Stacy Peralta is walking up just as Angus Hudson—the DP on The Broken—is putting on his coat to leave. In one of those uniquely Sundance moments, Hudson lingers to tell Peralta that they met before, when Peralta was half of the legendary skateboard company Powell-Peralta and Hudson was a 14-year-old skate rat. On the Hobie team in London, Hudson is saying. Peralta remembers the team. “That was my first job as a cinematographer,” Hudson adds, “they strapped a POV camera on me,” and Peralta laughs. “Me too,” he says and turns to me, “A lot of filmmakers started out as skaters,” he says. “There’s a story in that.”

Peralta who made the popular Dogtown and Z-Boys about the 1970s Zephyr skating team and opened Sundance 2004 with the surfing documentary Riding Giants, is back with a documentary that takes on a parallel culture. Peralta has in the past documented the skate and surf culture he grew up in; he had nowhere near the easy access to the South Central LA world of Made in America.

“We shot in two locations, one was a secure location—a gas station in neutral territory, where everyone would be comfortable enough to talk,” he says. Those sequences were shot with a Varicam, while the second unit shot with an inconspicuous Panasonic DVX100 in the field—DP Tony Hardman, a sound person, a still photographer, a PA and Peralta. “Every neighborhood has what’s called a ‘shot caller’, a kingpin,” Peralta says. “We’d meet that character, establish a relationship, and he’d put the word out to let us work. We had to do this neighborhood after neighborhood, because it’s so Balkanized, each with their own history, own mythology.” more