It’s funny, because we actually had to cut out quite a few scenes of things that actually happened in real life because it was so crazy. “And there were so many scenes where it just felt like… a movie! I just cut ’em out. “Oh my God, the first cut was 4 hours and 45 minutes long!” Moselle exclaims. Skate Kitchen sometimes blurs the lines between narrative and documentary not only in its style, but its content, which is hardly if ever driven by melodrama. Though a quick descriptor brings to mind either Larry Clark’s sensationalistic Kids or gnarly-rad ’80s comedies, nothing could be further from the truth. There’s just so much movement in their lives, it just felt like there was this flow to it that I wanted to translate to the movie.”įor Moselle, a bigger challenge in making the film was ensuring that the movie wasn’t… too much like a movie. “I wanted the film to have a lot of movement I didn’t want the camera to ever stop unless it was to capture a really meaningful moment. “Our second AD was a skateboarder who had done a bunch of skate videos,” says Moselle. Skate videos are an extremely important part of the subculture, and therefore a narrative feature about the sport starts playing in a world with a pre-established visual language. (laughs) When I saw the girls skateboarding, I really saw it as something fresh and new and inspiring.”įilmmaking and skateboarding go hand-in-hand, of course. Then again, I got really sick of it at a certain point in my life, to the point where if I saw another dude skateboarding, I was gonna move somewhere else.
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“I’ve had friends date pro skateboards and I hung with a lot of skateboarders when I came to New York, so it was definitely familiar to me.
“Growing up, all my friends skateboarded,” says Moselle. As her relationship with her mother grows more tense, Camille begins to lean heavily on her friends, particularly Janay (Dede Lovelace), who has, shall we say, mixed feelings about Camille bumming around with her ex Devon (Jaden Smith).Īlthough their encounter came by chance (Moselle apparently discovered the crew on a train and recruited them for a short film project before embarking on the longer feature), Moselle herself does have some experience in the peripheries of the skate scene. Camille nevertheless accepts an invitation from a Manhattan all-girl skate gang to come and ride with them, and she soon falls in with the disparate crew, telling her mother that she’s spending her days at the library. Skateboarding is her passion, but her overprotective mother has forbidden her from skateboarding - partially because of a bad spill she took, and partially because she sees it as somehow unbecoming of her daughter. If they have this openness, all you have to do is give them the circumstances and let them live as themselves within them.”Įighteen-year-old Camille (Rachelle Vinberg) lives with her single mother (Elizabeth Rodriguez) in Long Island, far from the hustle-and-bustle of Manhattan. The key to working with non-actors is that they have to be open. I think it’s also about building this space together that feels really special and that makes us all feel comfortable. There was a script that they actually, at some point, held in their hands, and sometimes others would chime in. They gave us options they knew where the story needed to go and they kind of improv’d their way through it. “The rehearsals were really more about them learning the beats, and then I would just let them go off page without having to give the same reading every time.
“We did a lot of rehearsals, but I think the main thing is knowing where the narrative needs to go,” says Moselle.
One thing’s for sure: I find what Moselle has been able to get from these non-actors to be extremely impressive. Skate Kitchen is entirely scripted, but cast mainly with non-actors in roles very much based on themselves it has an established plot but relies heavily on improvisation, giving it the texture of a documentary without the structure or implicit expectation of “truthfulness.” It’s something that’s been done before (most notably - and recently - by the Safdie brothers in Heaven Knows What) but remains infrequent enough to be difficult to describe. Now that this approach more or less also describes most of reality television, it doesn’t seem right (or particularly accurate) to assign those qualities to a film that is purely a work of fiction. Once upon a time, we would’ve called it a version of fictionalized cinema vérité or direct cinema.
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I don’t know exactly how to describe Crystal Moselle’s Skate Kitchen. Jaden Smith and Rachelle Vinberg in Skate Kitchen
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