David Belle, Interviews etc.

"Jeff Belle has an office in Paris, where he handles fire-department business. To speak with him, I brought a translator, Susan Chace, an American novelist who lives in Paris. Belle, who is forty-five, is small and wiry. He has a round face, a sharp chin, dark eyes, and black, cropped hair with flecks of gray. He was wearing a fireman’s uniform, a dark-blue garment like a jumpsuit. The legs ended just above the tops of his black combat boots. Over the uniform, he wore a long coat that had “Pompier de Paris” written on the back. We met at his office, then he took us to an empty, low-ceilinged room with a bar and an espresso machine and some tables stacked on top of each other. On the wall were photographs of firefighters.

Jeff said that David was a restless boy. “He was always exercising in front of the TV,” he said. “He still takes whatever’s next to him, maybe a big book, and starts lifting it. He can’t sit still. He lives with it.” The brothers did not see much of each other until David, at fourteen, moved to Lisses to live with his mother. Then Jeff, who was already a fireman, began to look after him. He would show him how to climb ropes and perform gymnastic maneuvers, and David would go off and do it his own way. Now and then, David would go to the climbing wall in Lisses with his father and show him things he had taught himself, and Raymond, thinking that he was being encouraging, would say, “I could do that when I was nine.”

Through Jeff, David was exposed to the methods of Georges Hébert, a French sports theorist, whose motto was “Be strong to be useful.” Hébert believed that modern conveniences such as elevators were debilitating. He thought that Africans he had met while travelling were healthier and stronger than Europeans, and that the proportions of the bodies he saw in Greek and Roman statues were ideal. The philosophies and the exercises he developed, which are part of a French fireman’s training, were also meant to cultivate courage and discipline. Inspired by Hébert, a Swiss architect developed an obstacle course called a parcours. “David took Hébert’s ideas and said, ‘I will adapt it to what I need,’ ” Jeff said. “Instead of stopping at a reasonable point, he just kept going.”

David was briefly a fireman recruit, until he hurt his wrist. While he was recuperating, he started thinking things over and saw that the life of a fireman had too many rules, and not enough action, and he decided to join the Marines, but he didn’t find the same values among them, the “traditional values.” He left the Marines and went to India, where he stayed for six months. When he came back to Paris, he was twenty-four, and he didn’t know what to do with himself.

“He came to see me at my house,” Jeff said, “and he told me he didn’t know where his life was going. He was only interested in parkour. You could be a super policeman or a firefighter using it, but you can’t earn your living, because there’s no championship. I said, ‘Maybe if we film what you’re doing.’ ”

It was 1997, and Jeff was involved in planning an annual ceremony in which recruits perform firefighting drills. He decided that David should put on a show. He told him to get a group together, so that he wouldn’t look insignificant by himself. David collected two of his cousins and some other kids from the neighborhood, including Sébastien Foucan, with whom he ran around doing parkour. Jeff choreographed a routine for them. They dressed as ninjas and called themselves the Yamakasi. “It means ‘strong spirit’ in the language of Zaire,” Jeff said, “but it sounded Asian.” During the show, David climbed a tower and did a handstand at the top. He also scaled a fireman’s ladder and did a backflip from it. After the demonstration, David began getting invitations to perform.

Jeff is proud of David, but worries about him. “This was a kid who refused any kind of system, who just wanted to live his life,” he says. “If he’s surrounded by the right people, he can do what he wants. Ordinary life really upsets him, though, because this world the rest of us live in is not where he finds his pleasure. He’s easily disturbed by ordinary things. But he’s also asking, ‘Why am I doing this parkour?’ All his family who did this physical stuff were doing it for a reason, but he’s asking, ‘Why am I doing this, what does it mean?’ ” Jeff added, “He’s simple in his purposes. He doesn’t like talking very much. He’s someone who is looking for his way.” I asked what sort of routines David observed in his training. Jeff shook his head. “He’s still eating Big Macs and drinking Coke,” Jeff said. “He likes chicken sandwiches. He trains when it comes to him. He’s usually sleeping in the morning. He’s really a night guy.”

We arranged to meet with David the following day, in Lisses, where he was staying with his mother. When David is in France, he lives either with her or with Jeff. “He doesn’t really have a lot of money,” Jeff said, “although people think that he does.” He added that David was very easy to live with. “We don’t know about the inside of his head, but outside he’s very neat. His room is always in perfect shape.”

The next day, I took a taxi with Susan Chace to Lisses, about half an hour south of Paris. When we were under way, the driver asked why we were going there. Chace said, “To see David Belle.” The driver nodded. Chace asked if he knew who Belle was, and the driver said, “Of course. Il est unique.” We left the highway and, following Jeff’s directions, went around a rotary and came to a collection of low, flat-roofed, two-story buildings, like shoeboxes, painted light brown. We stopped in front of Belle’s building. Chace knocked, the door opened, and the driver said, “That’s him!” Belle had his chin tucked slightly, like a man looking out from under the brim of a hat. He had dark hair cut short like a pelt and a thin, asymmetrical face, with a sharp chin and a hook nose. He was wearing a red fleece top and jeans. As I paid the driver, Jeff Belle drove up behind us. We went into the apartment. The kitchen was by the door, and there was a living room beyond it with a circular stairway leading up. In the living room was David’s girlfriend, Dorine Sane. David had his fleece top zipped to his chin—he had a sore throat—and he seemed subdued. He had just come back from three weeks in the Czech Republic, where he was making “Babylon AD,” which stars Vin Diesel, and is based on a French science-fiction novel. David plays the head of an Internet gang that does parkour, and he choreographed scenes for ten actors.

Jeff and David spoke for a few moments, and then Chace said that David was going to rest, while Jeff took us to the Dam du Lac. Outside, we crossed a parking lot, then took an asphalt path through a park. Several hundred yards off, the Dam du Lac rose up against the side of a small lake. It was the color of sandstone and had the shape of an arch. “David was afraid of it in the beginning,” Jeff said. “Now he walks on it like it was solid ground.” The lac turned out to be made of concrete. As we walked along the edge, ducks paddled away from us. For some time now, a fence has enclosed the wall, but it was easy to climb around it. The wall was slightly concave, and the top was intersected by a horizontal slab, which had roughly the dimensions of a king-size mattress and was curled up at one edge. Here and there on the face of the wall were footholds and handholds in the form of slots the size of bricks. On one side was a rectangular box, open at one end, like a cave, which is called the cabana. Below, sticking straight out from the wall and about fifteen feet tall, was a form in the shape, more or less, of a hammer. Jeff said that the first maneuver David had done was a backflip from the cabana to the hammer. About twenty feet from the ground was a sign saying, “Escalade Interdite.” On it were signatures. “The kids climb up and sign their names,” Jeff said. “David also went barefoot on it.” He pointed at the top. “And at night sometimes he slept up there.”

For a few minutes, my mind screened images of David in videos I had seen—running up and down the wall, doing a hair-raising handstand at the top—then we began walking back toward the apartment. We passed a low building with picture windows—a nursery school—and Jeff said that when David and his friends were young “they jumped over the bushes beside it to the roof. That was their first trick.” While we were looking at a stairwell that appears as a prop in videos for a series of David’s cat leaps, Jeff’s cell phone rang, and it was David saying he was ready to talk.

When we got back to the apartment, David sat on a couch with Dorine, and I sat next to them. Jeff made coffee. For the most part, David sat quite still, like a machine at rest. The only part of him in motion was his right hand, which moved from Dorine’s hand, to her knee, to her lap, and so on. I asked how he knew whether a movement was too dangerous. “It’s just intuitive,” he said, shrugging. “My body just knows if I can do something or not. It’s sort of an animal thing. In athletics, they have rules—you have to take your distance and stop and jump, everything has a procedure—but I never did it that way. I don’t take a risk, though, that I know I can’t do. I like life too much.”

He said that parkour hadn’t changed much, since he started it, but his intention had become more specific. “When I was younger, I was playing, the way kids play at parkour, but now I ask the question ‘Is this going to be useful for me to get to the other side?’ The movement is simple. I don’t do anything special, because I want to get to the other side. What I’m interested in for parkour is the utilitarian thing of getting to the other end, whether as a task or a challenge, but in film they like a little entertainment, so I do that, too, but it’s not what I’m interested in.

“You always have to get through the first obstacle that says, ‘I can’t do it,’ whether in your mind or for real, and be able to adapt to anything that’s put in your path. It’s a method for learning how to move in the world. For finding the liberty men used to have.”

I asked David why he had gone to India, and he said that he had friends there.

“How did you pass the time?”

“I just kept training,” he said. “I was training in the trees.” Jeff handed me a scrapbook with a photograph of David leaping from the limb of one tree to another. He was stretched flat out, horizontal to the ground, like Superman.

“I was at a waterfall one day,” David went on, “and there were huge trees all around, and in the trees were monkeys. There were fences and barriers around them, so they couldn’t get out, but I went around the barriers and played with the monkeys. After that, I watched them all the time, learning how they climbed. All the techniques in parkour are from watching the monkeys.”

He then showed us, on a computer, a documentary called “Warriors of the Monkey God.” It was about a tribe of monkeys who live on the rooftops of Jodhpur. The people regard the monkeys as holy. We watched them leaping from rooftop to rooftop and through the trees. The scene that made David smile was one in which numbers of them leaped onto, then off, a piece of corrugated tin that was loosely attached as a roof to some stakes. Their landings made the tin shake. Some of the monkeys were leaping from the ground, turning on their sides in the air, landing on the stakes and shoving off from them—a tic-tac.

Watching the movie, which was about forty-five minutes long, took only about fifteen minutes, because David kept advancing it to scenes of the monkeys in flight, looking exactly like traceurs. When it was finished, he said that after coming home he had just continued perfecting what he had learned from the monkeys. He had plans, he said, to make a movie with them.

I asked about the fall on the Internet, the one that the American traceurs always talk about. David gave a little smile. “I was a bit tired,” he said. “It was the end of the day. I was just doing stuff with a bunch of kids. I fall all the time—I fall like the monkeys—but it never shows up on film, because they just want the spectacular stuff.”

I thought of Nikita with his bleeding hands and said, “You never wear gloves?”

He said that he wanted to be able to feel the surfaces he was grabbing. He held his palms out for me to feel, and they were as hard and slick as linoleum.

I told him that I had been to see people do parkour in Colorado, and that they had imagined themselves as preparing to use it for an escape, and he said, “That’s good. If you’re really thinking about how to defend yourself, how to be useful, then that’s a very different mind-set from just doing things to look good.”

Last fall, David said, he had discussions with Sam Raimi, the director of “Spider-Man,” about playing the role of Spider-Man’s double, but he decided he wasn’t interested. “That was a childhood dream, to be in a Spider-Man costume,” he said. “Now I’d rather appear on a poster with my own name, not as a character, saying, ‘This is me performing.’ ” He was planning to tour the world doing parkour, he said. A French film company partly owned by the director Luc Besson paid his expenses to perform last winter in Madagascar, and David had also given exhibitions in Italy, Germany, and Portugal.

He yawned and rubbed his throat, and I took it as a sign that he was at the end of his interest in talking. I thanked him and stood up. We shook hands. He seemed to think for a moment, then he said, “I’m still learning. I’m not sure of anything yet, I’m just trying to be as complete as I can.”

I nodded.

“What I do is not really something that can be explained,” he said. “It can just be practiced.” Then he went to call us a taxi."

The Parkour is:
1 - a utility sport that serves you in first place, you move, climb, jump, you don't continue to be blocked by a wall or by an obstacle that hinders you to advance.

2 - a train method that aims to make you stronger, then, is normal that you have to train very strong

3 - what must make you more agile, you jump, recoup, roll, co-ordinate your movement as a monkey... agility...

4 - the work force that allow you to increase gradually your physical and psychological capacities to cross step by step what limited or what hindered you to advance and to continue your parkour... the strength.. to carve with that you diminish your fears and your apprehensions to the will of progressive work in jump's with gap's, the more distant jump's. Your body must become accustomed gradually but it is a long work and difficult and, diminished the fears, you learn (and you must) to know your body, its possibilities and its limits.

All of this is parkour

But it is also to know to suffer and to know if you made badly (not too much badly) but is also to become hardened... the warlike spirit and determined that one must learn... David it lost some time because it was the only one... nowadays he allowed many to follow much more fast and to prevent all its former errors and all being a constant search and trainings to be able itself to say that I know my body and that I develop an above average physical condition

David for example, he's 34 years old and he's stronger now then when he was 20, but that's because (parkour) it's he's life and he lives it every day, because it is an art of living but is also physic... it's difficult for that who doesn't know and that doesn't understand the effort and the physical suffering... because if parkour is pretty, it is because it is dominated, and that is the result of very effort and suffering...

To train it is enough to find educative exercises (in which) you work regularly and gradually, your physical capacities will increase, it's automatic, the exercise must be done to the more extreme possible. It is normal and logical, one does not have nothing without nothing.

Later, all people speaks in the acrobatics, if yes or not... for us, the gymnastics and the acrobatics it has the base of trainings in the gymnasium and are also a base of the coordination of the movement of the body. To carry through a jump demonstrates that you know to command and that you dominate your body, and, if making 4m of height, you demonstrate that you have the force, the crave and the physical power to carry through this type of exercise that a specialized gymnast couldn't do. But one should not chain acrobatic movements on a wall or an automobile, this become only acrobatics for the show, it's not the useful parkour, is the "parkour acrobatic show of"

If one day you will be in difficulties in the roof of an apartment in flames or you are to be pursued by people how want bad things for you, you use parkour as in the B13, if you don't know what to do, then you make pirouets, you make as the Yamakasi on the automobiles or walls as in its film

We spoke with (non-revealed) brand. They want that David's parkour becomes (non-revealed brand parkour)... they had said that don't want freerun from the UFF, they know that are we and that we know better than no nobody to speech (about our parkour), to form, and pure and simply to show what we created

Parkour is free for he who practises it... is for you, later, if to want to make of this your mark, it is only necessary to be good at it, and not to hide behind the movement that you transformed. But well, the objective is that you understand the spirit and that you (must) advance in security, without useless risks, therefore the goal is also the security.

The important thing is to advance in this world with the idea of a basis of an action art that is parkour... it's enthusiastic to create an economic sporting movement that can allow many people to live its passion. But we guard so that the ones that live it, deserve it... it's very simple.

We are going to federate the parkour of DB, to form instructors with 3 levels of formation with periods of training in France and events in the foreigner so that all and each one of us speak only about one and the same parkour

1º period of training will be in (dates not divulged) and only the formed people will be able to form people for parkour. The objective is to be able to have a national representative for country in contact with us, he will be the judge of what's happening in his country and to form new practitioners.

One will not try to stop the people who make "extreme parkour" but this will be practiced on the responsibility of the one making the extreme, such as the person who makes ski out of the ski track.

One will not try to stop that who wants to do parkour by himself, but if some accident happen and this person doesn't belong to our organization, it's a matter of protecting us so that we are not responsible for all the accidents on hearth, and, if that person it's affiliated, during an event this person will have complete insurance, but if out of the event is on its responsibility.

The goal is to transmit and transmit well

article by Lina Manso for Mundo Universitário
<a href="http://www.mundouniversitario.pt/artigos.php?art=670" target="_blank">http://www.mundouniversitario.pt/artigos.php?art=670</a>

.What influence did you're father and grandfather (both conected to the fire department and the military forces -where you also were)in the invention of Parkour?
DB: I began getting interested in what they were doing, until the point I asked myself: what is there beyond this? I turned what I learned into a kind of game, with a lot of silence, flexability and agility.

.that takes us to the second question. Is this a sport, a lifestyle, a hobby or a philosophy?
DB: It's an art of life. It is as much urban as it is contemporary. (this part I think something got lost in translation from french to portuguese by the journalist..)

.Care to expand?
DB: Before anything else, is to learn how to be carefull. And never underestimate physical training. And it takes harmony between the practicioner and the space where he practises.

.And who can practice it?
DB: Everyone!

.I don't think I could jump off a 3 meter high wall...
DB: That comes with training! If you had a Lion chacing you, would you stand still?

.I read some placethat it can help you strengthen you'r self confidence and overcome you're fears.
DB: The main objective is to know youreself and learn how to overcome youre limits.

.How do you see the way Madonna has been promoting the art (seen in the video "Jump", from her last album, or in the coreographies of the "confessions Tour" shows.
DB: I simply think she uses Parkour to sell her music not her music to promote Parkour.

.The first time I heard about parkour was in the movie "Yamakasi". Do you have anything to do with that group?
DB: Yes, they're cousins of mine I initiated in the art.

.So what have you done to promote the art (since you've been doing it professionaly since you were 18)? (Again I think the translation during the interview was not that good...)
DB: I've been, for exemple, in the film "Banlieu 13", from director Luc Besson. I am now shooting another movie in Prague(Chec Republic), and I think there may be another movie coming soon, in Holywood.
Besides that I've been in several commercials for numerous brands like TMN (here in Portugal), Nissan or Nike.

. Talking about brands, Is there any kind of special shoe for Parkour?
DB: Nothing specific yet, but we would like to have our own brand...

. What do you think of the Portuguese traceurs?
DB: They have a tremendous potencial, a great climate that always helps... I think Parkour can go a long way here.

. Will you be comming back soon?
DB: Yes, maybe with my girlfriend (I really liked it here).

. Talking about women... where are the female practinioners?
DB: The same way that there are women who like football or boxing, there are does who like Parkour. They're around..in hidding.

. Going back to what you said about Parkour could go a long way here in Portugal. I got the sensation that you did'nt say everything...
DB: It's because besides the fact that the traceurs are in harmony with the city (they're not going around destroying private property), I admire the fact that most of them still study (I left school at the age of 15).

. If you had the time, would you go back to school?
DB: I learn alot on my own! When I travel I like to read about the History and Geography of the places I visit.

. Tell us something about Portugal then!
DB: I've heard of Sintra and was thrilled about it's mistical side! I love the ideia of the existence of an Ocult side.

David Belle:
Everything that is an obstacle is part of our art (Parkour). All that is an obstacle. WHen someone takes a step and encounters an difficulty, it is that. It's the crux of completing a task.
A part of it is a way of saying, "I've escaped, I am free, I go where I want," and there's no one telling me, "you should move through there because that's the way it is." It's "I move where I desire."

Voice over:
Overcome every obstacle. Advance, progress, without stopping. For David, Sebastien and others, from the start it's never been a game. In a concrete environment it's become a true discipline. Maybe also a philosophy.

David:
I think that if no one had done that, people would have done a lot of stupid things.
Because in doing this people have always been together, and where people don't know what to do, then someone will start to move, "come here, catch that," yes, and then everyone follows, then after you have the little challenges to face.
People say, "what will that give you if you practices that at the same level as the best, for example, who have a good training programme, who train regularly every day? And it's clear with the years. If someone had said to us before, "in ten years you will jump from there to there, no one would have believed it."

Sebastien Foucan:
People will see a lamp post. For us it is not a lamp post. It is something on which you can climb and you can maybe jump and go to the ground and you can...
For us it's the big game. It's... for us, it's like if you're in a gymnasium, and there, there is everything.

David:
The times when you have pressure and 'psh' it is released, I don't know, boxers must feel that. It's similar.
It's...you are like this, you are outside and it doesn't matter where you are, it's "I charge, and everything in front of me, I pass"

Sebastien:
Any person in the street, they can be like us. All you need is to put on some trainers.

David:
And anyone can do that. At your level, you adapt. And then, it's... you're freed, you escape, and that, that places it in our minds that we are not blocked by the walls that surround us.

Sebastien:
When you were young, you (we) liked... you have idols, everyone. You like the super heroes, every genre, Spiderman, Superman, Daredevil...
So, by doing that we become closer to these people. Me, when I looked at these old books, I tried to put myself in that person's place, how they lived like that. The method of control. To see people, like ants in an anthill, who live their little life and him, he is at the pinacle of everything, really. It is this freedom that I wanted to search for.

David:
Young people often stay in their corners and then, they wait until someone comes and takes them by the hand and everything. And we said to ourselves, "if we wait and wake up again in ten years, there will always be nothing."
So, you take it in hand, you move... and you create your standard on your own.