it becomes something that everyone wants to protect. It’s not like a golf course that you can got to at any time. This is something you can only do for a finite amount of time. For a couple hours each morning, if there’s a swell, and if the tides are right, and if the wind is right.

CHRIS NEUMER: I guess you guys don’t get hurricanes up there, then, do you?

STACY PERALTA: Uh-uh.

CHRIS NEUMER: Oh. Well this is another one of those surf stories. It was ’94, and I was down in North Carolina, and one of those swells came up off a hurricane in Florida. We were getting some monster, twelve-foot waves. It was really nice. It wasn’t choppy, you didn’t have to worry about killing yourself when you’re going under. It was just very, very nice.

STACY PERALTA: Yeah. It’s a good experience. You’ll never forget that.

CHRIS NEUMER: No, I won’t. One time I didn’t want to go out on a surfboard, so I got on fins and took the body board out there. I had an elevator drop. I get to the top of it and I look down and then, Boom! Knocked the wind out of me, I was scared. That one I won’t forget.

STACY PERALTA: Yeah.

CHRIS NEUMER: Well, so, I am sure that you are familiar with the works of Bruce Brown.

STACY PERALTA: Oh, yeah. Well, Endless Summer, but I haven’t seen Endless Summer 2 yet.

CHRIS NEUMER: Oh, really? I mean you’re not missing anything. It’s pretty much just more of the same.

STACY PERALTA: I mean I saw that motorcycle movie he did too. I mean he has a terrific style. He makes things very fun and accessible.

CHRIS NEUMER: You know that’s interesting because that was my point about your film. Was that even if you’re not interested in skateboarding. Honestly, I am not that interested in skateboarding, but here is a film that is a self-contained work that only the most casual observer can get into and enjoy.

STACY PERALTA: Well I’m really glad to hear you say that.

CHRIS NEUMER: And I thought it was interesting because you know Bruce doesn’t have any formal training. I mean he has a camera and guy fronting him money to go out and shoot stuff. I was thinking it’s the same thing with you. I mean you have experience as second unit stuff and TV stuff but…

STACY PERALTA: No formal training.

CHRIS NEUMER: Exactly. I was wondering, maybe there’s something about this.

STACY PERALTA: Well, the thing is the reason I started succeeding in Hollywood was I started making skateboarding videos in the early ‘80s. I never had any dreams about being a filmmaker, but I had to do it by default because I hired a crew to make a skateboard video for my company, and I didn’t like what they were doing. After the first day I fired them all and hired the equipment and did it myself. They didn’t listen to me. Anyway, I got a camera and a little editing bay and eight months later I had a skateboarding video. I think it was because I didn’t know what I was doing that helped me make the right mistakes, which I might not have made had I been trained formally.

CHRIS NEUMER: Oh, yeah.

STACY PERALTA: You know what I mean? And it was those mistakes that led me to get offers to do other work. So it was a process of that, of learning how to do it by doing it. Embracing the mistakes, embracing the imperfections.

CHRIS NEUMER: Gives you a more well-rounded view when you do something like that too. If you don’t have lots of training, common sense helps you out a lot.

STACY PERALTA: Yeah. Common sense. And you get used to wearing a lot of hats. But yeah, you’re right, it’s been all self-taught, for the most part. But I work better that way anyways. Whenever I read directions I never understand what they’re trying to tell me. So I never look at directions. There’s a processing shift in my brain that doesn’t work when I read directions. I don’t know what it is.

CHRIS NEUMER: You sort of touched on this earlier when you talked about the video that you made -- you sort of know what you want. You don’t have to be talking technically about it, you say this is what I want. If you’ve got the vision, that’s the hard part right there.

STACY PERALTA: Well, sometimes you want what you want, but what you want you can’t see. It’s like you’ve got a blindfold on, and something in you is saying, “Go north.” And you say, well, I am sensing north is that way so that’s the way I am going to go. And slowly you pick up clues along the way and the clues start to make more sense, and then when you see the sense that they’re making you say, ok, if I add this to that… but at the start it’s always a blind process.

CHRIS NEUMER: Hm. So what was it that got you started? Why Dogtown and Z-Boys? Why was this your feature debut?

STACY PERALTA: Um. I had always wanted to tell the story based on an article that came out three years ago in Spin magazine, about the Dogtown skaters. Based on that article, Hollywood wanted to write a screenplay and buy our life rights to the Dogtown fictional film.

CHRIS NEUMER: Ooh, good move not selling that there.

STACY PERALTA: Right. And I didn’t want to do that, I had always wanted to do that myself. But I realized I wasn’t going to compete with these guys because I don’t have the same kind of financing. So one day it dawned on me that I could make a documentary. That will cost less money. And at least we’ll get a firsthand testimonial. It will be us telling the story. So that was what happened.

CHRIS NEUMER: Well, and I was just thinking that you could use some of the fifty hours of archival footage you probably have lying around.

STACY PERALTA: Well, no. I didn’t have it. I had to go find that stuff.

CHRIS NEUMER: I thought you had all that. Was that [Glen] Friedman [Dogtown’s co-producer] who was shooting all that?

STACY PERALTA: No, from forty different sources. Friedman had some, [Craig] Stecyk [co-writer of Dogtown] had some, and some other surf-film cinematographers at that time had some. But because I was one of the guys back then I knew what footage existed, I just had to figure out where to go to get it. And it took a little work to find that.

CHRIS NEUMER: I know in the thanking credits at the end you thanked Scott Dittrich. I was just curious did he have any, uh…

STACY PERALTA: He had skateboarding credential. Do you know who Scott Dittrich is?

CHRIS NEUMER: Yeah, what was it? I think ’86 or ’87 with Amazing Surf Stories? The one with Christian ??

STACY PERALTA: Yeah. Well, I knew Scott because we had done a lot of work together. He had shot me skateboarding back then. He had footage. So we bought his load as well. Hal Jepsen is another one. And thousands of photographs.

CHRIS NEUMER: The thing about the photographs that I liked the best, or that I noticed the most, is that you made them come alive. There are a lot of documentaries, you know they sort of tilt and pan in on them like this, but here you are you’re snapping around, you got quick edits, you’re zooming around, then you pull back and show the black, you know. I was like, wow! Was there any…

STACY PERALTA: I am so glad you liked it! I think the documentary form is such a great form, and it doesn’t have to be so methodical. Every single documentary you see, there’s a wide shot, and then they do the slow push -- they’re all the same. It doesn’t have to be that way. And with this, it leant itself, because of the music and the action, to a more kinetic feel.

CHRIS NEUMER: Now did you do any of the editing yourself?

STACY PERALTA: No, I spent thirteen years as an editor. But I couldn’t physically do it because I didn’t have the time and plus I chose an editor who was my first choice, Paul Crowder. He was my first and only choice. And I knew that -- this was a very important project -- I have enough hats to wear. I felt whoever I got to edit it he would have to feel a sense of ownership about it. I felt that if I had gotten involved in it, it would have cramped his space. And I’m glad I made that choice because he did a fantastic job.

CHRIS NEUMER: He really did. That was one of the things.

STACY PERALTA: Amazing job. He’s also a musician so he knows how to cut music and work with music like nobody.

CHRIS NEUMER: Well, when you bring those two together that’s nice.

STACY PERALTA: Yeah. But because of my post-production background I knew how to give Paul everything he was going to need to excel. So I shot all these photos and designed the shooting of all these photos so he could come in on them from any angle or multiple angles.

CHRIS NEUMER: Oh, did he physically shoot them?

STACY PERALTA: No, I did all that. I shot all that stuff to give to him, but I would shoot a photograph this way and this way and then this way so he would have so many different options to come in on it.

CHRIS NEUMER: You don’t think of people shooting a lot of coverage of photos.

STACY PERALTA: No, exactly.

CHRIS NEUMER: That seems like it would have worked very well.

STACY PERALTA: What’s funny is these motion-mat cameras work on a computer. They sit on a copy stand, with lights on both sides, and there’s a camera up above. There’s a guy with joysticks who operates it. But what they normally do is they program the moves. And they hit the switch and it does it all clean, and I said, Guys, I don’t want to do it that way.

CHRIS NEUMER: Sort of like the difference between handheld and steadi-cam

STACY PERALTA: Exactly. I said, get the computer out of here. Just go get on the joysticks. So I threw a photo down, and the guy would go this way, he’d go this way. I’d throw the photo down and say, Go! Go! So it was a jam session. And they liked it because it loosened them up. They could just screw around. This guy was shooting it like he was playing a video game.

CHRIS NEUMER: Yeah. Well, and that went well with the whole fast and furious nature of the subject matter anyway.

STACY PERALTA: Right. But also, you know, so much of what we see today is so over-lit, so perfectly lit and so beautiful. From television commercials on up to motion pictures, so that it doesn’t even look like reality anymore. We didn’t want this to look pretty. We wanted it to look like it was down on the ground level with dirt. You know, it was like this is on terra firma, this is real, this actually happened. So we wanted to just keep that gritty look, with roll-outs and…

CHRIS NEUMER: What kind of footage was it, like digital video?

STACY PERALTA: For the interviews? It was Super 16 black and white.

CHRIS NEUMER: OK. Well, that’s another way to keep it looking ??

STACY PERALTA: Yeah and dirty. We didn’t overlight them, usually just a key light and that’s it. And we shot them in alleys, next to trash cans, behind decrepit brick buildings. Just 'cuz I didn’t want guys sitting with a nice beautiful background, you know, and potted flowers.

Chris Neumer