ROTOR Magazine

Interview by Mike Hughes

*Photograph provided by* *J. Grant Brittain*

Stacy Peralta has helped shaped skateboarding into what it is today. Believe it or not, there was once a time where artwork wasn’t even screen-printed onto decks and nobody knew what to make of people sliding around on boards in public spaces. Whereas today, it is commonplace. You can and probably should thank Stacy (among a couple of others) for that.

Stacy started his storied career in the 70’s where, at the ripe age of 15, he began competing with the Z-Boys. Which was a group of talent sponsored by Jeff Ho Surfboards and Zephyr Productions in Venice, California. By the age of 19, he would become one of the highest-ranking professional skateboarders of his generation. He has traveled the world over putting on displays and competing. He would go on to form one of the most successful skateboard brands of all time, Powell-Peralta. Peralta later put together an incredible consortium of talent better known as the Bones Brigade. Many of whom carved their own paths in the skateboard world and have carried the torch forward.

Stacy, I am thrilled to have a chance to catch up with you. I know you are currently directing a number of projects. We appreciate your time and energy. Let’s dive right in.

MH: From your formative days as a professional skateboarder as well as your involvement with Powell Peralta and the Bones Brigade, it seems like you’ve always been a highly functioning creative talent. Meaning, you set the bar very high for yourself. Is there any truth to that?

SP: At age 16 I was driving three of my surfing friends up the coast highway in my VW Squareback. The question arose; What are you doing to do after high school? My friend Dave sitting next to me said he was going to UCSB, Paul in the back was going to Art Center in Pasadena and next to him Stan was going to Art College. It was then my turn and I answered; “I think I’m going to become a plumber. “

MH: Sometimes I think what makes creative talents great at what they do can be driven by things like self-doubt, being self-critical or over-analyzing oneself. Did you ever find these things getting in the way either as a performance athlete, in business or as a director? Or, have you ever found these things as a driving force to become better?

SP: I’ve been plagued by self-doubt my entire life, I’ve never been able overcome it, I’ve only been able to get used to its presence. I’ve also never had a lot of confidence.

But what I do have is desire, a burning desire to do what I want to do and fortunately a way to transmit that desire to others. When I decide to do a new project I can think of nothing else but doing it, it just consumes me and it consumes me with an excitement that lights me up and that excitement is what sustains me through the journey no matter how difficult it may be.

I’ve discovered through my own personal experience and through the experience of mentoring young athletes and filmmakers - is that desire supersedes everything including talent. Talent in and of itself has no inherent value. Its value only comes into play when you infuse it with your attention and desire. It’s desire that makes the world move forward, it’s desire that propels us forward and it’s desire that gets us out of bed. For me desire is more important than any other personal quality or lack thereof. I can move forward with self-doubt and I can move forward with low confidence but I can’t move forward with a lack of desire.

Another example; Tony Hawk initially lacked all of the physical characteristics that make up what is considered a good skateboarder; he was thin, tiny, frail and physically weak. But he was able to overcome all of these inherent limitations because of his overwhelming desire to become good at skateboarding. I saw his development happen before my own eyes and it was his fierce and unrelenting desire that made it happen.

MH: There are certain traps that creatives can sometimes get ourselves in. Specifically, being a perfectionist, and the need to have our creative output liked in some way. Whether it’s your professional skateboarding career, the business side or your work as a director, are you a perfectionist? And has that ever caused problems for your creative output?

SP: I want to be good at what I’m doing and I want to get as close to my initial expectations as possible but what I’m really striving for is “connection and depth of feeling.”

The connection and how deeply I’m feeling is what eventually leads me into the “zone” and there is nothing more joyous than reaching the zone, that state of being where you get lost in the creative process. When it happens it’s pure magic because it’s at those moments that I lose myself and things begin to happen spontaneously and unexpectedly and I end up going places and producing creative work that I hadn’t anticipated, it all becomes this exhilarating surprise.

MH: Has the need to be liked, on any level, ever taken you down the wrong path?

SP: I don’t believe it’s ever taken me down the wrong path but it’s taught me important lessons about loneliness. Loneliness is a huge part of the creative process. We all want to be understood and we all want our initial ideas to be understood but it just doesn’t happen so easily and that can become very disconcerting and confusing which can lead to loneliness and feeling like an outsider. You feel you’re out on a ledge without a net.

I had to learn to live with the loneliness that comes with stepping out and trying to remain outside the box and it’s one of the most important lessons I’ve learned in my career.

Embarking on any creative endeavor of any kind means I’m going somewhere I haven’t been, a place that is without footprints, that is filled with uncertainty and the outcome is unknown. So the journey is a lonely one; I’m doing it alone and I’m trying to figure it all out as I’m moving through it and very few people will understand why I’m doing it and I don’t have the ability to articulate to them why I’m doing it because it’s still all so new to me.

And when I say loneliness, what I’m really trying to describe is living with the constant drum beat of uncertainty and insecurity and accepting that it is okay, that it’s normal to feel insecure and unsettled and it’s normal not to have all of the answers during the process. I don’t know how this is going to turn out, but it will never turn out unless I remain firmly committed to the journey. So I’ve learned to live like this and accept that it’s okay and that has helped me immensely.

MH: You have mentioned before that you struggle with the idea of disappointment. How has that manifested itself over the years? Where do you think it comes from and how do you/did you overcome it?

SP: Many people have seen my successes in the skateboarding world and in my films and I think it’s easy to assume it’s all been a series of exclamation points. But it’s hardly been that. I’ve had many ups and downs and many long deep valleys of disappointment.

I put the same amount of energy and effort into the projects I’ve done well as those I’ve failed at and I’ve failed at many. I’ve also had difficult transitions to navigate through in my life, which were filled with radical challenges. But I think the greatest skill I’ve learned throughout the decades was learning to fail, but even more important than that was learning how to manage myself through repeated failure. Failure is hard to endure and it brings out the worst in me but it’s also unavoidable. Some ideas just don’t work out. No matter how good they might be, they just don’t work out and I had to figure out how to manage myself through this if I was going to continue.

When we first starting skating inside empty swimming pools we had to learn how to fall on concrete, often from the very top of the pool straight down to the very bottom. Learning to fall on concrete at high speed was more important than any single trick we learned, because if we couldn’t learn to fall then we couldn’t skate the pool.

Falling is a skill to be learned and so is failure.

MH: In any creative industry, all of us experience that moment where a beautiful creative idea sometimes gets stone-walled, or outright rejected by people who don’t understand it. Looking back at the broad spectrum of your career, did anybody ever tell you that you couldn’t do something? Or that you shouldn’t do something? If so, how did you overcome it?

SP: My tombstone will read: “He couldn’t take another set of revisions.”

Bringing dreams to life is an exhilarating way to live but it’s also filled with periodic bone-crushing heartbreaks. Feeling deeply passionate about an idea and then being told no, is flat out hard to take but it goes with the terrain. It’s just another form of failure that you have to figure out how to navigate and manage yourself through.

But these setbacks also continuously remind me how good I have to be at selling my ideas. I win commercial jobs based on my ability to sell my ideas and myself as the director to the clients. I have to tell a better story and have a better pitch than the directors I’m competing against and it’s hard work, really hard work, and I don’t particularly like doing it, but I’ve got to do it if I want the job. The same goes when I’m pitching a film idea to a prospective financier; I have to tell a great story with great enthusiasm and passion because I need to get inside that person I’m trying to reach and move him or her to the point where they are now willing to sign a check. That’s a big ask of them and it requires everything I’ve got.

MH: Did you make any revelations after experiencing anything where the odds were stacked against you?

SP: Yes. I learned that I have to protect my innocence, the kid inside of me. I must remain vulnerable and I must remain humble but these creative trials we all go through can rip humility right out of us and lead us to becoming cynical and bitter and to me when that happens its game over. Nothing good comes from cynicism and bitterness. I want to remain open and vulnerable and it takes effort to maintain this and one of the ways I do is to learn new things because when I go through the learning process of something new I get to be a kook again, an amateur, a novice, a fool and I get to experience how bad I’m capable of being. I can’t over state how important this has been to me. Over the past two decades I’ve learned two new forms of surfing; Stand Up Paddle surfing on waves and Kiteboarding on waves. I was a total kook at both of them when I began and working through that kook phase where I’m completely bad, helpless and vulnerable taught me what a rare place that is to be. Being vulnerable leads to being humble and being humble is one of the most important human traits because humility is what keeps our hearts open.

Ghandi has a great quote: ‘What you do is not important, what is important is that you do it.”

MH: What would you tell people who haven’t been able to push past their own self-doubt to see their ideas come to fruition?

SP: Bringing dreams to life is a very tenuous process that has to be practiced and learned. When dreams come to us, they come to us raw and undeveloped, more like impressions or hints and very rarely do they arrive fully formed - and as such when they emerge within us we have to live with them in this undeveloped state for long periods of time as they slowly take shape and form within us, and it’s during this time which tends to be filled with uncertainty that everything can go wrong and we can lose our dreams by trying to rush them, because dreams are not linear and in many cases are totally irrational and make no sense whatsoever, it’s why we call them dreams. But this is why it’s so important not to share your dreams with others as they will crush them by telling you that your dreams make no sense – you have to understand that our minds demand that things make sense, our minds don’t deal with abstractions very well; our minds need things to be linear and sequential all of which dreams are not. But here is the irony, dreams cannot come into existence without the aid of the mind, but the very mind that aids in their birth can also destroy them because dreams cannot stand up to the logic and scrutiny of a mind that is too inquiring and demanding - if you allow your mind to apply too much sense and logic to your dreams, your dreams will wither and vanish because they can’t stand up to it, they have no defense for it.

Dreams don’t exist in the world of the mind, they exist in the world that is much deeper within us, in a place the mind cannot gain access too and in a place the mind cannot even understand. So the mind must be taught to act as a servant without the need for immediate results in order to help shepherd this delicate precious dream into existence, on its own time and accord, at its own pace and however it needs and wants to come into existence, the mind must simply be there to serve and not to control and to act only when given permission.

For me it has all been about learning this skill of how to live with uncertainty and feelings of insecurity and not knowing the outcome. And it’s not a skill that I have ever landed on in a fixed way, it’s a skill I learn over and over again with the experience of bringing each new dream to life.

MH: You’re probably best known in the realms of surf and skate culture. But you are quite a talented director. Also, a younger Stacy Peralta appeared in one of my favorite films of all time, Real Genius. When was your passion for film and filmmaking ignited and what has making films taught you?

SP: I fell into it. In the 80s with my skateboard company Powell/Peralta, I had created what is now considered the most competitively successful and innovative skateboard team of all time. We wanted to figure out a way to showcase our team to the world and we dreamed up a skateboard film. We couldn’t afford to hire a film company to make the film so the job fell on me. I got a production grade video camera and had an editing system installed on my kitchen table and I went to work. A year later in 1984 we had our first of ten films that I would eventually make for my company. From there I went on to directing second unit action sequences in a handful of motion pictures, then went on to seven years directing television and finally landed on making my own documentaries.

MH: What do you find in directing that you haven’t found in other creative endeavors?

SP: Every film and every commercial I direct is like starting a brand new business; you start out with a concept, you then put a great team of people together, you chose your locations and cast, and then you set the sails and go out and make the film or commercial based on that original concept and each one is just as challenging as the last one and it just never seems to get any easier. There is no blueprint, they are all so different and the medium requires so many unique skill sets and the wearing of so many hats, which is something I seem to like. I like the battlefield aspect of it, the speed and fury that goes with production; the constant pressure to make quick decisions and solve creative problems and how we’re always chasing the changing light or at the mercy of some random gardener with a leaf blower. And when it’s all done, you let everyone go and you close the store down only to begin again somewhere else with another team of people.

MH: Any current or upcoming projects you’ve got going on?

SP: In addition to my documentary films I’ve also got a vigorous career directing commercials and branded entertainment. I like the work I do in this field because I get to work with great people, the budgets are decent so I don’t have to beg and steal like I have to do on my films and this works allows me to sharpen my skills in a medium that is anywhere from 30 seconds to 10 minutes in length. It’s all about finding creative solutions and creative ways to tell unique stories.

Stacy Peralta

Pam Hogg

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