Paul Rodriguez's Sense of Balance

Paul Rodriguez is set to headline what may be the most elaborate skate movie ever made.

Spanning continents and directed by skate auteur Ty Evans, fully crewed and accoutered with the latest state-of-the art cameras, a van outfitted with video mounts designed for helicopters, a fleet of drones—replete with specially trained pilots—and the royal largesse of a Middle Eastern prince, We Are Blood seems to hew closer to Hollywood-style motion pictures than the collection-of-vignettes, album-like skate videos that get played for inspiration before a mission or to stave off winter, wind, and rain. Its preview trailer looks something like Yeah Right! or Fully Flared or Pretty Sweet, films wherein the aesthetic, vis-a-vis the presentation of the tricks, was almost as important as the tricks themselves. But We Are Blood has an obvious thematic thread, that of skateboarding as an internationally recognized culture, demonstrating disproportionately shredded front toes of shoes as lingua franca for a cosmopolitan, honest-to-God culture.

And that vision will not be difficult to see. When We Are Blood, produced by Mountain Dew's Green Label films and the action sports media house Brain Farm, is released in August, it will be highly visible, available on the usual streaming platforms—iTunes, Amazon—and in physical form in brick-and-mortar local outlets, from core skate shops to big-box leviathan Target. The film seems to walk the line between a classic skate video and a documentary, a highly stylized nod to the skate rats and an elucidating entree for the curious, agnostic, and antagonistic. We Are Blood is aiming to make waves within both skate culture and popular culture, hopefully with a minimum of alienation or acquiescence.

In short, the film is the perfect vehicle for Paul Rodriguez, who I met in the devastatingly hip—neon signs, scattered remains of Hebru Brantleys, white walls and exposed supports, heavy doors, wooden floors, and a sense of creative and commercial energy—Lacuna Artist Loft Studios in Chicago's Lower West Side. Rodriguez, wearing a hat with a Mountain Dew logo on it whilst discussing the semi-esoteric French savant Bastien Salabanzi, is in the strange position of being a skater's skater—for what seems like most of his life, really, beginning with the bidding war he began while on City Stars—as well as the skater even your mom recognizes from NBC Sports coverage.

Whenever figures like Rodriguez come along, i.e., skaters whose sponsors extend beyond the normal hard goods, soft goods, shoes, and shops to corporate benefactors like Mountain Dew, Red Bull, and others seemingly better suited to racecar liveries or stadia adverts, it raises passions—sometimes with mamba-like levels of venom—on the role corporate money (read: money coming from corporations which are not ostensibly skate corporations) plays in skateboarding.

Too much influence, the core skaters figure, and everyone ends up with skate stoppers and excess heat, the skate culture they love—the very one captured in We Are Blood—co-opted and commoditized, and turning every kid pushing down the block into Poochie. Of course, skateboarding without Mountain Dew and Red Bull, without the X Games and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and Skate, threatens to atrophy, to die that sad, exsanguinated death that can befall passions without pockets.

A film like We Are Blood would not be possible without a level of financial support most core skate companies would be hard pressed to provide.

"I personally have no problem coming together, getting with bigger sponsors. Of course I have my core sponsors, but I have no problem venturing outside that world," Rodriguez says. "I have no problem trying to make a film like this and expose our culture on a bigger scale, because it's progression, man.

"To be honest, I'm tired of doing video parts. I could do another video part. I could film another video part and out it out there to the same audience I've already put video parts out to for 15 years now, and do that again. But like, that's boring. I don't feel driven to do that again, because it's like repeating myself."

Rodriguez sees a different challenge in We Are Blood.

"This was what was exciting," he says. "To do something on a bigger scale, tell a better story, do something more progressive. And yeah … it takes those bigger sponsors to come in and help make that happen."

While an obvious beneficiary of outside money in skating, Rodriguez does not belittle the core's complaints. In the core's attempts to keep skateboarding for skateboarders, Rodriguez sees a steering mechanism to help keep the sport, in its purest forms, from dissolving in lucre.

"I think it's like checks and balances," Rodriguez says. "If you don't have that group of guys constantly nagging people about being too mainstream, then it might go too far. Skateboarding might go too, too far. And vice-versa. If you don't have dudes over here"—Rodriguez holds his arms out in a spread evocative of a spectrum—"pushing shit mainstream, then the core guys, if they had it their way, there ultimately wouldn't be a viable industry. It couldn't sustain itself. That's how skateboarding will die. Core is cool, but core won't sustain an industry. People can't build brands and companies off of that.

"I know most people out there, when they hear that, they think, 'well, it's not about the money.' Of course it's not about money, but you can't factor out that money is necessary in the sense of like, if there's no money out there, then the person who owns the wood shop, the manufacturing shop, can't make boards to get it to you. He has employees, he has machinery. That costs money to run that."

Finding the balance can be difficult, and the reception of We Are Blood may be the best chance, since computer-animated pros collected the letters to the word "Skate" and Erik Koston was on ESPN, for skateboarding to re-assess its tense relationship with corporate America. After all, the non-skater who plucks a copy from a Target shelf and falls in love with the imagery of a fully armed Ty Evans or the Prince-aided session on the helicopter pad of the Burj Al Arab, may also be inspired by an appearance from Dustin Dollin to grab a Thrasher and visit his local shop.

"This is skateboarding, man," Rodriguez says (perhaps with a nod to the Emerica classic). "Whatever it's going to be to you is whatever it should be to you. If that's how you feel, there's nothing wrong with that."