In a decades-long career spent capturing seminal personalities in celebrated portraits and deep conversations, Sam Jones has made just three documentaries. Each of them examines the process of becoming a legend—of music, of sport—and explores the emotional spaces between the impact they have on the world, and the effect of that impact on themselves.

Jones’ first, 2002’s I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, broke the mold for music documentaries at the time with its intimate focus on process (the making of Wilco’s album Yankee Foxtrot Hotel) rather than chronology-with-archive-footage. It is, writes Zach in a recent review, “pretty much the platonic ideal of a great rockumentary: filmmaker documents band at a career-defining moment, right as they’re recording their masterpiece, and then captures way more of a story than he bargained for.”

If Jones’ latest film is much more of a straightforward biographical documentary, that’s because the archive footage within it has already captured so much of the obsessive process that took Tony Hawk to the top of the world’s skateboarding ranks. Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off is two hours of thoughtful conversations with skateboarding’s greatests (Hawk, Steve Caballero, Rodney Mullen, Mike McGill, Neil Blender, Christian Hosoi, ringleader Stacy Peralta and so many more) smashed together with decades of footage of Hawk and friends dropping in, falling off, getting up and trying again.

It’s a quirk specific to extreme sports that there is so much of that process footage; from camcorders to GoPros to DoggFace lip-synching Fleetwood Mac, the strive to capture the best wave, the biggest air, or the chillest downhill has constantly pushed technology and techniques forward. The results are seen across live sports coverage, feature filmmaking, and the groundbreaking Pro Skater video games built on moves captured from a rigged-up Hawk.

Doing his part, Jones hunted down a drone pilot to try a few new things with the always-game Hawk who, at almost 54, has never stopped inventing new tricks. Until, that is, he broke his femur ahead of the film’s SXSW 2022 premiere, a calamity that adds more weight to Jones’ focus on men and fathers, fame and pain and what drives extreme sportspeople even as they age.

Until the Wheels Fall Off is an alternately energetic and contemplative addition to the canon of skate films that includes Peralta’s Dogtown and Z-Boys and Spike Jonze and Ty Evans’ Yeah Right!. As Bored Grizzly writes, “Jones doesn’t back down from the personal details, but he’s far more invested in the psychology that drives Hawk and many of his contemporaries.” Zack agrees: “Once you get to the second half and begin diving into the psychology of these now-aging skaters—the stories and stakes are breathtaking and emotional.”

So to sit down with all of them and explore Tony’s life and his challenges, [I] was really making an autobiographical film about my own childhood and my own love for something. It was really the most personal film I’ve ever made.

Have you ever done a 540?
[Laughs] I have never done a 540. At the height of my skateboarding, probably around ’88 when I was doing bigger backside airs and inverts and a lot of tricks and doing well, I would kind of bounce on a trampoline and just realized how… When you think about it at that time, when the 540 was first being done, there were only three or four skaters, for three years, [who] could do it. I mean, it’s an incredibly hard trick.

So, no. I never got anywhere near that level. But man, was it exciting. When that happened and when it first came out in the magazine, it was shocking. Just like in the film, that’s why there’s such a big chapter on that because to have lived through that and see the progression of skateboarding was shocking.

Camera-wise, it’s fair to say that skateboarding and extreme sports in general have moved camera tech and camerawork forward in ways that have benefited the whole film industry.
Oh, I agree. Yeah.

What are your favorite aspects of this, and what did you want to bring into Until the Wheels Fall Off in that respect?
All of my skateboarding camera experience has been through the skate videos that I’ve watched. It started out with people like Stacy Peralta filming Tony on a big, old, clunky VHS. Stacy was always trying to find new ways to show skating. To me, skate [photographs] are often more exciting than skate video, and the pursuit of trying to make the video and motion feel as exciting as skating itself is something that, it’s moved the whole sport forward.

Stacy used to try to put cameras on wires over the ramp. There’s early footage of people trying to have this massively heavy camera attached to a helmet and try to skate. The first ‘GoPros’ were these massive bricks. But when the GoPro came along and when you started seeing motorcycling and mountain biking and skateboarding and surfing in these POV ways, it was really impressive.

On this film, I wanted to contribute something of my own language to that. We closed the film on a series of shots of Tony skating his ramp all by himself. I hired this drone racer who… he had this video on Twitter of him flying a camera into a bowling alley and down the lane and behind the pins and through the snack bar and then through the legs of a bowler. I saw this and I tracked him down and he came out and he flew with Tony while Tony skateboarded.

To me, that was probably the best day of the film because it gave me the closest feeling of what it must be like to launch that high above a ramp and to do those tricks and to fly with him. That to me is the same thing as putting the record on and trying to get that feeling.

We used to have neighborhood Olympics and talent shows and all kinds of things. I used to turn the sound off on the television, like if there was a football game or something, and I’d find records to put on [over the picture], because I love that one-plus-one-equals-three feeling of, oh, there’s magic happening. I didn’t understand how it worked. I still don’t. I still think when filmmaking works great, I don’t want to know too much about it because I love the mystery feeling of it.

You point out that euphoric feeling in the Ted Lasso episode, and also when Tony is competing in the 900—I want to transfer the feeling that I get when I’m incredibly inspired to an audience. It’s that way with skateboarding. It’s that way with playing music. There are certain feelings that you only get from diving deep into something that excites you.

Why shouldn’t a documentary have those moments of complete euphoria? Why shouldn’t it keep you on the edge of your seat? I think that’s more important than anything else is. Can you give someone two hours of complete escapism into somebody else’s story and let them walk out seeing life a little more magically?

On the topic of movies for kids, I know Jonah Hill has been there with mid90s, but: Bones Brigade narrative feature when? The spirit of your film, even though it is a documentary, reminds me of films like Breaking Away and BMX Bandits. When do we get the funny, dangerous, euphoric, heartfelt sports comedy we need?
That’s funny you say that. I think that Lords of Dogtown proved how hard it is to take the energy of a documentary and have actors sort of try to do that. Because there’s something about being the authentic originator of a sport and having the actual footage and the story being told about those real people—it’s an incredibly hard thing to capture.

You mentioned Breaking Away, which was one of my favorite films as a kid. It made me get into bicycle racing, but that film wasn’t a bike-race movie. It was a coming-of-age movie, and it was a father-son story, wanting to belong, growing up. And I think skateboarding is such its own genre and its own tight-knit little community that it almost repels any attempt to dramatize it. I just don’t think it’s maybe the medium for that.

I don’t know if there will ever be a film that succeeds as a drama and a narrative that has skateboarding at its center, unless you count Gleaming the Cube.

I had Mark on the show and I was so inspired by his desire to just cut out all the crap in between having an idea and making it. He just jumped straight over all the things that we hold ourselves back by. So when I talked to Tony and got Tony’s permission to try to go get this thing made, they were the first people I thought of, because I knew they would me in a way that was smart and independent. It’s been the greatest collaboration. They know when to step in, they know when to step out. They don’t have an ego when it comes to that. They’re all about the work.

There is a warmth that comes through in both the Tony Hawk film and in your earlier Wilco film—which, by the way, I reckon came at a time when music documentaries needed a fresh injection of style.
Oh, that’s so nice of you to say. I was just trying to make a film that was like some of my favorite films. So that was my film school, really—I just sort of tried to figure it out as I went. But again, I do think it brings up something, which is that when you love something… I’m not somebody who has hobbies; I go all the way into anything that I get involved in. As a music person, I play several instruments. I’ve made records, I’ve done all that stuff. Obviously as a skateboarder, I pushed it until I got up to the end of my talent and my ability to commit to going to the hospital.

But I take it seriously. And I think that when you do that, and when you love something that much, you have a pretty good barometer of what’s good and what’s not. The fear of not making something that would live up to my own standards as an audience member or whatever was always the thing that pushed me. And that’s where I’m the happiest, is finding a challenge and seeing if I can pull it off.