Stacey Peralta: Interview

Interview by Clint Morris

Interview with Stacey Peralta
Writer/director of the movie Riding Giants.

Stacey Peralta (right) shows off his mime skills on the set of Riding Giants

If you know what Margaret River Wax is, if you what a Tube is, and if you're familiar with a FCS (Fin Control System), don't spend your hard-earned green on seeing the wave-riders of Point Break or Blue Crush, Stacey Peralta beckons you to his new movie.

"I've been a surfer my whole life and those movies weren't the experience I know," Riding Giants writer/director Stacey Peralta states.

"If you look at the movie The Godfather, one of the most interesting things about it was that it was ultimately made by an Italian. It was made someone who understood those interesting idiosyncrasies that makes someone Italian.

"One of the problems with surfing movies of the past is that they've always been done by outsiders, and too often they use the obvious clichés to define that world".

Peralta belongs as much in that same grouping as much as Corey Feldman does in the musical hall of fame. He may be famous for ripping it up in the skating world, but this guy's spent just as much time on the waves.

"I've surfed all my life, I know that world," says Peralta, whose previous film explored the world of his other sports-love, skating, called Dogtown and Z-Boys. "As much as I love skating, there's nothing like surfing - I love it. I had to make a real movie out of this world".

After the success of his 2001 skateboarding pic Dogtown and Z-Boys, Peralta found it a lot easier to piece together his next sports documentary.

Riding Giants is a documentary detailing the origins and history of surf culture. It features a who's who of the sport - Jeff Clark, Darrick Doerner, Laird John Hamilton, Dave Kalama and Greg Noll.

"They were willing to park their flag with me and give me their support," he says. "We found financing fairly early with Dogtown, but it took some time to consummate the deal - about eight to nine months. It was on, it was off, it was on, it was off. With Riding Giants, it was again series after series of meetings - we had to meet this guy, then we had to meet that guy. That too took about eight months to a year - but it happened."

Peralta, the first skater in history to land nifty sponsorship deals, left the world of competitive skating at age 19, but has always remained in close vicinity to the world.

In the '80s, his skating know-how landed him jobs on Gleaming the Cube and Police Academy 4. "I was the second-unit director on them, the skate sequences. What those films allowed me to do was allow me to work in 35, and I was so shocked too when I first turned up to work on them because, I was such a street-filmmaker, and my God, there was a person to do everything.

"All I had to do was show up and say this is what I want to do and boom," he says. "It gives you a taste of a different world. And also, you have the streets locked down, so you don't have to worry about cops kicking you out or getting run over by a truck."

It'd be a similar deal with the forthcoming Lords of Dogtown movie, then? "Same thing, I didn't direct it, I just wrote it, but yep, they would come into an area and just occupy it. They had free reign to do whatever they wanted".

Dogtown, inspired by Peralta's own life-story and his earlier documentary, stars Heath Ledger, Emile Hirsch and Johnny Knoxville. It, like the doco, examines the skateboarding trends that originated in the 70's on Venice Beach, California. "It's in the can, they're mixing it right now. I saw a rough cut - I'm pretty happy," he explains.

"The reason I put the disclaimed 'pretty happy' is that I don't have any reservations about it, it's just that I'm looking at a slice of my life. It's such a surreal experience that I can't look at it objectively. It's like looking inward in a dream, it's a very strange phenomenon".

Peralta says there's a talented newcomer playing him in the movie. "[He's] a kid named John Robertson, who appeared in Elephant. Heath Ledger plays the part of Skip, who was the proprietor who owned the surfboard shop that we all kind of hung around at. He's really good."

So good, in fact, that the studio is thinking of casting Ledger in Peralta's next project, a biopic about Greg Noll, the surfer whom upon settling in Hawaii in the early 1950s, helped create the laid-back lifestyle attributed to the sport and its followers.

"Sony studios saw Riding Giants and they saw Greg Noll, and immediately they thought it would make a great story. So they hired me and they hired Sam George, who co-write Riding Giants, to write a biopic based on his life. We're just about finished - in three weeks we submit it to the studios. This is Greg when he was about 23. I don't think so far ahead as casting, but the producers have been banding Heath Ledger's name about."

Whatever Stacey Peralta does down the track - and we're guessing it'll be an adrenaline pumping sports movie - more than a few of us will be there lining up first night.

Riding Giants screens in Australian theatres from March 10th, 2005.

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