大象传媒

Acclaimed photographer and music video director David LaChapelle makes his feature debut with Rize, a documentary looking at the fast'n'furious ghetto dance called clowning. When LaChapelle states that he's obsessed with the little-known dance phenomenon, believe him - he's now made three films on the subject, including two shorts (Clowns In The Hood and Krumped) before Rize.

How did you discover clowning?

When I was working in Los Angeles, doing music videos and stuff, some of my dance friends said to me, "There's this thing going on called stripper dance which is in the hood." Now the ghetto of Los Angeles, South Central, is so segregated from the rest of LA they may as well build a wall around it, it's like another country. When I started going down there I saw this dance and right away I knew I wanted to do a film on it. This was three years ago, and it was called clowning or stripper dance. Then, about a year into filming I started hearing about this underground offshoot called krumping, which was like a new form of that. And the more I filmed, the more I got into the lives of these kids and these young people doing this dance.

It became very profound, because in that neighbourhood the kids have to choose what gang they're going to be in - the Crips or the Bloods - but if they're going to dance, they don't have to make that choice and the gangsters respect that. So these kids are choosing dance, and they're creating this dance that is storytelling, it's African, it's aggressive, it doesn't look like anything we've ever seen before, yet the story behind it is as incredible as the dance itself.

The dance becomes a form of expression in the film, and there's probably more dancing than talking...

I tried to create a balance. I structured it as a musical - the dance was super-important, the dance is a way of communicating and storytelling, and I did not want the film to be a bunch of talking heads, I wanted you to experience the dance. The dance is also an uplifting experience, an enjoyable experience; I did not want this film to be a sad film or a downer. This film is about these heroes, and you don't find many heroes in the world today - especially in films. The film is also about breaking down stereotypes. I've received so many letters from people saying that for the first time they've seen people like themselves who are not being portrayed as stereotypes - as gangsters and thugs and heathens and pimps.

There's life and death in this neighbourhood on a daily basis, and when kids were telling me, "Oh, you could be that person shot just walking to the store," and then just six months later when we were filming, this 15-year-old girl and 13-year-old boy were shot and killed in the middle of the day just walking to the store. When you're making a documentary you never know what's going to happen. That was one of the tragic points of making this film, but that occurs on a daily basis there. It was an eye-opening experience for me. It was three years making this film, you don't come out of it feeling the same way about life, it does have an impact on you.

You were obviously an outsider coming into this community. How did you win people's trust?

Honestly, I didn't go in there and drop my resum茅, and people didn't really know who I was, they just knew me as David. The way I got access is that I just showed up there and had a camera, nobody was paying any attention to them. Outside of the neighbourhood nobody even knew it was going on. Just the fact that I showed up and had a camera, it was, "Oh man, this guy's interested in us." Later on, about a year into filming, they had seen me at the MTV awards on TV and were like, "Dave, what were you doing at the MTV awards?" And I said, "I have a job, this is what I do, I make videos and things." And that gave me a certain credibility too, because once they knew about the work that I had done they thought "Well he's not going to be wasting his time with us", so it sort of validated them a little.

Same as going to Sundance. A lot of the kids had not left their neighbourhood ever and they were getting people from all over the world saying how much they loved their dance. You could just see them shine. As an artist you just want to share your work, it's not an ego thing, it's about sharing the experience. If you're a great singer, you don't want to just sing in the shower, you want to have that communion with the audience. It's the same thing if you're living in the ghetto and you're dancing in the street - to have invented an artform that's incredible, that's valid, that's mind-blowing, that you don't even think is humanly possible, and then to have other people appreciate it and share within that, that's part of being an artist.

What was the transition like for you going from photography and music videos where things are staged?

It was a relief that I didn't have to art direct anything, number one; that I could just go there and it was all done for me. But it was everything that I love - it was surreal, it was colourful, there was dance, music, I got to tell a story. It had everything that I really loved, so it wasn't like a stretch for me. I've always been escaping reality in my pictures, and I think that these young dancers are doing the same thing within their dance - escaping their reality and creating their reality, which is what I do in my photographs.

What makes a good documentary for you?

I think when you learn something about someone else's life that you would not normally have access to. A great documentary can also be entertaining. I think Michael Moore uses humour and irony and sarcasm as his vehicle to get across a very political statement which, if you took away those elements, would just be very dry and boring. In Rize, dance is the vehicle to tell the story about living in a ghetto, otherwise it would just be very sad and depressing. I think you leave the cinema feeling changed, and the letters I've had from people say that this film has had some profound impact on them. That they want to be like the people they have met in this film and it has changed and inspired them. It's not like they want to dance like that, it just means that they want to apply this idea of 'krumpness' - which means being in a zone creatively where you don't think about anything else. A transcendent moment of creating is really the definition of getting krumped. And they call me a krump photographer, so...

And which documentaries inspired you?

I've always loved documentary films - from Paris Is Burning to Style Wars, which is a film about graffiti art in New York in the early 80s, to other things like Aileen: Life And Death Of A Serial Killer. I'd never thought of making a documentary myself, but I had to do it, I became obsessed with this subject.

Rize is released in UK cinemas on Friday 30th December 2005.