Tengu: God of Mischief (Colin Read, 2013)

Rooftop-shredding Deities

Interview with Colin Read

interview by

Emma Daelman

14.11.2026

In his films, NYC-based filmmaker Colin Read uses skateboarding to playfully reflect on themes such as life, death, and nature. His 90s-style fisheye Sony VX1000 evokes nostalgia for the heyday of skateboarding, but his visual language expands and challenges the format, both in its content and form.

One of Read’s first skate videos, Tengu: God of Mischief (2013), appropriately references the titular half-bird, half-human creature from Shinto mythology. The film starts high atop NYC’s rooftops, with skaters flipping over building edges before diving into the city’s underground. But a scorching sun at the time of filming turned the roofing into unskatable goo: it took two years to shoot the opening scene. Incorporating the sounds of the city and the low rumble of the wheels, Tengu sounds like a contemporary city symphony. Like the mythological creatures known for their pride, sometimes regarded as the ghosts of the arrogant, the film highlights the tension between feeling invincible and the fragility of the human body, something inherent to skateboarding.

In Spirit Quest (2016), voice-over inserts and nature-documentary sequences link each skater to a specific animal: Read directs them to skate as if they were that animal, sliding like a snake or flipping like the aggressive flaps of a bat’s wings. Using practical effects and careful editing, he creates almost impossible-looking skate sequences, carefully grinding the line of believability.

The success of Read’s skate films gave him the opportunity to create music videos for Radiohead, Glass Animals and Weezer, as well as commercials for Converse, Lexus and Burberry. While skateboarding features in some of his commercials, the visual language and technical skill he built through skate videography creep into all of his work.

In both Tengu: God of Mischief and Spirit Quest, there is an overarching theme of life and death: living fully by playing in the shadow of death. How did this motif become a part of the film?

In Spirit Quest, it was more about the general life cycle of nature, predator and prey, natural selection. If you do any larger natural theme, death is going to play into it because it’s inevitable. But in Tengu it definitely was [a big theme].

Not to make it too grand: at its core, it’s still just a skate video. But a few things happened while we were making it. Our friend Justin Clady, one of the people we skated with the most, was hit by a car. He ended up with severe brain trauma and was in the hospital for a long time. He gave me the security footage from his court trial and said: I want you to use this. His last clip in the video, not even a trick, just him skitching behind a car, was filmed after the accident.

Then Akira Takata, the photographer who took the cover photo of Ryan Barlow riding on the car, passed away from cancer before the video came out. The end of the video is dedicated to him. He and Kenji Nakahira were two of my first Japanese friends. They visited New York to skate with us nonstop, and even though they barely spoke English, we became great friends. That started a whole series of trips to Japan, and it changed how I saw the possibilities of skate videos. Even the name Tengu is a Japanese figure. I was also watching a lot of Akira Kurosawa at the time, which is why the quote from Ikiru is in there.

You have filmed and skated in New York, San Francisco, Bordeaux, and Tokyo. Skateboarding developed differently in these cities. Were you ever surprised by specific styles, and how did this diversity influence the way you filmed?

San Francisco was a rude awakening. The first time I was there, I was holding on for dear life. I grew up on the East Coast, where it’s pretty flat, so I basically grew up without hills. When I rewatched Tengu recently, I could tell which trip each San Francisco clip was from, just by how badly it was filmed. Eventually I got comfortable and learned to love it. But the best clips in that section were probably filmed by Zach Chamberlain. That’s his natural habitat. I think he’s the best downhill VX filmer [a videographer who shoots skateboarding videos using a Sony DCR-VX1000 camcorder] of all time.

On hills, you film to maximise speed and show how steep something is. Sometimes that means getting as close to the ground as you can, so the speed rushes past the lens. Other times you hold the camera a lot higher than normal, which gives a better sense of scale.

Tokyo changed how I lit things at night. Normally you have one light on top of the camera. But the Japanese filmers, like Shinpei Ueno and the Tightbooth crew, held a second light in their hand, off to the side. Instead of flat front lighting, you get directional light, shadow wrapping around the skater, almost Rembrandt lighting. It looks a lot more dramatic. They were basically lighting the way photographers do. That completely changed how I filmed at night.

And stemming from the tradition of Takahiro Morita and his FESN videos, the Japanese think more about how the filming itself can make a trick memorable. It’s not pure documentation. You bring artfulness to how you film. In Tengu, I was still pretty basic and conservative. In Spirit Quest, I was thinking very closely about how to make every single clip as interesting as possible.

Tengu: God of Mischief

Colin Read, USA, Japan, France, 2013, 40’

For Tengu: God of Mischief, Colin Read spent over two years filming skateboarders, from the rooftops and subways of New York to the streets of Tokyo and Bordeaux. His moving camera creates a sense of continuity, reminiscent of a city symphony

Skateboarding is the hardest thing in the world. But because everyone is amazing, nobody stands out, and it’s all a bit less special. I’m not sure if skateboarding is better or worse for it. It’s definitely more welcoming: less of a bullying culture, much less sexist, homophobic, and cliquey, at least on the surface.

Colin Read

New York has changed a lot since both films came out over ten years ago: more gentrification, hostile architecture, and surveillance. How have these changes affected skateboarding and skate videos?

Spirit Quest couldn’t have been filmed when Tengu was filmed, and you couldn’t film Spirit Quest today. New York is constantly changing. Unlike Europe, where architecture and history are preserved, nothing is precious here. They knocked down the beautiful Penn Station to build a stadium. Buildings go up, get torn down, go up again. A park exists for a few years, then they change it, or cover it in scaffolding for ten years for no apparent reason. Storefronts change constantly.

A lot of spots are created by that construction: scaffolding, girders, metal plates over potholes. So New York has always been a very temporary skate environment. Tons of spots in both videos no longer exist, but some perennial ones stay. That’s part of the fun. A spot shows up in every video, then it becomes unskateable, and the next one appears.

You once said that “the proliferation of skateboarding has surpassed any containment.” Does that hold true for skate filmmaking as well? Is there still a future for independent skate films beyond short-form content?

There’s certainly room for it. People are still making the full-length homie video. I’ve gone to some New York premieres recently, and they feel like a time capsule from twenty years ago: same grunge and indie rock songs, same kinds of tricks, same homie vibes. I hope people always keep doing that.

But there’s interesting new stuff too. Take EDGLRD, Harmony Korine’s studio. It’s like that Zoolander scene where Hansel says he doesn’t really listen to Sting, but the fact that he’s making music, he respects that. It’s not my taste, but they’re doing something completely different and weird, and I’m glad it exists.

Because the level of talent is so high now, it’s actually freeing. It makes the tricks almost irrelevant. Someone does a hardflip backside noseblunt slide. Who cares? You see that every day on social media. What’s interesting is a new way to show a trick, or showing a more basic trick. There’s also the legacy of the goofy skits of Girl and Chocolate [two sister brands and skate crews founded by Mike Carroll and Rick Howard along with Spike Jonze and Megan Baltimore in the early 90s, ed.]. I did a fixed-camera-angle joke with Girl last year. And I think the best example right now is WKND. Their new video Unk, by Grant Yansura, is about half skits and narrative. It’s funny and charming, and it’s interesting in a way pure tricks aren’t anymore.

A feedback loop has always existed between skate videos and skateboarding itself. What effect does the shift to ultra-short, algorithm-driven content have on the visual culture of skate videos, and on the way people skate?

I don’t think anyone would bother watching Spirit Quest if it came out today. People don’t have the attention span anymore, not just skateboarders. Everything is hyper-fragmented, the TikTok-ification of everything. Spirit Quest came out during a resurgence of the independent full-length video, and then that kind of died again.

What’s sad is that kids today don’t have the shared language we had. We all read the same magazines and watched the same videos, because there weren’t many. That scarcity made every video required viewing. It was physical media; you rewatched it until the next big one came out six months later. So my generation can quote hundreds of throwaway lines from skate videos. Now you get a web part, and the next day there’s a new one on Thrasher pushing it off the homepage. Unless you go looking for it, it never comes back.

As for how people skate: honestly, I’m too old and disconnected to know. The level of talent now is unfathomable. Maybe because kids grew up seeing that level, they assumed it was normal. As someone who was never an amazing skater, the consistency seems impossible to me. Skateboarding is the hardest thing in the world. But because everyone is amazing, nobody stands out, and it’s all a bit less special. I’m not sure if skateboarding is better or worse for it. It’s definitely more welcoming: less of a bullying culture, much less sexist, homophobic, and cliquey, at least on the surface.

Has social media also changed the celebrity status that skateboarders used to build through full-length video parts?

There used to be fewer skaters and less access to them, so you knew them much better. Through videos and magazines, you really felt you knew a skater’s personality, realistic or not. Instagram actually gives you a more direct line, because it’s them presenting themselves. But you lose the quotes, the moments after a trick is landed, the little glimpses of life, the skits. That’s what WKND does well: you feel the personalities, people having fun with their friends. That’s what skateboarding is about in the first place. I’d rather watch someone having fun with their friends than someone alone doing the best trick in the world.

New York has always been a very temporary skate environment. Tons of spots in both videos no longer exist, but some perennial ones stay. That’s part of the fun. A spot shows up in every video, then it becomes unskateable, and the next one appears.

Colin Read

In your music videos and commercials, I see a lot of your skate films. In Radiohead’s “Man of War”, you use tracking shots, transitions, match cuts, and time ellipses that feel very much like skate videos. How has making skate videos shaped your approach as a filmmaker?

That video was my first so-called professional job, and I was terrified. But once I started directing, I found I was very prepared. Everything I’d learned from skate videos carried over: blocking action, planning the edit in your head in advance, like I did for the match cuts in Spirit Quest. Together with my writing background and my love of movies and books, it all funneled into knowing what to do on instinct.

It’s been 10 years since you made Spirit Quest. How do you experience the film now?

We’re doing anniversary screenings in Tokyo and New York, mostly to get the gang back together. When I rewatch Tengu, there are things that make me think: oh god, what was I thinking? But Spirit Quest feels like a foreign artifact. The level of obsession and work that went into it seems impossible to me now.

I don’t consider it my video. It’s a collection of friends. A super disparate crowd from all over the world and from very different skating backgrounds, who would never normally end up in one video, came together through friendship. Connor Kammerer was vital to it in so many ways. Taylor Nawrocki was out with us every day filming second angles, beyond how amazing his own part is. I might have pulled it together and had the larger vision, but it was a labor of love from hundreds of people. I just feel lucky to have been part of it.