“Rachelle (and I) met on YouTube as 12-year-olds trying to make skate videos,” Moran explains. “We were friends over the internet for, like, two years until we met at this ‘girls’ sesh’ at House of Vans, and then we instantly became friends in real life. One day, we were taking the G train and talking loudly, and Crystal overheard us and came over and asked if we wanted to do a short film. She was like, ‘Are there more of you?’ I knew Dede (Lovelace) and Ajani (Russell) from high school, and Kabrina (Adams) through other girls in the city that I used to skate with. I knew the twins (Jules and Brenn Lorenzo) from the Chelsea skate park. So I brought everybody together.”
“While we were doing the short film, we were talking about it and we were like, ‘We need to stick together because what we have is really awesome, it’s magical,’” recalls Russell. “And Rachelle was like, ‘Let’s be a skate crew, I already have a name.’ She would watch girls’ skate videos on YouTube and sometimes in the comments guys would say, ‘She needs to get back in the kitchen, go make me a sandwich!’”
“The idea,” deadpans Moran, “is that if it’s a kitchen we’re allowed to be in it, so we’re skateboarding over here in our kitchen.” Just like that, The Skate Kitchen was born on Instagram. But Skate Kitchen the movie was intended as something else. “I originally wanted to do a documentary,” says Moselle. “I was in Poland at this incredible film festival called New Horizons, and I saw this movie called All These Sleepless Nights, which follows these two boys around for a year and a half.
It’s kind of a documentary, but it has these narrative arcs where (director Michal Marczak) shifted things with his subjects to make it feel like a narrative film. So there I was, on the jury with all these creative, out-of-the-box filmmakers, and I saw Kim Yutani, who is now the head of programming at Sundance. I showed her the short, and she said to me, ‘Why are you going to make a documentary? Why don’t you just expand what this is?’ After that, I decided to make a feature film. Then I became psycho for a year.”
To develop the story of Camille, a young skater who commutes to the city and falls in with an all-girl skate crew, Moselle followed the gang and pulled anecdotes from their everyday lives. “The character (of Camille) and her whole journey is similar to mine,” says Vinberg. “(Like) the fact she’s from Long Island. I take the train into the city and I was taken in by Nina and Kabrina. They did teach me a lot and I did fight with them, specifically with Nina. I was naive and didn’t understand how things worked, so that part is all true. It was hard filming sometimes, because we would do a scene based on something that had happened the day before and, like, I wasn’t over it! It was a big dose of introspection. I was like, ‘Oh my god… I’m an asshole. I’m mean!’”
“I’m so inspired by these girls,” Moselle explains. “It was easy. (I said), ‘Let’s hang out and talk about what this movie is going to be.’ We spoke about things happening in their real lives. Then we decided there needed to be a love interest and Rachelle was like, ‘Oh, you know, Jaden (Smith) hit me up on Instagram, maybe he should be in it – and he can skate!’”
For his part in the film, Smith had the particular challenge of immersing himself in a world, and a community, that was already intact. “It was about letting (the girls) show me,” he reveals. “Just open-mindedness – not really talking, just listening. And when I wasn’t talking, I really understood how everybody else spoke. I wanted to listen and absorb it.” For someone who traverses the worlds of music, fashion and movie stardom, while operating as a centre of gravity for the Calabasas multimillionaire jet-set, the notion of playing a supporting role in an all-female indie flick might seem odd. But Smith considered it a no-brainer. “When Crystal reached out I’d already seen The Wolfpack and was like, ‘Oh shit, she’s the real deal,’” he says. “I’d been making skate videos already in California, and she was like, ‘Let’s really get into this skate film,’ so I was 100 per cent down, no question.”
Jaden wears all clothes Jaden Smith + G-Star RAW
Photography Roe Ethridge, styling Elizabeth Fraser-Bell
Read more from Dazed here
Words & Image credit: Dazed Digital
