VINCE VIELUF: Very little.
JOEY KERN: Zero.
Did you want to?
VINCE VIELUF: We tried every day. We had people screaming at us. I do jump off the roof, that’s really me. I skate off the roof into the pool. I did that three times.
How deep was the pool?
VINCE VIELUF: Like 8 feet. It was terrifying.
JOEY KERN: Do you know what take they used?
VINCE VIELUF: The third one. I was scared the second and third time I did it because my shoes were wet and the roof was wet. I’m up there kind of slipping and I’m [thinking], “Okay, if I take off running and get to the edge and my foot slips, I’m dead.”
How good a skater are you?
VINCE VIELUF: I’m good at skating around, like I use it for transportation, but we had the best skaters on the planet [in this movie]. These guys are constantly winning all the extreme sports gigs. It was never a thing like we’re going to skate.
JOEY KERN: I skated a lot when I was a kid but in the movie, no. We didn’t need to, we didn’t want to, and they didn’t want us to. I skated a lot as a kid and I loved it. We can both skate. We can do some tricks. We look like we’re skaters on film.
Did you learn much from the pros on the set?
VINCE VIELUF: We learned a few things. I learned how to do a kick. They loved showing us. Skaters are the coolest people on the planet. They are so laid back. You’ll be sitting in their crew [made up of] every race and every political bent you can think of - punk rockers to hip hop dudes. And it’s like none of that ever comes up. That’s why I was afraid Hollywood was going to screw it up. When I read that script, I was like, “Man, I don’t want this to be ‘Blue Crush’ with a skateboard,” because this is real to these people. This is a lifestyle. It’s about relaxation, which Hollywood is not about. But when I found out that I found out that it was going to be a seamless film, that it was going to be about the jokes, the rock and roll, and the skating… Tons of skaters who went to our screenings that were in the movie – and I mean they are the best in the world – they were all just laughing. They’re like, “Dude, that’s so what it’s like.”
How different was the original script from what’s up on the screen?
JOEY KERN: When I got there - when I landed on Friday – I got there and I read the script and asked, “So when are we going to Vegas? When are we shooting there?” They’re like, “That’s not our script.”
VINCE VIELUF: We all had different scripts (laughing).
JOEY KERN: Literally. As an example that girl teaches me how to throw a pie and it’s a sexy scene, I take my glasses off and give them to her. There was a scene in the movie like that but it was terrible. I rewrote it and I brought it to the director and he’s like, “Great. Let’s do this. Let’s have this line and put this line back in…” It wasn’t all me but we put it back together and did that scene.
VINCE VIELUF: Every day was a puzzle.
JOEY KERN: Every day was a puzzle, which is good and bad.
But you guys were all on the same page as to what you wanted to do, right?
VINCE VIELUF: We’d eventually get there, yeah.
JOEY KERN: Sometimes it gets difficult when you have the four of us. Luckily we worked well together because it could be a struggle about what’s important. You need that director or that writer there to say, “Okay, that’s great, that’s funny and stuff like that, but this is what we need to get across.”
Shared Character Traits, Randy Quaid and First-Time Directors
