With Stacy, it was interesting because you know he was within all this chaos, all these different lives that were so broken and so much anger and so much frustration and their skating came out of that, their different styles came out of that.

I felt like I was betraying my family. But I knew that trying to explain my emotions in a movie like this was more important than leaving them unspoken.

So for me having that element of being able to be competitive wasn’t a problem. I’m very competitive. I thought if I could skate first, acting would come second. I could say my lines and then go do what I was saying. You don’t have to fake it, you’re not really acting.

If you don’t know how to hold a board, you’re going to look phony. That’s was the biggest pressure for me was to have that respect and to look up to that.

There was a double-wide mobile home directly across from (New Prospect Baptist) church, .. The mobile home even had tie-down straps on it, but it was thrown clear across the highway. Part of the mobile home struck the church, and part of the frame ended up in the woods behind the church.

There is no creature so perfect in wisdom and knowledge but may learn something for time present, and to come, by times past.

To live with God is to live always in the present, with him who is the eternal Now.

Tony, Stacy and Jay really looked at life completely different and that played into everything that they did, whether it was skating or with their friendships. And for the three of us, we had such a close relationship off screen, that it was so easy to have that on screen.

Columbine was so frightening. And the media took off with it, like everything else, so it instilled more fear in people. You’re looking around at school for kids like the ones who committed the shootings, and you feel wrong for doing that, you know?

Prior to Elephant I’d taken about six years of acting classes in Portland, but there’s not a huge market there. The only thing we have is commercial stuff, and that didn’t really appeal to me. So this is really a dream come true.