Interview

LF: Yeah. That’s why when I was young and I discovered skating, it was the perfect thing. I would just go skateboarding every day, and my mom wasn’t around to discipline me at all. I could fucking do whatever I wanted until about midnight or something, and then I had to go home. Skateboarding really changed everything in my life—I didn’t give a shit about TV, I didn’t give a shit about movies, I only cared about music because it was part of the skateboarding culture. I met all these different kids from all these different walks of life, and I don’t think if my mom had let us sit around watching TV I would ever have been into skating. Then who knows? I would be, like, working at a bank somewhere. Maybe I would have graduated high school. [laughs]

NL: We did have a skate shop for a little while in my town, and we were psyched about that. I had a launch ramp, but I just kept busting my head open. It was woodsy there, so you couldn’t skate a lot of places.

LF: You just need a gas station or something with a curb. 

NL: People weren’t super-into kids lurking around skateboarding. 

LF: I don’t think they ever are. 

NL: Which is a good thing because it makes you go find your secret spots, and learn that an empty warehouse can be something more than a real estate prospect or a sad, empty warehouse. 

LF: Yeah. And I think it’s also great that it teaches you to question authority. Did you ever feel, as a kid growing up in the environment that you did, that in a weird way you almost wanted to rebel and have a normal childhood?

NL: Not really. I feel like I grew up normal, in a small-town normal kind of way. We had to drive down a mountain to Palm Springs if we wanted to go to the mall, and that was interesting for, like, five seconds when I was in sixth grade, but I was never really around the suburbs much. And by the time I spent any time there they freaked me the fuck out, dude. I really was intrigued by cities, like L.A.

LF: I grew up in middle-class suburbia—New Jersey is one big fucking mall. But at least where I grew up there was a little diversity, a little character. It’s not like these towns now in Arizona, where they’ll open a Wal-Mart and build around it until it eventually becomes a town. Tonight is Friday. When I was 14 on a Friday night I’d hang out at the food court in the mall and try to hit on girls and fail miserably and then go skating until, like, one in the morning or something. And that’s Friday night. It doesn’t sound too bad now, looking back. 

NL: Doesn’t it sound more fun than a benefit art auction or some bullshit? Or deejaying a benefit auction? [laughs] 

LF: When I’m not acting, I’m usually deejaying, so my schedule gets completely flipped upside-down where I’m just on a nightlife schedule, and I don’t wake up until, like, two o’clock in the afternoon, which means I don’t go to bed until, like, four in the morning. It’s a really unhealthy lifestyle. 

NL: I like working at night, though. I like painting then. The night schedule is a crazy pit I fall into most of the time, but I do like it because the buzz of normal professionalism has gone away. Even though you’re working, you feel like you’re playing. Of course since I’m never up in the day, I still have this Con Edison bill in my pocket that I can’t mail because I haven’t been able to buy a stamp.