Q&A with director Eddie Martin

The director of All This Mayhem on making a film charting the rise and fall of skateboarding legends, brothers Tas and Ben Pappas.

How did you get involved with the project?

When I was a kid I used to skateboard at Prahran and I knew the Pappas brothers who skateboarded there. I made two previous docos and then prior to Ben’s death, I would see him occasionally. I was kind of around even when he died. I was always present but it just didn’t feel right making the film at the time because I knew all of the people involved and it was such a raw wound. It felt wrong to attack it even though people had said to me, ‘you should do it, you should do it’.

A bit of time had passed and then someone else tried to make a documentary about the brothers. They approached the family. The family said no but they were still going ahead with it. It just felt really exploitative. At that point a couple more people were involved in our project and said, ‘we’ve got to do this’.