david belle
The founder and most famous practitioner of parkour,
David Belle was born on 29th April 1973 in Fécamp in Seine-Maritime
area of Normandy, France and raised by his maternal grandfather, a former
Regimental Sergeant-Major of the Parisian sapeurs-pompiers (the military
fire service). David’s father, Raymond Belle, was a soldier in
the French Army and served in Dalat in Vietnam. Raymond was greatly influenced
by the pioneering French physical education practitioner, theorist and
instructor, George Hebert, and eventually passed on his passion for physical
activity to his son. At 15 years old, David left school and moved to
the Parisian suburb of Lisses. It was at this time that he began to develop
the disciplines that would eventually become what we now know as parkour
or free running.
Still following in his father’s footstep, David
joined the fire brigade and obtained the UFOLEP certificate of gymnastics
leadership, and later went on to join a regiment of the French marine
corps at Vannes where he became the Regimental rope-climbing record holder
and champion (just as his father had been), gained a certificate of honour
for his gymnastic agility, and was first in the Essonne obstacle course
championship. Continuing to develop his own version of a discipline partly
practiced by soldiers as the ‘parcours du combattant’ (military
obstacle course), and by firefighters as the ‘parcours SP’,
David made some videos to illustrate his capabilities. In May 1997, the
first footage of David in action was screened to correspondents from
the French television sports programme Stade 2. Amazed by the footage,
they decided to film a piece about David the following week and the rest
is history.
David subsequently met with actor Hubert Kounde (star
of La Haine) who initiated him into the arts of theatre, and helped him
take his first steps in the medium of film. David soon appeared in
several pop promo videos and in 2001 made his feature film debut in L’Engrenage,
followed by small roles in Brian De Palma’s Femme Fatale (2002)
and Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention (2002).
It was after his
brother sent a demo video to Luc Besson that David was finally to
get his big break. Impressed by what he saw, Besson originally wanted
to feature David in the film, Yamakasi (2001). Things didn’t work
out, but Besson put David in touch with Cyril Raffaelli and the pair
became great friends. The following year, David gained national recognition
in the UK when he appeared in a short ‘station ident’ film
for the BBC called Rush Hour, in which he played a man who races home
from his office across the rooftops of London in order to catch the start
of his favourite BBC TV programme. Finally, in 2004, Luc Besson got his
way when David and Cyril were cast in the lead roles of director Pierre
Morel’s action-thriller, District 13, written and produced by Besson.
Actor
District 13 (2004)
Divine Intervention
(2002)
Femme Fatale (2002)
Engrenage, L' (2001)
Stunts
Crimson Rivers
2: Angels of the Apocalypse (2004)
AN INTERVIEW WITH DISTRICT 13 STAR DAVID BELLE
Well, actually,
I didn’t really invent it. It came from my father. I learnt it from
him. He was in a kids’ troop in Vietnam when he was a child. These
are little children who join the Army when they are really young. I was always
trying to understand why he was so good at sport and by asking him over and
over again I found out that it was because of his youth in Vietnam. He told
me about parkour, how he trained himself in doing it and all that stuff.
It really fed my curiosity and attracted me to it.
Yes, I did. I never wanted to do it for film
or to earn some money, or anything like that. The only reason I got moving
was to amaze my dad. I wanted him to look at me and say, ‘I like that.
What you’re doing is great!’ I was bad at school. I mean, I actually
couldn’t find my way. Parkour really saved me.
Yes, exactly. Whereas my father learnt it in
a military atmosphere, I turned it into a fun and enjoyable form. If you
look at young people who go in for parkour nowadays, they go much more into
freestyle, including acrobatics, and you can tell that they have fun, while
I learnt it in a more serious, effective and ‘survival’ way.
It’s definitely more than that. It’s
a way of getting yourself confident, of knowing that from any place
you are, if there is a problem… It’s not about the unreal or
the virtual. It’s about reality. You know immediately what’s
possible or not. Most of the time people say, ‘Well, if a problem comes
up, I can do this or I can do that, blah, blah, blah.’ But they actually
don’t
know because they never face those problems. With parkour, putting
yourself in difficult situations makes you aware of what you are
really capable of.
I am really happy about it. If people are doing parkour for the
love of it and for the art, and not because they think it will get
them into films, music videos, or anything else, then that’s good.
That’s good
because it’s
a healthy-spirit and a healthy motivation. It’s not like a martial
art in which you know that you will always have to confront someone
and possibly hurt that person. This is fighting actually, but the
only fighting in parkour is against yourself. You never have to hurt
somebody else to prove that you are stronger. It is something that you only
have to prove to yourself.
Well, when you’re
doing parkour if you don’t want to hurt yourself, you have to do it
with the simplest spirit possible, not to presume your strength,
and to go little by little. It’s just like learning to walk again actually.
What often happens in any sport is that there are lots of egos involved.
I can also see it in parkour too. Some people are going to come jumping
to show off and prove that they are able to do the same as the other, or
trying to impress, while it’s wrong to go in that direction.
Anyone can interpret
it differently. If I am personally a purist in my own methods, that means
that if I am at the level I am today, and if I haven’t hurt myself badly yet
then it’s
because I have been following my rules. Therefore when I teach, I
am tough because I don’t want my student to blame me or say, ‘You
haven’t
told me the right way to do it.’ So while training other people, I
am really strict and tough to make sure they… well, my personal philosophy
is, ‘Train yourself while crying, and you will win while laughing.’ The
point is to anticipate as much as you can in order to avoid injuries.
Well, when they do a jump, I often tell them that ‘once is never
enough.’ That
is to say that you have to wait for the third time to see the master.
One time, everybody can have the chance to succeed something like
this. So, to really feel as though you are in control or that you have mastered
it, you have to repeat the action several times. That’s what I say.
The three first rules are to do. That means that it’s not a matter
of time. There is no rush. However, you keep seeing young people hurting
themselves because they are not prepared enough. I think that you have less
chance of hurting yourself if before jumping you think something like, ‘I
don’t
feel it today. I’d rather do it tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.’ Nobody
has ever pressured me into doing a jump because if I don’t feel it,
I just don’t do it. I can tell that each time there is an accident,
that’s because, as they say, ‘more haste, less speed.’ Young
people go for it straight away because it’s easy. You just have to
put some trainers on and you can jump. But you need a strong physical
condition before doing some parkour, so the first thing, I say is ‘You
have to do it,’ then, ‘You have to do it well’ and then, ‘You
have to do it well and fast.’ This last rule is the important one when
filming, for example. That is to say that lots of people are going
to say, ‘I
can do that jump.’ But the crew is working to tight deadlines on a
shoot, so when you recce a location and say, ‘This I can do, that I
can do…’ you have to be certain that you are capable of doing
it on the shooting day. That requires you to be quite professional
and you can’t actually start working in show business or the film industry
before you have reached this third level, which is ‘to do it fast and
well’.
Well,
he’s a slighty rebellious character who would do anything to get through
his situation and his condition because he believes, and keeps hoping,
that some light can come back to his district.
Well, not today as much as I used to in a time
period when I was training a lot and was a bit more like a rebel myself.
But you can tell in the movie that it works really well because I did it
in a similar spirit and state of mind.
Yeah,
completely. The shooting experience was new and it took me… I spent
much more energy acting than ‘moving’ actually. When I was filming
before, I had previously done the recce location, planning what I
would do. There is no camera when I ‘move’. Well, at least I
don’t
feel it. Acting is different. This is the first film in which I had
to act and it wasn’t easy to manage.
It depended on if it was
short jumps and not dangerous stuff, for which you are allowed to repeat
it several times. But if you have to deal with a tough and quite dangerous
parkour move you have to make sure to get it on the first or second take.
Well, I’ll see.
I don’t have
any plan. I think that things happen naturally. I don’t like to make
plans about the future because I get disappointed if they don’t happen.
After I have finished a film, I prefer to tell myself that nothing
else will happen. If something finally does happen, that’s great. If
nothing happens, it’s not a big deal.
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You reportedly founded ‘le parkour’ when
you were only 15 years old. How did that come about?
So you decided to
follow in his footsteps to endear yourself to him, as well as it
being a kind of tribute?
How would you sum up the philosophy of parkour?
What do you tell your students? What do you try to teach them?
Your performance was obviously
very physically demanding. Did it prove to be any more difficult
performing for the camera, particulary because of some of the parkour
moves that were involved?