I think a lot of the inspiration comes from being a teenager and seeing people go through all the shit that you don’t have to go through. It’s like knowing what you want or not knowing what you want to do with your life, but just being pushed into something that you don’t want to do anyway. You, as a free individual, should be the one to make the decisions regarding your present and future life. People are so caught up in their lives that they’re not being able to live through a finer spirit— through everything they can possibly do as a human being.
When I was 16, I was like, “I don’t know what I want to do—or what should I do? And who am I? But I don’t even know who I am, but I’m supposed to know what I’m supposed to do for the rest of my life until I’m old and shrivel.” I do see like—hey, maybe I’d want to do that, or I have a lot of examples of “that’s exactly what I don’t want to do.”
Like how we’re making films—like if we continue to make films, and make amazing shit, people are going to be like, “Oh, my god! And they’re so young.” That whole young aspect is what’s forever grasping my attention because you look at a baby doing something — he’s a one-year-old and doing something so far ahead of his time, and it’s so amazing just because he’s doing it. And then you see an old person doing it—it’s not going to be the same whatsoever.
To me, there is like this simplicity to parkour. That it’s so simple that you can just look at it and just pick it up, but people see it, and it’s still not getting through. With just overcoming and applying that to multiple things — because it’s mental, it’s going to carry on inside your head, because you’re not just using your brain in parkour, you’re using your brain with your whole life.
That whole aspect of doing something that hasn’t been done, or doing it in a different type of way because you are yourself — so, within that, we can bring that to our artwork, we can bring that to whatever we’re writing. Parkour — it’s so much to say “This is what it did,” because it’s done so much.
Photography by Andrew Obenreder and Nathan Cephas
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