Spike: I definitely knew I liked film. I mean, I liked photography. I didn’t understand how film worked, but I would certainly be hypnotized. I liked Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back, movies that made me fall into a world. I spent a lot of time playing in my room and making up worlds.
Judd: Did you read?
Spike: Not a lot, but yeah. I think that I might have had some reading problems. I’m still a super-slow reader. If somebody wants me to read their script, it’s like dread—I know it’ll take me a good six hours to read it. But, you know, I wish—I think it’s rare to find a teacher like you had. I had a photography teacher in high school who was cool and encouraging, Mr. Stallings. But for the most part I would write something that I thought was funny, a short story or something, and the teachers would say, “Bad handwriting, bad grammar, no paragraphs.” They would rip it apart and give me a bad grade.
Judd: No acknowledgment of the soul of it?
Spike: No acknowledgment of the humor or imagination or whatever. In elementary school, they thought I had learning disabilities and they wanted me to get tested, you know, at the room down the hall. There was a special classroom for kids with learning disabilities.
Judd: Do you think your reading problems made you more visual?
Spike: Maybe. I mean, it does seem like directors often come to directing through either photography or writing and I was definitely more, you know, I liked writing. But as soon as I got to the magazine in California, I started focusing on photography because it was more exciting to me.
Judd: What were you getting paid?
Spike: Fifteen grand a year, and then I got a raise to eighteen grand a year.
Judd: That’s not bad.
Spike: That was amazing, actually. For back then, a kid right out of school? And I loved what I was doing. After a year I thought I was going to stay out here for another year and then go to school next year. And it was halfway through that second year that it dawned on me: Most of the kids getting out of college would love to have the job I had. And I started to realize how much I was learning and that this was kind of—
Judd: This was your college.
Spike: This was my college. And I was around all these other really creative writers and photographers and interesting people. I would just watch them, watch how their minds worked, ask them all a million questions, and be inspired by them.
Judd: I had such a similar trajectory, because I came out to college and I knew I couldn’t afford it. There was this ticking clock. I only went for a year and a half but I knew from day one that my parents wouldn’t be able to afford it. I knew it could end any day. I got a job at school making burritos and I was making a little money trying to do stand-up comedy at night, but it dawned on me that no one in my family was obsessed with figuring out how we were going to pay for it. My whole family was happy when I dropped out. But when I was in high school I wrote for Laugh Factory magazine. And through the magazine I interviewed David Brenner and Henny Youngman and that was my first connection to comedians. Then I was an intern at Comic Relief. When I was in college, they did their first benefit, and I worked it for free. Afterwards, they said, “Do you want to stay on?” They paid me like two hundred dollars a week and then after two–three years I got it up to four hundred dollars a week. I was writing jokes for comics on the side and before I knew it I’m like, Oh my God, I’m making like eight hundred dollars a week—half from Comic Relief and half just writing jokes. And it was the same thing. I was around people that I could watch.
Spike: From the time I was thirteen, I was so into the BMX and skate world—that was like the comedy world to me—but I kept thinking, That’s not a job. You know, I’ve got to go to college and get a real job. But it was the thing that I loved. Getting to work on the thing that you’re always thinking about anyways is like the biggest—that’s the goal.
Judd: What did your parents think of you going deep into the BMX world?
Spike: My mom was very encouraging, I think, because she saw how excited I was about it.
Judd: She recognized that sense of fun.
Spike: Yeah, I think so. I think she trusted me. Looking back, I had a point of view about what things meant to me and she saw that. Like if you’re told that something should be taken seriously, you should try and figure out why before you take it seriously. I always wanted to know why before I believed something.
Judd: The thing I was thinking when you were talking was when we were young, there was no Internet. When I was interested in a subject—like, oh, I wonder what happened to Lenny Bruce—I would have to go to the library and get out the microfiche. Today, kids are so savvy. All that information is just sitting there. You can look up Martin Scorsese and watch hundreds of interviews with him. But we were really in the fucking woods. If you wanted to know something, it was hard to find out. Like, I didn’t even see a picture of USC before I went there. I didn’t visit. There were no photos. Where would you get a photo of it? You’d have to write a letter: “Can you send me a brochure of USC?” My parents didn’t even know what I did at school. I filled out all my applications. Like today, if you have a kid, you’re there constantly. You’re so deep in their lives. But my parents didn’t know what the hell I was doing, most of the time. Was that what your experience was like?
Spike: Yeah, but my mom was really encouraging in wanting me to work at this BMX shop in Rockville or to go on tour, or letting me move out to California. She was super-supportive of it. But, yeah, I’d be gone for three months on summer tour and she wouldn’t know where I was.
Judd: I would never think to do that in a million years. My daughter’s sixteen. The idea of shipping her out…But I did the same thing. I would just jump on the train and go to Poughkeepsie to interview Weird Al Yankovic. I didn’t know where I was. I used to go to the city by myself all the time when I was fifteen.
Spike: My dad lived in New York so I would go back and forth. I went to school a little bit in New York and, yeah, by the time I was ten, I was wandering around the city by myself all the time.
Judd: That’s when the city was dangerous.
Spike: We got mugged in Central Park. I’d get chased on my BMX bike. But also, going back to the idea of—one of the things I got from working in the bike shop and just being a part of skateboarding in general is that everything—and I would have never known this intellectually at the time—but in skateboarding, the city is a playground. The city is for you to reinvent. You’re looking at it in a different way than everybody else is. You’re looking at handrails in a different way. The things that people might sit on to have lunch, the ledges, you’re looking at what you can do, tricks you can do or lines you can do and everything is to be invented.
Judd: Is skateboard culture progressive? Because it seems like there are so many artists that come out of it. Like, I love Mike Mills. There’s so many others, too—Templeton and all of the Beautiful Losers artists. Is that part of what they’re taking from that culture?
Spike: There’s no one way to do skateboarding. It is athletic but it is also really creative. It’s a very individual, individual-minded thing. And especially in the eighties or early nineties, when it wasn’t that popular. It wasn’t on TV. It didn’t have the X Games. We didn’t have skate parks. You had to go out of your way to be a part of it.