#Slomo mission beach professional#

Then I went back six months later with a camera guy and a cinematographer and we started shooting. I had a skateboard, so we went skating up and down the boardwalk and I got to see his world a little bit. I’m in San Francisco, I went down to San Diego for a long weekend and then I spent about a day-and-a-half talking with him. I spent two days with him before we started shooting, although there was a lot of time that elapsed between when I first hung out with him and we went back to shoot. How much time did you spend getting to know John before filming and what was filming like? On the flip side, the narrative was helpful because it gave me a foundation to create a story structure and Slomo somewhat adheres to a narrative story structure, so it was helpful. At least in the narrative stuff I’ve done, you know what you’ve got. We racked up a lot of footage we didn’t end up using, so that part of it was new. There wasn’t a script we were sticking to. I didn’t know where it was going to go when we started. Very different in as much as I didn’t have control over the story.

Was it different for you to tackle a documentary?

Up to this point, it appears you’ve primarily worked on narrative films. I really felt like there was a lot there, so I got in touch with Slomo and told him I wanted to do a film on him and we went from there. He was telling me about this guy and Slomo had this Web site I read his treatise on “The Zone,” which is his philosophy on movement and subjectivity.

#Slomo mission beach professional#

He was really surprised to find a guy he last had known as a professional neurologist was suddenly skating up and down to opera music. They were friends then and they fell out of touch, and my dad was in San Diego and bumped into John on the boardwalk a few years ago in his new incarnation as Slomo. My dad met John in med school at Wake Forest in the late ’60s. How did you first learn of John and get to know him? Shortly after the film won the Best Documentary Short prize at SXSW, Izenberg shared how he first got in touch with the man who rechristened himself “Slomo,” how he and his crew achieved the amazing gliding shots that capture Slomo in action and making changes in his own professional life.

If putting us in the company of this remarkable man with a syrupy Southern accent as smooth as his skating was all that Izenberg achieved within the span of his 16-minute long short, it’d be more than enough, but what “Slomo” achieves is an equilibrium akin to the one Kitchin seeks in his own life, detailing how the former doctor has applied his scientific expertise to his spiritual beliefs in a wondrous and witty way. Rather than trying to readjust what he had to accommodate his condition, Kitchin recalled some advice a mentor once gave him to “Do what you want to do” and used the diagnosis to hit the reset button to live a life on limited means while finding his joy in rollerblading. Yet even in a city that prides itself on “keeping it weird,” there’s never been one quite like John Kitchin, the 69-year-old star of Joshua Izenberg’s documentary “Slomo.”Ī one-time neurologist who had all the markers of what many would consider the good life, complete with a marriage, a Ferrari, and even an exotic animal farm, Kitchin now skates the Pacific Beach Boardwalk alongside the Mission Beach of San Diego, listening to opera music and wearing a blue tank top and a grey fishing hat, a considerably stripped-down lifestyle that wasn’t brought about by financial calamity but the discovery of a rare disease that began to prevent him from recognizing faces. There is no shortage of great characters to be found at SXSW, usually as many outside on the streets of Austin as there are inside the film festival’s theaters.