Once playing a shy high school senior drooling over Elisha Cuthbert in The Girl Next Door, 20-year-old Emile Hirsch has finally graduated. Taking on the brash, hard-edged rebel Jay Adams, Hirsch radiates in Lords of Dogtown.
Wilder and harder to reign in than the rest of the Z-Boys gang, Jay represents the sports dazzling highs and hardcore lows, which Hirsch attributes to Jay’s crazy kind of spontaneous energy which ultimately wouldn’t let him go pro: “He couldn’t market himself the same way as the other guys. Jay was never really into the business side of it. He was more of the skate and destroy kind,” Hirsh explains.
At 19, Hirsch is considered a veteran in the ‘biz’ himself and talks to Hollywood.com about his rebellious past and what he learned from his Hawaiian holiday spent with Adams himself.
Were you already familiar with the style of skating in the movie?
Hirsch: “Yeah, as far as new school skating goes. I never did ‘burts’, I never did pool skating, so I had to learn with them and John [Robinson] ended up being better than me. But as new school skating goes–grinds, flip tricks and all that–that’s what I did in middle school. You know, me and my friends on the weekend we would go, we would break into a high school and we would skate until the security guard chased us away. It was more than just a part, it was like this is where I was from. You know, this is what I did.”
Did you ever sneak into someone’s backyard?
Hirsch: “I remember a really funny story. We were skating El Camino High illegally and a security guard chased us; it was like out of a movie. I was climbing over the fence and I was the last one and my pants got stuck and he’s like loving it. He’s coming up on me, he knows he’s going to get me and right at the last minute I just kicked it free and I went over. And we were just like, ‘F*** you!’ and we were screaming at each other. And he was like, ‘You damn kids, you kids!’ I was just like so happy that I got away, then we just got out of there. You know, just little skate rats.”
Was the Jay Adams’ character the one you were most drawn to from the beginning?
Hirsch: “Yeah, definitely. I saw the documentary [Dogtown and Z-Boys]. My dad was like, ‘You gotta go see this,’ and you know, he’s knows skating, and he was like, ‘You gotta go check this out.’ I walked out and I thought, ‘I wish I could play that Jay Adams part. That part was awesome.’ I was probably a little too young at the time, but then a couple years later, I heard they were making the movie. I was like, ‘Oh cool.’ Apparently [David] Fincher wanted to cast actual skaters who couldn’t act at all to do it and you know, that never got off the ground because I guess, you know, they couldn’t act or something. Then a year later, I was working on Imaginary Heroes and Art Linson, the executive producer, goes, ‘You know, we’re making Dogtown right now…’Yeah, so you know maybe you could play Jay Adams,’ and I was like ‘Shwing! Reeeaaalllyy?’ You know, I had to struggle to focus on my work on Imaginary Heroes for the rest of the day. I was just thinking about Dogtown.
You also spent time with Jay Adams in Hawaii? Hirsch: “Yeah, well, originally I was like, ‘I’m going to go to Hawaii on my own, and I’m going to hang out with him for seven days and I’m going to sleep on his couch and we’re just going to hang out.’ And I told that to everybody and Catherine [Hardwicke] was like, ‘No, you’re not. You’re not going to Hawaii.’ You know, she was like, ‘You gotta train.’ She was just scared I was gonna go on my own and get into some serious trouble with Jay because Jay’s very wild.”
So, he hasn’t changed much?
Hirsch: “He’s not very different. And so it ended up being that Art Linson would accompany me to Hawaii and we went and it was for my 19th birthday and we hung out with Jay Adams. I sensed immediately that Jay doesn’t like to be interviewed, he hates being interviewed in fact. And he’d answer me with such vague answers and such short answers and I was like, ‘OK, you know what, forget the interview. I’m just going to pull back all my troops and just let him kinda have some free air and maybe I’ll get gold if he starts talking about himself on his own. Maybe he’ll just start giving up stuff,’ and that’s what he did. So I just kinda left him alone and he started talking and telling me different stories. And his biggest piece of advice was, ‘Make sure that the relationship between my mom and me is strong ’cause it was, we were best friends,’ and ego was poison. Those were his two main things for me. He always disliked ego and people thinking they were better than anyone else because they could do something. And I really loved that advice.”
Was Jay concerned about how you’d portray him?
Hirsch: “He wasn’t about to tell me how to play it. You know, he was just really like so easy going about it. He was like, ‘You know, I’m not going to tell you about how you do what you do, or whatever,’ which is cool. And he was really nice. There’s a certain kind of movement to him that you can only really sense if you’re with him. In the documentary, he comes off real cool and calm, like super cool. But when you’re around him you get a little bit more of a sense of the franticness of his everyday life. He can be really cool and calm when he wants to be. You know, if he’s being interviewed or something, he’ll be real cool. But when the cameras are off sometimes you’ll see what wildness they’re talking about.”
Is there anything you wanted more of in Dogtown?
Hirsch: “A lot of more of the insanity. I mean, people are like, ‘Your character is so wild,’ and I’m like, ‘I wanted to make him even wilder.’ You know some of the stuff just wouldn’t work with the story. I wanted him to like skate and snatch a wig off an old ladies head. I wanted him to skate on the freeway and get a ticket, you know? I wanted to have scenes where he’s throwing dirt clods at people and hitting them in the head. And there was actually a really messed up [story] that never made it in which he takes this car that had like insane amounts of exhaust shooting out of it. And apparently–this is really mean and I don’t support it at all–he, like, backs up in front of an old lady carrying groceries and just like floors it while breaking and just like covers this woman in a cloud of smog and then puts it in drive and speeds off. And I thought that would show like what a brat he could be.”
Is there any correlation between what those guys went through in the ’70s with sudden fame and success and what’s happening in your life right now?
Hirsch: “Yeah, I mean, I definitely hope I learn from the film and having the whole ideas on fame. But at the same time, I feel like I’m a lot different person. [Jay] had a different background a little bit than I do.”
