An Interview with "Stuntwood" Director and Editor: Jeff Roe
Jan 30 2007 / Park City, UT“Stuntwood: The Birth, Life and Death of a Skateboard” won 'Best Documentary' at the 2007 Lat34 X-Dance Action Sports Film Festival
Director and Editor Jeff Roe sits down with Lat34 to talk about his film...
Lat34: How many films were you working on this year?
JR: I am the editor on the Burton film, "For Right or Wrong" and then wrote, produced and directed the "Stuntwood" film.
Lat34: "Stuntwood" is your skate film right? Tell us about it.
JR: It was a skate film. We were given $100,000 from Fuel TV as part of the Fuel Experiment to make the film. We knew we wanted to make a skate film but wanted more than just the average tricks. The funny thing is about skateboards is that the wood for it all comes from one place around the Great Lakes region and so that was our jumping off point and from there we just followed once a tree is cut down to how it’s made, used and what happens after it’s done being used. Birth, life and death.
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Lat34: What athletes were in it?
JR: It was narrated by Chris Miller, which was such an honor. Bob Burnquist, Ryan Sheckler, Paul Schmidt, Kristian Svitak, a lot of other guys. The guy who co-produced Michael Leon and I made a laundry list of who would be ideal in it and in thinking about that it was like who could speak about skateboarding in terms of the documentary and so we had list of 50 people and we ended up with about 25 of those guys. Our film covers everything that is skateboarding from a mother in Seattle who has built a skate park in her front yard for kids to the guys who cut down the trees. We even interviewed the guys who makes skate stoppers so skaters can’t skate. All of the people in this film have careers from skateboarding, but they are not necessarily skateboarders. There were all of these other avenues that the skateboard led us down when we made this film.
Lat34: How long did it take?
JR: We made the film in five months. In the original version we wanted to interview truck drivers and everyone involved but we did what we could. We did get to talk to the lumber jacks and that was very interesting.
Lat34: Tell us about the characters you met.
JR: The skateboarding world is full of characters and there are a lot of stories in skateboarding that can’t be told through skate videos. Personally I am more interested in telling the stories that are behind the skateboard. So we did.
Lat34: Could you tell any story you wanted even though you were part of the Fuel Experiment?
JR: We could. We were running independently and we weren’t tied to making a skate movie for one company. Michael and I grew up skateboarding and we felt like skateboarding influenced our lives. We felt like there were a lot of people out there whose lives were influenced by skateboarding in a good way and we wanted to make a film that could represent that.
Lat34: Big surprises?
JR: Yeah. One of the things we wanted to tackle obviously was the fact that skateboards use trees so we were interested in environmental issues and I was surprised at how the company we were dealing with was very environmentally conscious about logging trees. They went into the forest once every ten years. It was cool to see that people are thinking about it and that we will have skateboards 30 years from now if people think like this.
Lat34: Did you enter your movie in other film festivals?
JR: Nope. I have been involved in X-Dance for a number of years and I wanted to give them something. I won the best editing last year.
Lat34: What’s next after this?
JR: I am currently working with Paul Schmidt on a thing called CreateAskate.org where kids at the junior high and high school level get to make a skateboard in their wood shop class or do the art work in art classes. They learn in the process about math, environment. Last week we did the launch in Florida and we hope it will spread all over the country. The whole program is designed to get kids to do it themselves. It’s pressed at a factory it’s an awesome program and gets the kids involved and you through them a curve ball and they are learning at the same time
The Facts About Jeff Roe
Hometown: Los Angeles, CA
X-Dance Selections in 2007: "Stuntwood: The Birth, Life and Death of a Skateboard"
Burton Snowboards "For Right or Wrong"
Sites:
http://www.fisheggfilms.com
CreateAskate.org
