A quick word with Stacy Peralta

Stacy Peralta - skateboarding legend turned documentary-maker and screenwriter.

Having captured the influential late 70s South Californian skating scene, in which he was a pivotal figure, in his acclaimed Dogtown and Z-Boys, Peralta has turned his camera to the history of big wave surfing in Riding Giants.

The film not only captures the men who ride the world's biggest breaks but talks to the veterans who braved those swells first and lived to tell the tale.

Since finishing Riding Giants, Peralta's first feature screenplay Lords of Dogtown - again based on those skating years - has been shot by Thirteen director Catherine Hardwicke and he's now working on a biopic of big wave surfing legend Greg Noll.

It seems like movies such as yours and last year's Step Into Liquid have raised the bar on surf films.

Well someone needed to. The bar needed raising because too many people have been making the same thing over and over for 30 years.

Wave porn.

Exactly. That's exactly what it is and I don't think it's healthy. So much of our entertainment is like that. We're human beings and we need context.

The real star of Riding Giants seems to be [veteran big wave surfer] Greg Noll. Obviously a man with stories to tell.

He's had an amazing life. And the thing is those guys have had experiences - it's different because those guys were the first. They didn't have anybody behind them as guide posts. They really were going into the wild blue yonder. All of the guys now are certainly riding bigger waves but there was a sense of adventure back then and a sense of abandonment and freedom which I don't think the guys today quite have.

How much of your time was spent bobbing up and down shooting those waves? We certainly did shoot surfing but our primary focus was on lifestyle and all the things surrounding surfing. So that it did not become surf pornography like you said. And there was so much support footage that already existed, so my primary focus was on getting material that would help build our story and tell our story. As we were cutting the film the only time the film would tend to drag was when we showed too much surfing. And this from a person who surfed his whole life.

How much of an archaeological project was it to find all that old footage?

It always is. You are part archaeologist, part investigator. You spend so much time on the phone talking to people you don't know and who don't know you. You are trying to get them to part with valuable footage from 30 to 40 years ago and you are the right guy who should have this footage for this amount of money and you will take good care of it ... it's a job for a diplomat. A lot of deals are made. The bottom line is you must have that footage.

In the section capturing surfing's early history, you depict Captain Cook - with a peculiar accent ...

That was the wrong one?

He's from Yorkshire.

That's funny because the gentleman who did the voice-over assured me it was correct. I take that very seriously.

Well he probably had a good Royal Navy accent by the time he got to Hawaii, where of course he was killed by the locals who didn't want him on their beach.

Yeah I think he was the first person to die of localism, the first surf-related death of localism. You don't belong on our beach.

What's the biggest wave you've surfed yourself.

What a surfer would refer to as a 10ft [3m] wave, which is like 16ft [4.9m] on the face. I have no interest in going bigger than that.

What's with these guys who go way bigger than that? Do they lack something?

I think these guys have found something out there that plugs them into something special - a very present experience you can't find elsewhere. It's a kind of heightened state. What I did find is they clearly are not the Evel Knievel types ... these guys they surf if it's big, if it's small or whatever it is. They are very deliberate about what they do. There is no daredevil aspect to it.- Russell Baillie

* Riding Giants is at cinemas now.