In 1999, director Jon Reiss brought the electronic/rave scene to audiences with the documentary feature Better Living Through Circuitry. Reiss now returns with another kinetic documentary, this time exploring the controversial art of graffiti in Bomb It. Shot with vivid colors and set to an energetic soundtrack, the film investigates the history of graffiti while profiling artists all over the globe. Featuring old school legends and current favorites such as Taki 183, Cornbread, Stay High 149, T-Kid, Cope 2, Zephyr, Revs, Os Gemeos, KET, Chino, Shepard Fairey, Revok, and Mear One, the production shot in the United States, Europe, Africa, Latin America and Japan. Rather than just a slide show of graffiti examples, Bomb It is an explosive kaleidoscope of artists showing where the state of public space and personal voice sometimes clash and coexist. From sunny townships to dark serpentine tunnels, the film takes audiences along for the ride on guerrilla tagging missions and painting parties.

Bomb It premieres in Los Angeles at Laemmle’s Sunset 5 tonight with a run that ends June 12. In this interview, Reiss talks about the diverse scenes he captured along with the unending need for people throughout history to write on walls.

This documentary is very comprehensive with so many portraits of different graffiti artists. Did you know any of the artists before you started?

I didn’t know anything about graffiti before I started. I was actually writing a feature film about graffiti because someone had seen Better Living Through Circuitry and thought, “He’s the subculture guy, he should write about graffiti.” I was always kind of interested in graffiti but I didn’t know anything about it. I was telling this DJ who was part of Better Living about it and she said, “I’m a [graffiti] writer and I know a bunch of writers. I’ll introduce you once you are in New York.” So I brought a camera and did a few interviews, I immediately saw that there was a lot of depth to the culture that isn’t apparent when you see it on the street. That intrigued me.

Tracy Wares (producer/director of photography) came on board and we started doing interviews. We thought if it became interesting, we would do a film. Within the first interviews the whole topic about public space and the worldwide battle for public space became apparent - that’s what hooked me.

Were there certain street artists who you went after?

There were definitely some that we went after, for instance Shepard Fairey and some of the ones you kind of know off the top initially or whose work that I really loved as I started the project. As my tastes became more refined, we went after other people like Revok and Revs. Revs was targeted really early because I read a story about him and he was so interesting, he does a whole journal project underneath in the subway tunnels and he also does metal sculpture now. He doesn’t give interviews to anyone, but both Revs and I started in the punk rock days in the ‘80s so he was aware of some of my Target video work and my Survivor Research Laboratories documentary. That was the reason I got that interview.

I was able to get interviews because of my previous work and people could see from my previous work that I wasn’t an asshole. It was also a different kind of documentary so I was able to get people that other people wouldn’t have been able to. We were also very smart in not being a part of the scene so we didn’t have any beef with anyone. Beef is a big part of the scene which is not one of the topics in this film, although there will be five more documentaries coming. It will probably make it into the New York and LA documentaries because those are the places where beef is the most prominent.

We shot 400 hours of footage and there’s a lot of stuff that ended up on the cutting room floor, much to the consternation of the people who got cut out of the movie. We decided to also create these other DVDs and have clips on our blog with footage that didn’t make it in. The Sao Paolo version is being cut now and the next version is Japan. They are going to come out over the next few years.

You mentioned there is more beef in Los Angeles and New York compared to other cities. Why is that?

Part of it is territory, the crews and crew rivalry. People have beef with each other just in regular life and graffiti culture is so ego-based that it’s easy to create some problems that way. I would say it’s more prominent in New York because there’s a history of some more violent interactions between crews there going back to the ‘70s and people going over people. It’s just one of those things. There are certain spaces that are prime spaces and you want that space so you go over someone. That person gets pissed and they beat you up.

It’s so funny because the Europeans don’t have experience with that whatsoever. No one else in the world has violent encounters between graffiti writers. It’s pretty limited to the United States and then mostly limited to New York and LA. Sometimes people just don’t get along and there’s some of that in Sao Paolo, but that’s more artistic-driven in that they don’t like each other’s work. We tried to avoid the whole beef thing in the documentary because:

A. It’s been in some of the other documentaries
B. It’s ultimately not what the scene is all about

I tried to avoid that kind of non-topical negativity in my documentary. People in the streets having problems with the culture - that was valid to cover in the film - but the beef stuff just seems more like an unnecessary distraction. The beef will probably become a little more of an issue with the New York and LA documentaries because there will be more time to explore it.

The documentary explores a visual medium. What did you have in mind for the overall look of the project?

I always wanted it to be that was different from nearly all of the other graffiti documentaries out there. They are pretty boring, but for graffiti writers they are interesting because they generally show shot after shot of graffiti. Certain audiences love that. For me I wanted to give it the energy of the experience as much as possible. In Better Living Through Circuitry we tried to give the experiences of being at a rave without being at a rave.

For Bomb It we wanted to convey all of these ideas that are really significant to the culture, but do it in a really entertaining fashion to create a visual equivalent of the art form itself. We wanted the video to have the energy that graffiti has on the screen. For better or worse, I try to transcend the two-dimensional medium in my projects through the shooting, the music and editing. Film isn’t a medium for people to take long looks at art necessarily. There’s something else you can do with the medium to make it really exciting and vibrant and that’s what we tried to do.

There’s a very raw, energetic quality to the interview footage. Can you talk about how you shot the interviews with the artists?

We tried to do the interviews out in the street as much as possible. We needed to get good sound, but I wanted to capture the feeling of movement so getting them out of the studio and outside made the footage a little more interesting.

From Immortal Technique, Big Syphe, Disco D and Spank Rock to the Soweto Gospel Choir and more, there’s a whole lot of music in this film. Can you talk about why music was so integral to showing this world?

Having music adds to the feeling that I was trying to convey earlier – the excitement and energy of the film, bringing it to another level. I think music is very good at capturing that feeling and intensity. But music is related to graffiti in a lot of ways, for instance it’s one of the five elements of hip hop. Graffiti also exists outside of hip hop, especially in foreign countries where they don’t listen to that music. A lot of the earliest writers didn’t even listen to hip hop because it was after graffiti started. Graffiti was actually the first element of the five elements of hip hop. A lot of early writers became MCs and DJs like Kool Herc and KRS-One.

We tried to give a little bit of a different flavor musically for each continent and city to reflect the energy of that area. New York is a little more old school and hip hop oriented, Europe is more electronic, all the music in South Africa is from there, most of the music from LA is from LA, etc.

One of the most engaging things about Bomb It is that you follow the taggers in action in the middle of the night, in subway tunnels, even in sewers. What was that like?

The artists are pretty careful in general. Most writers who have been around for a while have a kind of sixth sense about obvious dangers. They are pretty cautious about what they do. They pick their places and they pick their moments. If we ever encountered a sticky situation, we would do whatever the artist wanted in regards to the footage. If they asked us to leave the footage or destroy it, that’s what we would do. It was like our pact that Tracy and I had from the very beginning. Sometimes we had to let go of some really great footage.

In Sao Paolo in the sewers, three minutes after we got out of the sewers there was a flash flood. Had we still been in there, we could have died.

With so many regions and aspects of graffiti to cover, were you ever concerned the documentary would become redundant?

As we went to all the cities and countries, we found things that were so different. Like in Paris, Blek Le Rat used stencils instead of spray paint. In Sao Paolo, we could have easily focused on Wild Style people there since they do exist, but it wouldn’t have been representative of the scene. Every area had something different, fresh and new.

Who was on your crew?

Tracy came on very early and we started shooting together. Then Kate Christensen the producer came on board. Jeff Levy Hinte executive produced the film and the editors Alex Marquez and Jessica Hernandez did an amazing job. The music supervisor was David Garcia. We had about 70 tracks in this film and for something low budget, that is astonishing. It was very hard. We did a lot and you can see the amount of work that we did is on the screen. I don’t think there are really any other graffiti films that have the scope, the history, thematics and intensity that Bomb It has. There’s no other graffiti film that deals with the relationship between graffiti and public space and all these artists. I feel pretty proud of what we did. We’re distributing Bomb It ourselves actually and we’re doing pretty well. We’ll be playing in over 20 cities in North America.