We here at SPoT have known and loved Chris Cole since back in those glorious days of neon XL T’s and swishy pants, and we couldn’t be more excited about the news that he’s getting his own movie, Motivation 2: The Chris Cole Story.

Two things you’ll need to do to prepare for the experience of watching it. First go on over to Netflix to check out the original Motivation movie, which follows Nyjah, Shecks, Luan, and other key dudes over the course of the 2012 Street League series which [SPOILER ALERT!] Nyjah wins. Hahaaaa like you didn’t know. Then read the interview below that I did with the films’ director, Adam Lough.

Some background. A couple years ago I interviewed Lough for the Xgames website when The Motivation 1 was about to drop. Apparently the piece I wrote was amazing enough that they offered me the scoop on The Chris Cole Story for the SPoT site, which you’re looking at now, a site that we alternatively like to call The Yellow Journal. I was psyched for the chance because, I mean, how often do you get to talk with someone who has made actual movies? In addition to the skate stuff, Lough has also done award winning docs on Lee Scratch Perry, OG graffiti dudes, and our favorite Tampa Pro crasher Lil’ Wayne.

Here, like a slightly less crabby Larry King, I asked Lough the tough questions about the Chris Cole project, at least one of which I stole from the Slap Message Boards. Lough proved to me again that unless you’re talking to Rodney Mullen, you never get a better perspective on skateboarding than you do through the eyes of someone that doesn’t actually consider himself a skateboarder.

Motivation 2.0: The Chris Cole Story will be available on iTunes June 23rd.
And If you’re going to be in the LA area on June 20th, you can go to the premier, where I’ll bet you get to meet Chris Cole. Just a hunch. Get tickets here.

Interview with the director: Adam Lough

I guess you could call it a spin off too. It’s all semantics. But, you know, in the movie sense of like categorizing it I’d characterize it as a sequel. A spinoff kind of makes me think of television more.


There’s kind of two answers to that, there’s the technical logistical answer, and then there’s the more of the creative emotional reason why.


On the boring technical level, Chris was the only dude who actually reached out to me and said, “I loved the first film and can we do something together.” So, you know, it was super rad for him to do that. And then on more of a creative level, it’s funny, I was looking back at some really old interviews I did for The Motivation 1, and I stumbled upon this interview I did, and in the interview they asked me, “Who of the eight skaters in the first film was I rooting for the most?” And I don’t even remember saying this, but I was like, “Chris Cole.” Because Chris and I have the most in common. Chris and I are about the same age. We’re both dads, we both have kids, we both grew up on the East Coast, me in DC, him in Philly. We even have kind of similar personality types, so I felt a sort of kinship to Chris and his story. The way he looks at life is similar to me in many regards. So on a creative level I was definitely also just stoked to tell the story of an East Coast skater coming up in the 90s, because that’s where I’m from, the music and the movies and everything that influenced 90s skaters influenced me.


Yeah, I guess I have a different perspective on him. From working with him, he’s very polished in his professional style. He knows how to operate in front of the cameras, he never tried to duck us, or make an excuse about why he didn’t want to film and stuff like that. I got the opposite perspective. But at the same time, he’s not a camera whore.


Right, that was definitely the nut we tried to crack over the course of making the film. And getting Chris to open up, I wouldn’t say it was a challenge, because he did, and there are some very real moments in the film that I think will surprise people.


Yeah, one hundred percent Rodney Mullen. We were excited to talk to everybody, people I’d never met before, like Tony Hawk, Jamie Thomas, um, Bam, you know?


Oh absolutely, I mean the whole interview was probably the single most intense interview I’ve done in ten years.


In every way. He led us down a lot of paths during the interview that were unexpected.


Well, with this one it was definitely some of both. Obviously with the first film it was just straight up, like, “We’re seeing where it goes.” We had no idea who was going to win, we don’t know any of these dudes’ backstories because going into it I really didn’t, with the exception of maybe like Sheckler and P-Rod. But with this one we wanted to tell Chris’s story and touch upon things that people didn’t necessarily know about, and there is a lot in his backstory that no one knows about and it comes out in the film. A lot. When we screened the rough cut for Steve Berra he was shocked, he was just like, “I had no idea about that stuff.”


I haven’t done the full count on it, I know with The Motivation it was like 120 hours.


Oh absolutely, there’s a whole other movie that we cut out of it.


The more experience you get with it, you realize everything is in service of telling a good story. It’s not as hard as it used to be when I was younger.


For sure, Albert Maysles and DA Pennebaker, those dudes, and even a lot of the stuff Werner Hertzog does in documentary, I try to capture that feeling.


Well, Hertzog defines it as “ecstatic truth,” you just want to reach deep down and feel something real and authentic and beautiful in life, you know? To inspire people and keep people going. That’s part of the reason, just a small part of the reason I tell stories, you want to make some sense out of life, and by documenting human struggle it helps you to make some sense out of life. And believe it or not, Chris has had a lot of struggle in his life, and continues to, and in the first half of the film it touches upon these struggles in the past that a lot of people don’t know about. And the second half touches upon the struggles that he’s having right now. You know, things that people maybe aren’t thinking about, but once you see the film I feel like you’re going to really be both inspired by his story, to keep going, and realize that, if you’re a kid trying to get put on, or trying to go pro in skateboarding, or in any sport really, that you’ll be inspired, that Chris made it. I ask him in the course of the film what he wants this film to be, and he’s like, “I just want this to be the story of a skate rat kid who made it.” And I think that’s what it is one hundred percent. He was just a skate rat kid, with a single mom, growing up outside Philly, who against all the odds, made it, and he made it big you know?


Yeah, Fresh to Hesh?


It’s covered fully. But we don’t position it like it was a big struggle for Chris. We cover it more with a sense of humor. And Bam is really funny, he has some funny quotes about that, and Jamie [Thomas], he addresses it in a very serious severe way, and countered by Bam joking around, and Chris has the final sort of word on it. But that wasn’t so much a struggle as it was a funny little side note, but it’s really kind of interesting sort of comedic relief within the film.


Absolutely. You hit the nail on the head. With a guy who is so supernaturally talented as Chris Cole, he could be skating in a clown suit and still fucking, you know, still get put on. But if you suck, or are just half way, those things can just destroy you. But in retrospect, that was never a possibility with Chris Cole, he’s like one in a million.


I’m a lot more into it now. For sure. But I’m not one of these obsessive fans.


I haven’t watched it on purpose. I try not to watch other skate content because I don’t want to let it affect me. So I haven’t watched it, is it good?


Man, you know, I don’t look at it on a macroscopic level, it’s more microscopic, it’s like, “Do I want to do this now?” I don’t look at it like, “How does this fit into my cannon?” If it does, that’s rad, but if it doesn’t and I still want to do it then I do it.


Well, that’s a good question, because the Motivation was very successful in our eyes, in every way, but we didn’t consider doing a second one. What happened was, I was getting hit up on social media at least twice a week by people saying, “Are you going to do a second one?” So that went on for about a year, so that’s like over 100 people hitting you up, and you start to consider it after a while, like, “Maybe we should do one.” I was so exhausted after the first one that I didn’t really consider it right away, but obviously there was some time that had passed, that movie came out at Tribeca in April of 2013. That’s a full two years from right now.


Yeah, it took about a year.


I think there’s one very brief ten second moment that got cut out of the first film, where Chris goes through his bedroom closet where he shows us the yellow camo t-shirt that he skated in. He still has it, the “bananaflage” as his friends called it, and he pulls it out of his closet and shows it to us. That scene didn’t make it into the first film, it just was like, an awesome scene that we couldn’t use, but we found a place for it here and it actually works really well in here.


Yes, we did actually. You know, and this is sort of the exciting thing about making a doc, you have no idea what’s going to happen. I mean, Chris Cole is the defending champion, so we were filming with him at all the events, and he didn’t make it, he didn’t qualify even to get to the finals, so I’ll leave it open to your curiosity of what happens in the film and how it’s addressed and how it fits in there, but to answer your question, we did go, and we were expecting one thing and it became a completely different other. So there’s an interesting way that’s addressed in the film in a very real way.


Yeah, we’re working on a third movie that I’m not going to say what it is yet, but it’s more thematic, it’s not on a specific skater, and then we’re developing a fourth film that I’m really excited about but it’s on a specific skater and we haven’t locked it in yet so I can’t say, but I’m hoping that it happens.

Here’s a link to my 2013 write up of the original Motivation movie, if you care...

-Paul Zitzer