The 12 O'Clock Boys got their name for a reason: when the wheels of their dirt bikes rotate a full 90 degrees in the air, they look like the hands of a clock striking the midnight hour. In Baltimore, dirt bikes are a way of life. First popularized by YouTube videos that accumulated millions of hits, dirt biking has now become a bona fide subculture with its own celebrities (Wheelie Wayne), sartorial sense (buttoned up Polos and no helmets), and lingo (groups of bikers are "flocks").
For Pug, the teenager at the center of the new documentary 12 O'Clock Boys, biker gangs are also an alternative to other, more dangerous neighborhood gangs. That's not to say that the 12 O'Clock Boys don't cause trouble––as the film, a debut effort from director Lotfy Nathan shows, the flocks of rowdy bikers relish provoking and running from police cars and helicopters, resulting in high-speed chases that can prove fatal.
Nathan's documentary, which started as a project when he was in art school in Baltimore, is the result of three years spent with Pug and his family. This Friday, it will be released in theaters and on-demand (after a sure-to-be-wheelie-worthy party this Wednesday, co-hosted by OC). We hung with the director and asked him a few questions.
Alice Hines: There's a few slow motion scenes of dirt bikers in this movie that are really ethereal and beautiful, in a way that communicates the sense of pleasure and escape the riders experience when they're on bikes. How did you shoot these scenes?
Lotfy Nathan: The most exciting stuff was using the Phantom camera, this high-speed military grade video camera that shoots in slow motion. Like, the shark coming out of the water in slow motion on National Geographic or BBC is shot with that. My producer Eric Blair had the idea because he knew I wanted to make this movie special, a kind of definitive take on its subject matter.
There are so many videos of the 12 O'Clock Boys already on YouTube. So you wanted to differentiate it.
This sort of had to jump over those.
Jump over them––or pop a wheelie over them!
[Laughs] That's not something I would say, but that's good. But these scenes were important. Some people would say they kind of glorify criminal behavior, but I hoped the audience would know that we were trying to communicate [the bikers'] perspective without saying it's right or wrong. There's no reason documentaries shouldn't have a lens or a point of view.
You also used a lot of news footage that criticized the 12 O'Clock Boys and pointed out the danger they present to drivers and pedestrians. What does the public in Baltimore think?
The public is very divided. Baltimore is a checkerboard. There are neighborhoods and populations who think these guys are terrors. And there's another huge population from which a lot of the riders were born where they're celebrated.
How did you pick the topic? Does it have anything to do with your own life experience? Certain parts, like when Pug disobeys his mom and skips school to spend more time biking, reminded me of my own rebellious teenage years.
I think everybody feels that. And rebellion is proportional in a place like Baltimore. There, everybody’s rebelling, even your father, your mother. In your whole community there are these staples of defiance as well as actual, real crime. So for kids like Pug, [dirt bikes] are an almost wholesome form of rebelling, in context.
How did you rebel?
I was rebellious as a kid although I didn't go for extreme sports. I was a little bit timid I guess, and my own rebellion was very
For Pug, the teenager at the center of the new documentary 12 O'Clock Boys, biker gangs are also an alternative to other, more dangerous neighborhood gangs. That's not to say that the 12 O'Clock Boys don't cause trouble––as the film, a debut effort from director Lotfy Nathan shows, the flocks of rowdy bikers relish provoking and running from police cars and helicopters, resulting in high-speed chases that can prove fatal.
Nathan's documentary, which started as a project when he was in art school in Baltimore, is the result of three years spent with Pug and his family. This Friday, it will be released in theaters and on-demand (after a sure-to-be-wheelie-worthy party this Wednesday, co-hosted by OC). We hung with the director and asked him a few questions.
Alice Hines: There's a few slow motion scenes of dirt bikers in this movie that are really ethereal and beautiful, in a way that communicates the sense of pleasure and escape the riders experience when they're on bikes. How did you shoot these scenes?
Lotfy Nathan: The most exciting stuff was using the Phantom camera, this high-speed military grade video camera that shoots in slow motion. Like, the shark coming out of the water in slow motion on National Geographic or BBC is shot with that. My producer Eric Blair had the idea because he knew I wanted to make this movie special, a kind of definitive take on its subject matter.
There are so many videos of the 12 O'Clock Boys already on YouTube. So you wanted to differentiate it.
This sort of had to jump over those.
Jump over them––or pop a wheelie over them!
[Laughs] That's not something I would say, but that's good. But these scenes were important. Some people would say they kind of glorify criminal behavior, but I hoped the audience would know that we were trying to communicate [the bikers'] perspective without saying it's right or wrong. There's no reason documentaries shouldn't have a lens or a point of view.
You also used a lot of news footage that criticized the 12 O'Clock Boys and pointed out the danger they present to drivers and pedestrians. What does the public in Baltimore think?
The public is very divided. Baltimore is a checkerboard. There are neighborhoods and populations who think these guys are terrors. And there's another huge population from which a lot of the riders were born where they're celebrated.
How did you pick the topic? Does it have anything to do with your own life experience? Certain parts, like when Pug disobeys his mom and skips school to spend more time biking, reminded me of my own rebellious teenage years.
I think everybody feels that. And rebellion is proportional in a place like Baltimore. There, everybody’s rebelling, even your father, your mother. In your whole community there are these staples of defiance as well as actual, real crime. So for kids like Pug, [dirt bikes] are an almost wholesome form of rebelling, in context.
How did you rebel?
I was rebellious as a kid although I didn't go for extreme sports. I was a little bit timid I guess, and my own rebellion was very