King Skate

We had about 25 hours of archive footage from skateboarders themselves. It was amazing stuff, shot mainly on 8-mm film. Plus no one had seen it since they were made. As I was watching it I was surprised by the camera skills of the skateboarders. While Ivo Škrabal made very precise footage of races, Vojta Kotek aimed at the bunch of laughing people. Ondra Sudek recorded the beginnings of skateboarding in Pilsen and so on. Petr Kottig got some reels of 16-mm colour film from mountaineers. He took it to races in Karlovy Vary and made some fantastic action footage. He’d put the camera into a pram so it is not too shaky as it follows the skateboarder, he had some very inventive ways.

Which footage was the most impressive for you?

Long jumps were pretty impressive, it’s an adrenalin event where a skateboarder gets pushed to pick up speed and then in full speed he did even a five-meter jump to another skateboard. There were often some ugly falls. A footage from Březiny where Ivo Škrabal built a ramp in a forest and it became a place for summer gatherings has almost a hippie-like large-minded atmosphere while a trip to East Bearlin is full of punk provocation. I like bizarre details, some of them brought us to new names. During a post-production in UPP I noticed a guy with ruffled blonde hair who was skating on an asphalt in real skates and sparks where shooting from his feet. Vojta Kotek told us the guy’s name was Petr Karlíček. A few weeks later we set off to meet him and eventually he became one of the faces of this film.

You managed to get eight skateboarders to talk in King Skate. Was it difficult to get in touch with them?
When I was starting this project I addressed Kateřina Černá from Negativ Productions – she grew up among the skateboarders so she knew all of them. Her friend Vojta Kotek is a natural archivist of the skateboarding scene and he became our expert advisor. So there were no problems getting in touch with them. Plus, all of them love to remember those times, you can see they lived their lives to the fullest. And they’re happy about it.

You spent several years making this film. What were the most significant experiences from this period?
It was the biggest project I have ever done and most of all I feel I was learning things all that time. As for the mood, I was overwhelmed by the open-mindedness of this group of people. All those weeks somewhere in a forest, or just weekends on a square, fooling around, psyching each other up, loving each other, being their own masters. That’s how I read it and that’s what impresses me the most.

The film exudes an incredible energy, apparently the life of skateboarders was one huge party. What was the biggest challenge when you were trying to transfer this mood onto the screen?

From the very beginning we knew we would mostly lean on music of that time. Music is very expressive, it can transfer the mood much more precisely than a picture. Eventually we used about 40 songs by 20 bands, Czech songs as well as foreign songs, new ones but mostly songs of that time.