We didn’t think that we would get a more dense Suciu interview than what Chrome Ball released last week. But Farran Golding unveiled a verbose piece via Slam City this morning that takes the cake. Complete with literary recommendations, it falls far outside the range of the typical skate interview. Pretentiousness aside, Suciu’s latest Q&A contains some interesting insights into the intricacies of making Verso that are worth checking out.
What was the dynamic like between you and Justin throughout Verso?
It was great and obviously successful but we had some difficult times in that Justin didn’t quite understand what I was trying to do with the last section. It’s not that he couldn’t understand it, it’s that he felt people weren’t going to look so hard into it so he didn’t want to look so hard into it himself. He just wanted to see what he thought people would see. But the day that it came out people were already talking.
“Whoa, the tricks mirror and he does the front 5050 at end because it’s at the beginning.”
“The switch backside flip mirrors the nollie frontside flip.”
Justin talked to me that night and said, “Dude, it’s crazy, people have already explained this shit to me way better than you have,” and I’m like, “Are you fucking kidding me? I laid it out. I made a whole graph and a chart. There’s no way you couldn’t have understood this.”
Is that an exaggeration?
No, I put it down on paper and made a fucking beautiful little graph, basically. I organised everything and showed him the overall structure of it and how it works, [laughs]. I think he was worried, as I was too, about ending with a conceptual thing where you end with a frontside 5050 and you’re basically taking the piss.
“Here’s my fucking great video part and here’s a little 5050.”
On top of that, he was so close to the process that he was worried I wasn’t going to get the trick. For a long time it seemed like I couldn’t do it. I had the idea two years ago, I started filming all the lines and got five or six of them in the first year on from having the idea. I started trying the last one around September 16th [last year] and I finally landed it on September 16th this year. I tried it three times in Madrid then I realised it just wasn’t the answer; it was downhill and the ledge didn’t grind that well so I thought that maybe I’d just try it somewhere else. I kind of gave up. That was back in April and I told Justin we should put it out without that final section
The way that I told him was just out of complete frustration and dejection and I didn’t really mean it so it was hard for him to understand what I was saying. Basically, what I was saying was, “I hate this trick. I don’t ever want to try it again. Don’t ever talk to me about it. Don’t ever act like we’re going to film it again… But we actually are going to film it so please wait for me,” [laughs].
It was a psychologically trying process for the both of us so you can imagine we had a difficult time understanding each other because we were having a hard time understanding ourselves. Then working on the edit together in the last couple of days before the first premiere was really fun. We went into it stressed and instead of saying, “We’ll figure it out when we get there.” I told him point-blank, “This shit isn’t working out the way I want it to.”
I wanted to get it all out on the table and have him be stressed and ready to go into this thing gung-ho. To an extent, that wasn’t very nice of me but it helped because when we sat down he had already done a ton of work. I just told him the parts that I wanted to look at, how I wanted things to sync up and very quickly things started working better. It was a big change and after each night we would sit, he would smoke and I would drink a beer and he would say, “It’s going well but you need to get better at asking me to change things because every time you say, “You need to change something” I feel like the world is going to end and we’re going to have to change so much. Then we do it and it isn’t so bad.”
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