by MATTHEW HAYS

"I guess I'm too naïve to worry about things," filmmaker Catherine Hardwicke says, in response to the daunting question. It's an obvious query to make: was she the least bit wary of taking on the Lords of Dogtown project, given that this is a pivotal slice of American youth pop cultural history?

"I'm never really afraid of anything," reports Hardwicke, who won the best director award at Sundance 2003 for her feature debut, Thirteen. But a bit more prying does reveal that Hardwicke had reason to be concerned about just how the legendary tale of the Z-boys would be represented on the big screen. "I did get a bit nervous because I actually live in Venice. I would walk out of my house and people would yell, ‘You'd better get it right!' Everybody around Venice, they feel it's their story. I'm not just talking about the Z-boys, I'm talking about hundreds of others. That's kind of intimidating. I'm like, ‘Am I going to have to move after the film comes out?'"

Faster, smoother

Probably not, given the rousing and fun style of Lords of Dogtown, the dramatic re-enactment of the embryonic days of California skate culture. The pivotal moment came, we're told, when new-fangled plastic wheels made skateboards infinitely faster and smoother than they'd ever been before. Inspired in part by their surfing idol Larry Bertleman, the Z-boys - among them Stacy Peralta, Tony Alva and Jay Adams - began skating just as they would surf, finding emptied swimming pools with concave surfaces to bone up on their technique.

Their revolutionary styles began to make waves at skate competitions, where they were initially shunned. Then stardom set in, with the three lads becoming hot commodities in the lucrative sales of skateboard brands.

The history of the Z-boys was first told in a 1999 article in Spin magazine. Then, Peralta decided to tell their story in documentary form, which became the exemplary feature doc Dogtown and Z-boys, which won Peralta the best director award at Sundance in 2001. Peralta then sequestered himself in his home to write the dramatic screen version of the street lore.

Casting, boarding and draining

Peralta had also caught the rough and tumble debut of Hardwicke, Thirteen, a teen-girls-out-of-control movie often referred to as the female version of Larry Clark's 1995 landmark teens-headed-for-train-wreck movie Kids. The combined talents have resulted in Lords of Dogtown, a fast-paced, beautifully-shot examination of the early lives of the Z-boys and their precipitous rise to stardom.

Casting for the film may have seemed like the trickiest task of all, but Hardwicke says the actors fell into place surprisingly easily. "Each of the Z-boys were so distinct, their skate styles are so unique. Tony was a chick magnet, and a very radical, aggressive, rough, competitive skater. Stacy was more fluid and graceful. How do you capture these unique personalities? Through the casting, I wanted to find people who could capture the original spirit. Interestingly, the three leads that I have were first choices - the first person we considered materialized as the ultimate casting call. Emile Hirsch was suggested by a producer who had just done Imaginary Heroes with him.

"Emile came into my office, picked up a skateboard and began doing turns on the carpet. He more or less started becoming Jay. He said, ‘I'm Jay Adams, I'm going to be Jay Adams!' I really didn't think of anyone else after that point. I also knew Victor Rasuk from Raising Victor Vargas, and John Robinson from his work in Elephant. They were perfect."

Hardwicke says she thoroughly enjoyed recreating the look and feel of the '70s, when skate culture was coming into its own. "Every department was incredible in their own right - the prop master, the costume and set people, they all threw themselves into it, because it's such a cool project. I pored over skate magazines from the '70s, people brought costumes in that they'd actually worn at the time. Tony Alva was on the set every day as our authenticity consultant. He taught the boys how to skate too. He had to figure out which pools would work, so he would go underwater with goggles on and then he'd emerge and say, ‘It's perfect - drain it!'"

Thirteen-year-old girls and Z-boys

While great fun, Lords of Dogtown does fall into the story arc we've come to expect from such narratives, from Goodfellas to Boogie Nights to any episode of MTV's Behind the Music: innocent people meet with fame and/or fortune; sometimes, they learn, fame and/or fortune can be a bad thing; personalities change while friendships are threatened; many suffer falls from grace, including obligatory drugs and booze problems; story punctuated by bittersweet, poignant reconciliation.

Was Hardwicke at all concerned about the potential clichés of rags-to-riches-to-rags storytelling? "Maybe I should have paid more attention to that," she concedes. "What I did was to try to pay attention to the real story. Real things are often quirkier than fiction. If you try to be true to the real story, I feel it will have its own specificity that audiences will be able to connect with."

Hardwicke acknowledges that it was a challenge to go from the all-female turf of Thirteen to the decidedly male energy of the Z-boys. "Some people were like, ‘Isn't this a movie for boys?' I guess there haven't been a lot of action movies directed by women. But I don't think about the barriers. I was so enthusiastic about it, I think that took over everything for me. In this case, I think being a woman director really worked well because I was dealing with so many alpha male egos, what with the actors and the real people they were based on around. The skaters are very competitive in a lot of ways. So I could actually smooth a lot of that over. I'm never going to skate quite like they are, I'm never going to attract as many chicks. So I really didn't pose any threats.

"But you know what? When I was doing Thirteen, a bunch of guys on the set said, ‘You've got to do a boy movie next!' And I was laughing about it, because I really wasn't thinking along those lines at the time. In Thirteen, one of the boys is wearing a Dogtown T-shirt and in one scene he skates and surfs, so perhaps this was meant to be."

Bare-chested Jackass

Straight women and gay men will certainly appreciate Hardwicke's perspective in some key scenes in the film. Towards the end of Lords, Johnny Knoxville has an extended scene, sans shirt. "He's so hot! It was rough for me when I had to be in the dressing room and he was in and out of different outfits. He's awesome. At one point he said, ‘I think I'm too fat for this shirtless scene.' I was like, ‘No, really Johnny, it's absolutely fine.'"

Hardwicke says she looked at three films before production commenced on Lords of Dogtown. And all of them, perhaps not surprisingly, are staples of American cinema in the '70s, the time many argue is the last great decade for that national cinema. "I watched A Woman Under the Influence, Mean Streets and Five Easy Pieces. I confess, I haven't even seen Kids since it came out. It's funny, because I'm the exact opposite of many of my favourite filmmakers. Richard Linklater, for example - he'll watch a film over and over again, seeing it ten times and talking about it, and then referencing it in one of his movies. He'll reference other films and bits of pop culture extensively - and that makes for incredible movies. But I tend to see things about once, and then, though it's sunk in somewhere in my consciousness, don't think about it very carefully when I'm actually in production. I just try to think about the best way to tell the story."

Still, as Hardwicke tells it, certain comparisons she won't argue with.

"I showed the film to Sean Penn last week. He said, ‘Wow, that really was a lot like Mean Streets.'

"That made me very happy."

Lords of Dogtown opens Friday, June 3

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