Michael McCloud, a veteran filmer in the Portland skate scene, is also one of Emile's closest one. He was responsible for filming most of Emile's footage for the new video. Following the release of I Don’t Even Know How to F**ing Airwalk*, these clips sparked significant reactions, so we thought the skateboarding community might enjoy some behind-the-scenes insights about them.
Hey McCloud. So after the video is out and we saw a lot of comments especially regarding the stuff Emile did, I thought you’d be the right person to talk to, because you film him a lot and have a close relationship to him.
Oh, yeah Response has been insane.
If you read the single comments, almost as if people seem overwhelmed by a skate video
again.
Yeah for sure. That'spretty cool. We are people who know Emile, how he is and we get that feeling skating with him, but to see the general public getting that feeling from just his video part is really crazy.
How would you describe being in that kind of high energy situations with him?
He had a little bit of a process for this video. He wanted people to take him more serious than they were maybe. He didn't want to just be the weird trick guy or the guy who just jumps off stuff. He wanted to really prove himself and push himself. He wanted this video part to really reflect him and that he's really trying, so he would think about these crazy tricks, that drop in being one of them. He just kept thinking about it so when he got there It was go time. Thought about it enough, looked at it enough. There was no fucking around. Me and him had been talking about it and I'm his hype man. I'm pushing him, reminding him or talking about it with him and then he had been overwhelmed by thinking about the trick that he was like, “all right. I'm gonna do it“. He's that vibe guy. He's got to be in the right state of mind to try something crazy like that. He can't just go in and force it and has to be stoked. I have a day job so I can't wait around for him to do it, so it's a little bit random in the timing. Our friend called me and he's like, “Emile's ready. He wants to do it. Get down here.“ So I kind of had to drop everything and cruise over there just knowing how important that trick was to him. I got there and to just get my camera out and get as ready as fast as I can. He already had the eye of the tiger. He didn't even wait for Joe Brook to come to shoot the photo. So pretty much by the time I got set up he was like “I got to do it now or I'm not gonna do it“. So he started trying it, you know They go there and if it happens it happens and if it doesn't it doesn't.
Take us through the tries a bit. I think the second to last try he's saying “I can't do that anymore.“
That’s because he already did it and then Joe Brooke showed up. He was shooting something else and he couldn't get there in time. Emile was just like “I'm just gonna try it with or without Joe.” We kind of convinced him to try it again to get the photo and he literally gave Joe that one try and he ate more crap than he did before. Then he was like “I can't try anymore“. He didn't get the photo. I was even trying to pay him money to do it again right afterwards, but he was not feeling it. He kind of knew that it was such an iconic Portland trick that he had to get a photo. Burnett even asked for a fish eye photo of it. So a whole year later, he's done it again, but the stoke and the intensity was really there for that first one. The second one was like he just wanted to get it get it out of the way. He maybe would have done it if I wasn't even there. There's been lots of stuff that's been just on the phone, because he's in in the zone and feeling it and he’s gonna do it with or without the camera being there.
How do you handle the pressure of filming in hectic situations like this?
That drop-in kept me up for nights. I didn't sleep some nights, because I thought I bungled it. There was a tree that was overhanging and it was really bright out. So it was a contrast of light and dark. I really had to go and get under. That's why I was so close, because the stupid tree was right there. Otherwise, I would have filmed it way far back and you would see how big and gnarly it is. He was literally coming from the inside of a tree. I had to get under the tree where you could see where he was coming from.
I heard that rumor that Jake Phelps once said that the one who will do that drop will get on the Thrasher cover.
Emile knows the story better than me. He mentioned something like that. One of the old Burnside heads said that if they’d do that they would get a thousand bucks and maybe the cover. I feel like there was a bounty on it. But it was from an old Burnside head that had known Jake or something. It's a rumor obviously. Maybe Julian Stranger or someone who knew Phelps more might be able to tell more about it. One person had tried it before. It's right next to Burnside, right around the corner.
How would you describe the difference between filming for that part and the years before?
Before it was pretty loose, just documenting him in the wild. We filmed that Pharmacy video together
and that one was more him, Big T and his crew were just doing their thing and I just happened to be there and documenting it. For this new one he was like, “all right, I'm warmed up. I've skated a lot of Portland stuff. It's time to tighten it up and make my mark in Portland skate history.” I think he really
wanted to push it to the stuff that had never been skated and do gnarlier tricks on stuff that had been skated. Half that stuff is never been done. Also that last thing at Burnside, the way he flies into the deep end. On camera you never really can see how gnarly it is.
It seems like you have to land pretty blind. You don't see where you land, because the deep end is so steep.
You can transfer it two ways. You can come from the side or you can come straight on like he did. From the side people have done Christian Hosoi, Tony Trujillo & more have done stuff. They’ve all come from the side, but coming straight on, it's blind, like you're saying. The wall is so steep. There's a little pocket that I feel Emile is built for maybe, because he's a smaller guy that could really condense himself and have the skill to put himself right into that little pocket. But it's insane. Burnside's been there for 30 something years and no one's ever done that one. He definitely wants to be his own person and that means skating stuff that's not really been skated or putting his name on iconic spots in town. Same with that rock to fakie that was on the Thrasher cover. No one had done that. He’s finding all the stuff at Burnside that people said couldn't be done or just hasn't been done.
I feel Emile didn't really think about his parts as a whole part before. And then this one, it was like, he was intricately thinking about each spot and was really stoked on trying to get multiple tricks at one spot. So it could tell more of a story of the thing he was skating.
Yes, he got a couple sections in the video skating one spot in different ways.
I think the lipslide tailgrab shove-it. That one was another spot that he was stoked on trying to get this thing where he goes back and forth. He was thinking about it from the
video side of it, where it would play this certain way where he would have this attack on this spot by doing these different tricks. This move, it was completely random. He was trying a lip slide to 5-0 180 and he had tried that for an hour and a half. And then he just did that one random try. He just did it that try that you see in the video and it is the try that he did. It was completely sporadic. So he did that thing first try.
But is that a trick he would do in a skate park more often?
No, it's completely, completely, completely random. He's done a few pop shove-it tail grabs or something before, but I've never seen him do that one. I don't know where that one came from, but it was just to stoke himself back up
or just to land something, because he had been trying for so long and wasn't getting it.
Also, I think that the front tail front 360 was an outstanding thing people were stoked on.
Yeah, that's a funny one for sure. When Sirus & the Polar Boys were in town we went to this church spot in Oregon City. He was trying that front tail 360 off the fence for a while & couldn’t get a good one. He wasn’t drinking any water and kept trying it over and over. He told me he sent up a prayer to the skate gods that he could land it the next try & the very next one he spun a good 360 and almost rolled away. He went back to the start point for the trick (which was around the corner away from everyone) and he started seeing something. I think he was experiencing heat. Then a few tries later he landed it right as a man from the church was kicking us out. It's kind of Emile’s religious experience, you know, like he's praying. Praying to land a trick.
I feel like many people who don't know him say that he seems to not be that skilled and just battles a trick till he makes it.
Yeah, but that's not the case. I feel like people know that now with this new part. There's a lot of skilled skateboarding in there. There's the big drop or whatever, but I feel like people translate that differently this time. Before he’d just barge it and do it. But it was actually really good. Switch tre, Nollie tre, that half-cab crook 180 at the pyramid ledge in New York. He's got really good frontside flip, anything. He’s really good at skating.
You film him and maybe back in the days you were also kind of a caretaker for him. How did that start between you and him look like?
I met Emile when he was five or six. We used to have an indoor skate park called Department of Skateboarding and it belonged to the skate shop. When Emile started skating he would come and kick
it. He was just a little tiny dude, but he always kind of skated that same way and barge it. I've known him since he was a real little guy and then the park closed down. But then when the shop closed I kind of went my own way and then when the shop reopened a couple years after, it had been five years since I'd have seen Emile and he kind of was already in the first Polar video and already started his own journey into the skateboard industry. I was a filmer before I was kind of getting back into it, filming some of the older guys at the shop, Sebo Walker, Tyler Bledsoe and more guys my age. But Emile & his friends were all associated with the skate shop already. So I knew about them. They were kind of just in that young shithead age where they're causing mischief and skating around at all night, bombing hills and shit I used to do when I was that age. They started making these little videos and I just have seen that their whole crew was exceptionally good at skating. They all had their own styles, so I was just really stoked on what they were doing.
So I was like “Fuck, someone needs to film them and document it for the masses!”, so I kind of started
skating with them downtown and then Covid happened. It opened up our whole downtown so you got to skate spots that weren't able to be skated any before. It was perfect place and perfect timing, because then those guys took a couple steps up In the skill department, because they had all the freedom to go for it and skate more huge spots and push it. I was documenting it and it was contagious because then the older guys kind of got sparked by it. It became like a group effort to go make this video.
You are talking about the Cal’s Pharmacy full length, right?
Yeah, “Land”. I think we're coming up on two years since it's been out. It was kind of accidentally really good. That's a good way to say it. You know what I mean? It had Emile, Big T and Enzo who were on the coming up and then the veterans Tyler Bledsoe and Sebo who had been our established guys. It was just perfect set of circumstances to make a really cool thing.
As Portland seems to get very popular as a scene and that process being pushed by having role models and pros coming from the city over many decades, would you say Emile already is in that local legend spot?
Oh, for sure. Everybody in Portland knows of Emile, even adults and people who have a very
loose relationship with skateboarding. Emile has this lore or literary status where he's done crazy stuff and he's had a funny interaction with somebody, but definitely his skating and him being in all the stuff definitely made him a guy to be looked up to from the kids.
As you say that people with loose connection to skateboarding would even know. I think his skating, like that drop, is really entertaining also for people who don't have a connection to skateboarding. That's the gnarly stuff people who don't know about tricks see and think is rad.
Yeah, for sure. My girlfriend's neighbor, she has mutual friends who skateboard and they had a
dinner party the other day and we didn't really make it on time, but we're neighbors, so we went over and said what's up. She doesn't skate at all, but she's like “I watched that Polar video. I watched the first half and then I had something to do and then I went back and watched the second half and she was just saying what the internet is saying right now. It was just strange to hear, but it was really cool.“ She was just genuinely stoked that she got to see that.
So we were talking about his battles and vision of the part. I saw some people mentioning him wearing same outfits in a few clips. So is there a story of him getting more clips in one day?
In the video, he does frontside 180 nose grind on the gap to rail. And then he had been thinking about doing that parking garage thing. So he just told Sirus, “All right, let's just go do that now.“ And he just went down there and did that big giant mute grab first try. It was kind of funny those guys got to see what I had been dealing with, you know. The high stress of you got to get your position because he's gonna do it.
