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Was it tough to convince people to take you guys seriously?
Rob Dyrdek: We wrote a 20-page treatment, and took it to a friend who is a Hollywood agent. You gotta keep in mind that this is before Rob and Big and everything so it wasn’t like we had this huge rep in Hollywood, and they told us it was good. Then they told us someone had to write the script. Nino told me he wanted to do and that he had already done scripts – that was the first time I’d ever heard about it!
Nino Scalia: Well here’s the thing, I had never told Rob that I wrote scripts. I wasn’t ashamed but I had just moved to LA from NY and I was twenty five with a bunch of cynical skaters for friends and it would have been weird for me to say “Hey guys I’m really coming out to LA to write scripts,” you know? So when I told Rob he was like “What the fuck?” He had no idea. But I had gone to this high school that was like the “Fame” of Philadelphia and I went for film making and writing. Then I became a skater and all I wanted to do was skate, but I had written tons of stuff. Rob put me through the ringer about it and I had to say “There is no way I’m not doing this!” I would write tons of shit and send it to Rob and go over notes, go over notes, half the time I was like “What the fuck?” But that’s typical RD status, that’s just how the dude operates.
Once the script was written what happened next?
Rob Dyrdek: Everyone was saying we had to get someone else to finance it, that’s just how shit works, so we decided to go that route. We put together this budget and went out to find financing.
Chris Zam: I had a production company so we ran out and looked for some financier people to make it happen and we brought a couple to the table. Rob was there meeting with the people and he heard a couple weird things come out of people’s mouths so he pulled the whole project and decided to do it himself.
Rob Dyrdek: So I’m sitting in this room with these football money dudes, and I give them the speech of a lifetime, the most passionate shit I can come with about how important it is that we get this movie right and all of a sudden one of the dudes says, “I think I speak for all of us, we knew how big skateboarding was when we walked into the mall and saw a kid rolling on his heels.” So I had to say fuck that and do it all myself. No fuckin way man. Heelys are you fucking kidding me?
Let’s talk about the casting. Did you really have the parts written specifically for each dude like P Rod, Terry etc and why did think that would work?
Rob Dyrdek: How could it not, those are those dudes. For it to be real it had to be them. They live that life, they know this shit, and they really do the tricks. There was never any other way we were gonna do it.
Nino Scalia: From the get go we knew P Rod would be the best guy for the main part so he was Derrick right from the start. We knew that Rob was going to have to be the bad guy, and this was way before Rob and Big was even a blip on anyone’s radar. Then one weekend Rob told me he had seen the Haggard movie Bam did and that Dunn had killed it. Then Terry, again, we knew that he would fit. So the choices were kind of made for us. If we were going to pull skateboarders in to act, it was gonna be these dudes or no one. It had to be Rob, Paul, Terry and Dunn.
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