For the second installment of Revisit, I had the pleasure of catching up with JB Gillet, a true OG. JB’s career has been made up of many video parts; so we picked a handful of them to go behind the scenes on, as well as catch up on his recent injury, Hôtel de Ville, and some of his favorite skaters at the moment!
🌀: What’s up JB, how are you?
Good, good! How are you?
🌀: I’m good, thanks for being down to do this! So the point of this series is to dive into video parts throughout someone’s career, and you’ve had a fair share of your own. Let’s start with your Rodney Mullen vs Daewon Song: Round 2 part. There are clips in Lyon, SF, LA, and more in here, was this around the time you started traveling to film?
Yeah, Round 2 was the first time I was in LA. I was filming with Socrates (Leal) in LA, and I filmed with French Fred when I was in Lyon.
Revisit is a new series, and I’m starting it off with P-Rod, since he inspired it. Last month this Paul Rodriguez | 20 and Forevervideo was released. This piece did an amazing job of highlighting the 20 years of Paul’s professional skate career and it did so in an emotional way. There’s some of Paul’s career that I didn’t live through, and other parts that I remember clearly, like watching Me, Myself and I right when it released. As this piece ended, you can both hear and see the emotion in Paul as he finishes reflecting on the incredible career he’s had thus far, and I felt the emotion myself. It gave me this feeling of being proud of Paul for everything he’s accomplished, as if he’s a close friend of mine, and all that he’s done for skateboarding. I guess the easiest way to put it is that it was incredibly inspiring to see all that P-Rod has set his mind to and done.
Fast forward a couple weeks – I’m driving to work in the morning, sitting in traffic on the 5, listening to The Nine Club Experience. On the show, they begin to discuss this recent P-Rod 20-year piece, and as I was listening, my mind started to wander. I started to think again about all that P-Rod has done in his career; and was beginning to obsess over the video parts he’s released over the years, and the lasting impact that they’ve had on countless skateboarders. As I was having these thoughts, it hit me that I need to write about skateboarders who have contributed so much to skateboarding through their video parts. I’m sure this is very clear by now; but skate videos are my favorite thing, ever. The reason that I love to write about skate videos is because of how much effort goes into making them, I feel like they deserved to be discussed. With that being said, the point of this series is to revisit a skaters video parts, spanning over different periods of their career. I’m not going to necessarily highlight every video part that a skater has released, or give a full timeline of their parts, but just highlight a few of them, as a nod of respect to what they contributed to skateboarding. To kick it off, here are some clips from 7 video parts that Paul has released, think about that for a minute, 7 video parts.
theskateloop.com 