"I knew I was going to end up teaching a group of skateboarders how to act, as opposed to choosing actors and teaching them how to ride a skateboard," says actor Jonah Hill, who debuted as a director in Mid90s.
To make this powerful and nostalgic 90s film a real-life experience, Hill put together a cast of real-life skateboarders, with the exception of the protagonist Sunny Suljic (who although he is a skater, we know him from The Killing of a Sacred Deer by Yorgos Lanthimos).
Teenage life
"Each of these guys had a crudity, a vulnerability, and an absolute inability to be fake", Hill says of those who appear on a skateboard in the main scenes of the film, and function as a refuge and a place of belonging for Suljic’s devastated character.
They are between 21 and 24 years old and they dominate the most difficult pirouettes in the air like nobody else, but the most important thing is that they look so real on the screen that you could have seen them in a square.
The film, with performances by Katherine Waterston and Lucas Hedges, is a trip that allows us to spy on what teenagers’ lives were like before the digital era, as well as their dreams, their streets, their clothes and, of course, their music.
