Rattray & McCrank interview
HUCK speaks to pro skaters John Rattray and Rick McCrank about their roles in new skate feature film, Machotaildrop.
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Films about skateboarding have a patchy history at best. Whenever someone tries to capture the essence of it, the result usually comes with a heavy whiff of fromage. Yet Machotaildrop, a new film by Alex Craig and Corey Adams, may just change things.
Pitching itself as a satire on the skate industry set in a fantasy world dominated by skate mega-corp Machotaildrop, the film tells the story of aspiring young skater Walter Rhum getting chewed up and spat out by the industry machine - with a heavy dose of weirdness!
At the night of its London premiere, HUCK caught up with pro skaters John Rattray and Rick McCrank, who played Machotaildrop's team riders Victor LeBonte and Blair Stanley respectively, to talk skateboarding, cinema and taking acting lessons from Joseph and the Technicolour Dreamcoat.
HUCK: How did you get involved in the film? I understand you both worked with Corey Adams and Alex Craig for the short film, Harvey Spannos?
Rattray: Well, me and Alex were visiting Vancouver and meet up with Corey and that lot. It was the skate connection but [Alex and Corey] were all super-interested in filmmaking and hit it off and started working on a couple of projects here and there. That lead to Harvey Spannos.
McCrank: They submitted it to FuelTV for a short film contest where ten people would win $100,000 to make a film. They thought that ‘well, they know Rick and he’s a pro skater so this might help us get the money.’
Rattray: The point was that it was financed by an alterative sports network so the premise had to incorporate skateboarding into the story line.
McCrank: With that, Harvey Spannos won the contest so they got a million dollar budget to do Machotaildrop.
Skateboarding films have a chequered history, what made you think that this film would be good?
Rattray: Nothing. It will just go down in that same chequered history as all the others but it was our friends who made it so we couldn’t say no.
McCrank: Yeah, it was something fun to do with your friends. That’s the only reason I did it.
Why do you think cinema struggles to do skateboarding justice?
McCrank: I think ‘cos they try to dramatise it. The only film that sorta worked with skating was Kids. And that was just sort of. It was a lifestyle thing, skating was just on the side. Even this one had drama in it as the people that were paying for it wanting to do different things than what these guys wanted to do so it didn’t come out pure.
The satire in the film seems to work because it’s set in such an outlandish world.
McCrank: Well, it may work for some people and not for others.
Rattray: I think you can get away with it a lot more if you go from the outset of satirising it rather than trying to be serious. If you approach something in skateboarding seriously, that’s gonna fail. Skateboarding isn’t something to be taken that seriously.
Obviously, neither of you are strangers to being filmed, but acting is a whole new level. How did you approach it?
Rattray: Well, my part is silent. I delved quite deeply into my memory banks of when we did Joseph and the Technicolour Dreamcoat in primary school. I thought, 'what could I learn from that experience?' It was quite a deep process. (laughs)
McCrank: He did have lines but they didn’t make the edit. For me, it was just trial and error. We had done Harvey Spannos and that was just Alex, Corey and a camera so it was easier and I wasn’t as nervous. This was in a foreign country with a crew and I just kind of fell into it and it worked out.
There is one scene when you two are duelling on a halfpipe, was that quite difficult to perform?
Rattray: Not really but we had to worry about our boards going in the river.
McCrank: They had a rope set up on the side of the ramp to catch on to. Falling on command wasn’t so hard though. The trick I chose was a noseblunt stall and you could just easily roll out of it and basically destroy your knees.
Rattray: Rick is exceptionally talented at skating in the manner that makes it appear that he’s never skated before. I don’t know how he does that, he must have been working on it
The film is a commentary on the skate industry and the disposing of pros when they reach a certain age, does that make you uncomfortable?
Rattray: Disposable heroes, my friend, disposable heroes. It doesn’t make us feel uncomfortable because we are very clear that those are the realities.
McCrank: Some people do it more gracefully than others but it’s a fact. You are on a road with a cliff at the end.
Rattray: All will go different ways but all will try and take you with them. (laughs)
What are your exit strategies then?
Rattray: As Gary Lineker said, ‘there’s life after football’. I do illustration, collage. I want to pursue collage a lot.
McCrank: I don’t have one yet.
Rattray: Skateboarding is all you have. (laughs) We rely on Alex [Craig] to keep coming up with little productions, then we can keep getting in on them.
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Rattray & McCrank interview (text) by Ed Andrews is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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