Tony Hawk names his favourite movies of all time
The world of skating wouldn’t be anywhere near as popular as it is today without the influence of Tony Hawk, an icon of the game who changed its style forever. Helping to commercialise the sport, Hawk became the face of skateboarding, releasing a line of video games whilst informing the look and feel of subversive media in the 1990s and early 2000s.
So, you’d think, as such a lover and advocate of skateboarding, Hawks’ favourite movies would be Video Days, Dogtown and the Z-Boys, Machotaildrop or even Mid90s, but the ex-skater has acquired tastes, picking two classics from cinema history as his all-time favourites. Sitting down with Fandango, Hawks delved into how movies shaped him as a young child.
The first film he picks out is the James Bond flick The Spy Who Loved Me, Roger Moore’s third 007 movie. Released in 1977, the film has one iconic action sequence that Hawk loves, “The ski chase in which he’s being shot at, he’s doing all these, you know, ski stunts and then turns his pole into a gun and then ends up skiing off a cliff and skydiving. Like that was all about me. I love that stuff”.
Elaborating on exactly why he loved the action scene, he adds: “The whole idea that there were gadgets and it was stunts and literally death-defying, it’s not like I was aspiring to do that, but I wanted to do something like that, I just always thought it was cool that my dad would take me to movies that were a little bit edgy for my age”.
Elsewhere, Hawk takes us to a different genre entirely, speaking about the iconic 1988 flick The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!. Helmed by David Zucker, the spoof that took the piss out of TV cop shows starred Leslie Nielsen as Frank Drebin, an incompetent detective who is tasked with foiling a plan to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II.
Speaking about the comedy and a specific scene he loved, Hawk stated: “The scene where Nordberg gets shot, touches his hand on the furnace, hits the wall with the wet paint, and gets caught in a bear trap, like, oh that’s just such a brilliant idea. You just can’t take ourselves that seriously, and skateboarding is just a way to stay immature the rest of your life that’s like what Naked Gun is, it’s a way to make immature movies”.
Take a look at Tony Hawk discussing his favourite movies in length below.
