Director Crystal Moselle On The Cool, All-Girl Skate Crew That Inspired Betty

By Crystal Bell


Director Crystal Moselle acts on instinct. She doesn't hesitate, not with her camera and especially not any time action approaches in real life.


She first discovered the Angulo Brothers if she was walking down First Avenue in New York City; six young males in black suit jackets and ties ran past her, and, on a whim, she ran immediately after them. They became the subject of her first documentary feature, The Wolfpack. Her followup film, the atmospheric Skate Kitchen, has a similar origin story. She was riding the G train whenever she spotted two young girls, Nina Moran and Rachelle Vinberg, carrying skateboards; there was just something about Moran's voice — with an energetic inflection like a gravitational pull — that drew her in. Moselle needed to know more.


"I'm obsessed with authenticity and realism, and I guess it's like my life's work," the 39-year-old filmmaker tells MTV News over the phone from her Brooklyn apartment. "My aim is to make life in a way that feels like you're watching it happen rather than it being contrived or set up, or whatever."


Moselle is now curled up with her partner-in-quarantine Isobel, a 15-year-old cat she borrowed from a friend on Facebook a month ago. ("I just wrote on Facebook, 'Hey, does anybody aspire to lend me their cat?'") Despite her feline age, Isobel's "young at heart," the director says. "She still parties all night long."


It's the sort of energy Moselle needs now even because the city shuts down in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, her brain does not. She's currently writing a script about her father's experience working in a mental hospital, furthermore to filming her next documentary. "I'm routinely inspired by a million things," she says. "I don't know if I'll ever have the ability to stop. Nothing will stop me, even COVID won't stop me. I'm weird. I'm still shooting a documentary amidst all this."


She's also busy promoting her HBO series Betty, a reimagining of Skate Kitchen starring the same spirited New York City skate crew that captivated the writer-director on the G train that summer four years prior. Rachelle Vinberg and Moran return in their respective roles as awkward shredder Camille and lovable stoner Kirt, respectively. They hit the pavement alongside their real-life companions and collaborators Moonbear (quiet documentarian Honeybear), Dede Lovelace (feisty Janay), and Ajani Russell (free-spirited weed-dealer Indigo). Like Moselle's past work, Betty is a portrait of youth today, bursting with vibrancy and fashion. "There's something really pretty about youth," she says. "There is this naiveness, an innocence and awkwardness. That time before we all get jaded or lose our excitement for life, that's what I love to capture."


Similar to Skate Kitchen, the series tackles narratives and themes inspired by its actors’ own experiences — like the emotional push and pull of female friendships, #MeToo, white privilege, recreational drug use, and fighting the patriarchy. Quite literally, in Kirt's case: She nearly gets into a fist fight soon after calling a dude "shrimp dick" over a turf war at the skatepark. However the story never lingers. It moves via motions of everyday life, roaming through plot like an audience teens drifting by way of the streets of New York City: kick, push, and coast. The show, in essence, is a vibe.


That has a lot to do with Moselle's collaborative and fluid approach to storytelling. "The world is theirs. The way they speak is theirs," she says. For Moselle, a script is a living, breathing entity — a loosely constructed narrative that permits for surprises. Her ability to record moments as they unfold, and do so aesthetically, is her strength. "I love those moments of discovering things for the opening time," she reflects. She is aware that the most human moments come not from a plan although rather from a possibility, and she encouraged her cast, several of these complete novices to acting, to play around. "Some of the perfect moments were as soon as we just let them do their thing," Moselle adds. "And I think that was really crucial for me to not feel like they were reading lines."


Throughout a scripted scene in which Kirt spends the afternoon high on mushrooms in Washington Square Park, Moran improvised some of Kirt's prophetic musings. Any time she says, 'I don't really understand time now that really killed me," the creator says with a laugh. "It was so good."


It accommodates that Moselle has spent the last four years working with the girls of Skate Kitchen. She understands them, is aware their strengths and eccentricities. Moran even pushes her to skate. ("I can get on a board and skate around," the director says, nevertheless I'm like 40 years old, so I'm attempting to not hurt myself now) Despite the 20-year age gap between them, Moselle says that she's learned more from Vinberg and crew than they've probably learned from her. "I'm inspired by the way that they visualize life and are so ambitious and relentless with what they're doing," she says. "They're incredibly open to letting ladies into their space. It's this idea that there's enough space for all females to succeed." That spirit is integral to Betty; the six-episode series is bookended by Kirt's aspire to host an inclusive, all-girls skate sesh.


Women are also the creative force in back of the show, and it also was key that the skaters-turned-actors spent time in the writers' room to craft narratives that felt authentic to their own experiences. "The stories are certainly inspired by their situations nevertheless also inspired by situations that the writers have gone through," Moselle says. She is a credited writer alongside Executive Producer Lesley Arfin (Netflix's Love). "There's certain things that we wanted concentrate on, like Me Also. We were all talking about Me Also in the writers' room, and I've never saw a story where young people deal with that. Like, what in the event you had a friend and he was accused of sexual assault? How would you deal with that situation?" Janay grapples with this firsthand any time her childhood friend-turned-ex is caught up in an accusation he swears isn't true. Betty navigates the tough gray areas of assault and buried trauma by letting these girls process their discomfort and talk it out, whether it's sitting with each other on a curb or sharing a blunt with companions in your bedroom. It's these moments in which Betty truly feels alive.


"We visualize a lot of dudes talking about things, although you don't visualize several females speaking about what they actually really talk about," she says. "Young girls have a lot of questions. And I think it's good to know that that's something that happened, and it's real. It's females talking about their bodies and their sexuality or joking around about that stuff, it's not taboo. It's OK. That's what we actually talk about."


And once they're done talking, they grab their boards. There's nothing that the sound of wheels turning on pavement can't fix. And Moselle will be there to capture it.