When Catherine Hardwicke made it big in Hollywood, she used her newfound power to make a movie about her backyard. Her favorite crack in the sidewalk, to be precise.
Hardwicke lives in Venice, Calif., an eclectic beach town where the gods of street skateboarding launched extreme sports in the mid-1970s. With an $18 million budget from Sony to film the group bio-pic “Lords of Dogtown,” Hardwicke took her cameras to the cement bumps just outside her door.
“We shot scenes on the same root-bent concrete slab that Tony Alva jumped when the guys were inventing the sport,” said Hardwicke by phone from California. “We shot a scene in my house, and another one in my alley. It’s still a pretty gritty and radical neighborhood.
“You’ve got all kinds of people living together. I still don’t walk outside by myself without a pit bull.”
Filtered through Hardwicke’s unsentimental realism, “Lords of Dogtown” is an homage to a neighborhood and a group of drifting adolescents who found a family when they discovered a new sport. It feels true because it is true, with the original skaters employed on the set and demanding all the rough edges – alcohol, drugs, absentee parents, betrayal – be left in. Extreme sport champions are not the type to ask their director for sepia-toned nostalgia.
“If they told me it wasn’t authentic, I changed it,” said Hardwicke. The advice and oversight was crucial to her desire for explaining skateboarding’s urban renaissance.
Skip Engblom, the skateboarding mentor and surf shop owner played by Heath Ledger in “Lords,” painted the skateboards and surfboards used in the movie. “I thought that was crucial to making a movie” that would be credible with skaters and skate fans, she said.
Recreating reality was made even more urgent by the success of Peralta’s 2002 nonfiction look at his youth, “Dogtown and Z-Boys.” The popular documentary was embedded with striking images of Peralta’s long blond locks and Alva’s swooping swimming-pool moves. Peralta later wrote the script for “Lords of Dogtown,” seeking to recreate the personal struggles and moods he couldn’t piece together in his documentary.
Hardwicke’s actors went through 10 weeks of skateboard boot camp. And while stunt doubles are used in “Lords,” there are plenty of unaltered, impressive shots of Victor Rasuk as Alva, John Robinson as Peralta, and Emile Hirsch as rebel Jay Adams.
Hardwicke was offered “Lords” after her chilling view of female adolescence, “Thirteen,” won acclaim.
Both “Thirteen” and “Lords of Dogtown” showcase Hardwicke’s convincing view of teenage life: She limns the joys of testing freedom and the dangers of pushing boundaries without condemnation or false sentiment. Her unflinching view is embodied in “Lords” by Ledger as Engblom, who first sponsors his skating team as a counterculture father figure, then recedes from their lives as his addictions and temperament get in the way.
“Skip said, ‘I don’t want a sanitized version of myself. Show me for all the scams I pulled and all the booze I drank,”‘ Hardwicke said.
Hardwicke’s next project will be in another backyard – Colorado’s. She has acquired the rights to the Edward Abbey novel, “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” and has scouted Utah for the eco-terrorism classic.
“People have tried so hard to make this movie,” she said. The characters – a ragtag, anti-establishment quartet fighting bureaucracy and Western development – are natural for the big screen, but the message of blowing up progress is a hard sell these days.
“It just seems like the Earth is only getting more and more sad,” Hardwicke said.
Staff writer Michael Booth can be reached at 303-820-1686 or mbooth@denverpost.com.
