Mark Maggiori

Steve Olson: Where were you born?
Mark Maggiori: I was born in a town called Avon, an hour south of Paris, in France. I was raised pretty quietly in the middle of the forest. [Laughs] My parents are teachers, doing philosophy and literature. They’re like, “clever” people. [Laughs] I started skateboarding when I was nine.
SO: But in the forest?
MM: Yeah. Actually, Avon had the biggest skateboard contest in Europe, for some reason. There was a little skate scene there, people were doing the first shit back in ’84 or ’85. The Bones Brigade came and it was amazing. We had a huge ramp, so I was doing mainly ramp stuff and some street stuff. I spent my whole fucking childhood and teenage years skateboarding.
SO: What about before that?
MM: I was rollerskating. I started when I was five and I was pretty good. I was winning contests. I was just doing speed, in circles. My older sister, she was in love with skateboard guys. She was hanging out with the skaters. I started skating that way. My first skateboard was a Gordon & Smith. I think it was like Nicky Guerrero. And I had one of your fucking boards.
SO: No you didn’t. I was done by then.


When did you start drawing?
MM: I was drawing when I was a kid, probably when I was like four…five…six. And then I kinda stopped, never really drew, and I came back to drawing after high school. I went to art school in Paris and I started to draw and it was like something coming back to the surface. Three months after starting school I was number-one in my class. Then I never stopped drawing.
SO: How did you get into art school?
MM: My uncle was a very famous art director. He did covers for every big magazine in France. He’s been kind of my spiritual father. He was kind of a badass and I really admired him.

I started a band when I was 15 and I was doing shit with my friend, playing music. When I graduated, at 18, I was like, “I’m just going to go to a shitty university and I’m going to focus on doing music.” After three months I was done with university because it was a pain in the ass, like, “I’m doing music.” And my parents went crazy, like, “You’re not going to do music. This is not a job; this is bullshit.” So my uncle suggested, “You should go to an art school, because you do have some art skills.” At this time I wasn’t drawing. So I put together a portfolio to apply for a very big art school in France and I stayed there for four years. The school was amazing. It taught me everything.
SO: Did you find the same passion that you had for skateboarding?
MM: Yeah. It was exactly the same involvement. I haven’t done a lot of things in my life, but the things I have done I’ve done with so much passion and I’ve done them, like, every day.
SO: What kind of music were you
doing?
MM: My girlfriend, when I was 15, was a big fan of Led Zeppelin. There was this guy around, he had long hair, he was a “cool guy,” and he was playing Led Zeppelin on the guitar and my girlfriend was looking at him like, “Wow. He is so amazing.” I was like, “What?!” [Laughs] “I’m gonna learn how to play that shit and I’m gonna kick this guy’s ass!” So I started guitar and I was playing six hours a day. In six months I was playing every fucking Led Zeppelin solo because I was so into it. Then I created my first band. I had a singer who had a great voice so we started doing our own songs—very inspired by Led Zeppelin. We entered a contest for bands in Paris and we took second place. We were like 16 and it was just something we were doing on the weekends. Then I stopped with those guys and kept on with my drummer and met a bass player. We came up with Pleymo, which is the band that became very famous.

SO: Was Pleymo before art school or after art school?
MM: It was at the same time. That was pretty insane because I was in the last year of art school, and at the end of the year you had to do a project and it required so much energy. So while I was doing that I was on tour with Pleymo all around France and Europe. I was taking night trains to be at school at 8 AM. It was insane. Sometimes I’d miss school on Friday because we had a concert that night.
SO: You were a singer in Pleymo, yeah? Not playing guitar.
MM: Yeah, because what I liked in Led Zeppelin wasn’t Jimmy Page; my favorite guy was Robert Plant.

Early on I realized when I was recording my voice that it was shitty. I said, “I’m just going to play the guitar.” But that was the time when Rage Against The Machine was on, and the beginning of Limp Bizkit. That gave me the confidence to start singing in a different way than the very lyrical, songlike, difficult melodies that I wasn’t good at. I just started putting words together, doing kind of jamming and hip-hop, and my guys were playing big metal behind that. That started to be very cool, because I was singing in French, and there were no fucking bands in France doing this, at all. Everything happened in 1999.
SO: What happens with Pleymo?
MM: France always works with the American market, but like two years after. We were kinda following Korn and Limp Bizkit and that scene from the US. We were the number-one French nu-metal band. And then the audience pretty much changed. After the third album more girls came to the show and it became really a band for the mainstream—we were on the radio. That’s when the original fans dropped it. They were like, “Now Pleymo is shitty. There are 15-year-old girls at the show. There’s no more moshpits.” The success of the band killed it, which is pretty much fucked, but I think it’s what every band like that gets. The last tour we did we were doing 5,000-person venues in Paris. We didn’t stop because it was over; we stopped because I thought it was good to stop at this level and because I wanted to focus on film.


SO: What about the painting part of your life?
MM: I’ve never focused on painting like, “I’m gonna be a painter.” After the band I had a studio in Paris and for three or four months I was locked in there painting all day long, but I find it very lonely. And then there was a girl who wanted to exhibit my stuff. We did this show in London and I had a very bad experience with these paintings that I’d spent so much time on. People just passed by and didn’t give a shit, or just said, “That’s nice.” So I decided, Fuck that, I’m not gonna be a painter. This is too hard. I might just use paintings for concepts. And that’s what I did for my film, Johnny Christ. I started to do paintings to get in the mood and work on the theme. But it was for something. I really prefer the medium of film, where you lock people in a room for two hours, and it’s dark, and they just fucking look at it. I haven’t found a way to express myself in painting, because the paintings I like are pretty old school and it’s kinda done. I realized contemporary art is very conceptual, and I’m not into that at all. I’m just painting realism because I like it.
SO: How did you get into film? Through photography?
MM: I did a lot of photography at school. My photography teacher was Paolo Roversi. He is a very big fashion photographer, and told me that I should just keep on going in photo. I did a few album covers and stuff like that, but I quickly went into music videos. The whole time I was with Pleymo I was doing music videos, too. Then in 2008 I did a short film in LA. The main showing at the Film Festival in Paris, I won first prize for that. It’s called Thelma. It’s with skateboarders, actually. It’s filmed in 35mm black and white, very raw. It was the first time I did something with dialogue, and I had a blast doing it. I worked only with people that I cast from the street. Same for Johnny Christ.
SO: Explain what Johnny Christ is.
MM: Johnny Christ came from my friend Petecia, who is my girlfriend now. I was in LA on a trip and she came up with the idea of doing an exhibition. She was dreaming about painting 144 pictures of Jesus. She’s like, “I dreamt about that. I’m gonna do a show of paintings. You guys want to do something with me?” So Shala was there—
SO: Who is Shala?
MM: She’s a friend of Petecia. She does jewelry and stuff like that. So we started to make this exhibition happen. I had nothing about Jesus because I didn’t give a shit about Jesus. The idea of painting Jesus on a cross or whatever was fucking boring. So I was like, What if Jesus came back right now and was in a White-trash town somewhere? I finally was like, “I’m gonna do a fucking film with that shit.” I came up with the idea of this guy riding in a car and he passes this naked guy, Jesus, in the street, bleeding all over the place, and he takes him back home.

I’m always painting from photos so I needed to make photos. I talked to the guys and I said, “I’m gonna go back to LA and I’m going to film this shit as a trailer for a film, and from the trailer I’m gonna paint stills.” At the same time I wanted to mix this with Demolition Derby because I was doing a documentary about the Demolition Derby in photos. So I was like, “What if the guy who finds Jesus in the street is a Demolition Derby driver?” We did a casting on Craigslist and we found one girl and two guys. I put them in a car and we drove up to Utah and did the thing, and then I came back to France and I put my trailer together and did my paintings. It was pretty epic. My daughter was born on the 20th of July and the show was on the tenth of August. I had to finish everything and my daughter went to the hospital because she was sick when she was born. Man, that was the worst time of my life. So fucking hard. But I wanted to do that show. Fuck. ’Cause I thought it would be good and Shala was like, “Yeah, so many people will come and I think it’s good if people see your painting. Maybe you can find money to do your film.” I was really believing it now. So I did the show and I sold two pieces. But I came back to France a little bit disappointed by the exhibition. I started working on the film. My producer, David, was like, “Fuck the US. Nobody knows us there. Just write a script and at the same time I’m gonna show your trailer to people and we’re gonna try and find money here.” I took three or four months to write the script for Johnny Christ, and when I was done David took three months to put the money together. Then around May we decided we were gonna do the movie. In August we were in LA doing rehearsal with you guys. [Laughs] It happened pretty fast.
SO: The movie looks like it’s going to be good. Maybe that’s biased, or I’m hopeful, or whatever. But yeah, it happened really fast, just like the band, just like everything.
MM: I am always unsatisfied, and I’ve been dreaming about doing things in the US forever, but it’s so hard to do it when you’re from France. So I guess Johnny Christ is the first thing that I did for real there.