"Where Movie Critics Get A Taste Of Their Own Medicine"
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AN INTERVIEW WITH:
Kevin Smith
by Peter Sobczynski

March 26, 2004

One of the more recognizable figures to emerge from the American indie-film boom of the Nineties, wage-slave-turned-auteur Kevin Smith has built a cottage industry for himself (films, DVDs, comic books, action figures, stores, etc....) with a series of movies that combined hilariously profane dialogue, an ear for capturing the voice of a generation obsessed with the minutiae of popular culture and even the occasional moment of serious thought about spiritual or emotional growth popping up among the di*k-and-fart jokes. His 1994 film "Clerks" made him a cult favorite and his audience has grown over the past ten years with "Mallrats" (1995), "Chasing Amy" (1997), "Dogma"(1999), "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back" (2001) and even a short-lived animated TV version of "Clerks" (which lasted for only two episodes in 2000 but which had a healthy after-life on video).

With his latest effort, the sweet "Jersey Girl", Smith has made a break from his previous efforts. While those films were all interconnected, with jokes, plot ideas and even characters (especially Jay and Silent Bob, the stoner version of C-3PO and R2-D2 played by Jason Mewes and Smith himself), "Jersey Girl" is a completely separate film. More importantly (and controversially for his fans), he has reigned in the raunchy dialogue in order to tell the story of a young widower (Ben Affleck, a Smith regular since "Mallrats") trying to raise his seven-year-old daughter (newcomer Raquel Castro) and beginning a tentative new relationship with a foxy video-store clerk (Liv Tyler). Close in spirit to the more character-oriented "Chasing Amy" (still his best film), "Jersey Girl" is a sweet, touching and occasionally very funny film that proves that Smith doesn’t need the potty talk in order to make a film.

Never particularly shy about discussing his work, or anything to pop into his mind (his post-screening Q&A’s and college lectures, commemorated on the "An Evening with Kevin Smith" DVD, are legendary), Smith recently sat down to discuss what inspired him to do "Jersey Girl", his future projects (he was recently announced as the writer-director of an adaptation of "The Green Hornet" to star Jake Gyllenhaal), the various scandals involving his two most famous leading men and how the fallout from "Gigli" wound up inadvertently affecting his own film.

What were your intentions in doing "Jersey Girl", a film which is somewhat removed from what you have previously done?

Yeah, but that wasn’t so much the intention to do that -I wasn’t thinking "Yeah, I have to get away from that sh**." A certain part of me wanted to try something different and try working without a net to see if I could tell a story that didn’t rely on every other story I had told prior to that. Also, I couldn’t really make any more Jay & Silent Bob movies because Jason Mewes was so knee-deep into drugs at that point and it was getting tough to do that. We’d clean him up and he would be clean for the movie, but as soon as we would wrap, he’d go right back into it. I told him to get clean and stay clean and then perhaps we might talk about doing another one-right then, it was just too heartbreaking and it saps a lot of energy. That also played a role but it wasn’t be thinking that it was time to grow up. It was nice to try one and see if I could pull it off without the familiar characters or the interconnectivity of the other movies. Fatherhood definitely also sparked it - I know I wouldn’t have thought of a movie like this without it.

Do you see yourself alternating between more mature films like this or "Chasing Amy" and your more smart-alecky films in the future?

I think so. It’s nice to go back and forth. I’m kind of a big softy at heart and my predilection is more towards movies like this than not. If I had to pick one with a gun to my head, I’d go with the more melodramatic stuff more so than the flat-out comedic because those are the films I enjoy watching more. I think I’ll jump back and forth. We won’t be getting to a flat-out comedy for a few because next up is "The Green Hornet" and after that is the adaptation of "Fletch Won"- by that point, I think I’ll be ready to go back to the Jay & Silent Bob situation. It depends on if Mewes can stay clean; if he can, then I gotta think about heading into Jay & Silent Bob.

"Jersey Girl" isn’t the total break from your past work that some have made it out to be-in tone and spirit, it is a lot like "Chasing Amy". Did those two evolve for you in a similar way that was different from your more overtly comedic projects?

A little bit. "Chasing Amy" correlated more directly with my life at that time-I was the very sexual and insecure Holden who couldn’t deal with his girlfriend’s past and who couldn’t get past that stuff. With "Jersey Girl", I’m a father but obviously didn’t lose my wife-then again, I obviously didn’t date a lesbian either. Maybe they are both equal in the balance of truth and fiction.

By virtue of the fact that you have a seven-year-old girl in the movie, it is tough to throw around the term "co*k-smoker" without making it with a lot of cutaways. When I was done with it, I was surprised when I went back after writing it to re-read it and found that there was only one "f**k" in the whole movie, and it was used more as an expletive than as a description of an act. It just didn’t lend itself to a lot of swearing and sex talk-there is sex talk between Ben and Liv, but just not nearly as deeply as if it were Ben and Jason Lee. It is much easier to go off on one of those sexual flights-of-fancy with two guys than with a guy and a girl, at least for me.

Were there any moments from your actual life that pop up in the film?

Oh, yeah, The whole baby-wiping thing comes right out of real life; the whole wipe-from-front-to-back is one of those important things that no one ever tells you until you actually have a little girl. Me, I’m a front wiper and I never would have thought of that. A lot of stuff with the kid was stuff I had to extrapolate because at the time I was writing it, my daughter was two and I had no experience dealing with a seven-year-old, except by remembering what I was like then. I had to make a lot of stuff up and hope I was accurate. When I was writing, she was no help-all she did was lie there and eat and shit a lot. They don’t make great sounding boards for dialogue scenes.

Kevin Smith, Liv Tyler and Ben Affleck on the
set of Miramax's "Jersey Girl" (2004)
Photo © Copyright Miramax

There was talk that this script was originally written for Bill Murray...

When I originally started working on this, it was for Bill Murray. It was back in 2000 when I was working on the "Clerks" cartoon - there was a lot of gag-writing on that one but very little substance to it and I was hoping to write something in the off-hours to keep the other side active. Bill Murray was the guy that I was thinking about - it was the same story except that the dude was older. After I wrote the first fifty pages, I put it aside and didn’t touch it again. There was a moment where I had to decide whether I was going to finish it then or write and make "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back". I talked it over with Scott Mosier, my producer, and I felt that it would be weird going into something new like this without first closing up the other stuff.

After that, I went to Affleck’s Fourth of July party in 2001 before "Jay and Silent Bob" came out. He was talking about doing another "Chasing Amy"- I think he romanticizes that period. He likes the movie but I think he romanticizes that time because it was the last movie before he became Ben Affleck, Movie Star. I think he was into the whole going-back-home thing. He was talking about rehearsing it for a month and that it would be about the dialogue and the characterization and not just him pre-selling it while being in it - he was doing the "Pearl Harbor" junket at the time. I said, "Look, dude, one of us won an Academy Award for writing and it wasn’t me-why don’t you go off and write something for yourself?" but he wanted me to do it.

I told him I had fifty pages of something that I wrote a year-and-a-half ago sitting at home. I brought it over and he read it and was like "This is it. Finish it. This is so up my alley.", and so I finished it. I just had to tailor those first fifty pages for him.

Obviously, when "Jersey Girl" was being made, you weren’t supposed to know ahead of time that the Jennifer Lopez character died within the first fifteen minutes...

Yeah, that was a big secret and we kept it really quiet during production. That was tough, especially in this day and age, to keep something like that quiet and off the Internet. We had security-tagged scripts and changed one word in each copy to be able to keep track of them. We kept it really quiet up until the first test screening, and then it started to get leaked out there. However, now it is a marketing hook...

How do you feel about that?

It is disappointing. I remember seeing it with that first audience-pretty much the only pure audience because they didn’t know - and it was like a f**king gut-punch. You are expecting her to be in the whole movie because it is Jennifer Lopez; she died and you could hear the gasps in the audience. Now you don’t get that anymore because everyone knows going in that she is going to die. It is disappointing, to say the least, but I understand it. I get it; post-"Gigli", it was important for them to get it out there that she wasn’t in it that much so that it wouldn’t be mistaken for another Ben & Jen movie.

I never got worried when all of that went down because a.) I knew she wasn’t in it that much and b.) I knew that this was a different movie. Besides, it wasn’t really their fault that "Gigli" didn’t light up - it just seemed kind of ill-conceived and misbegotten from the jump. That being said, I kind of enjoyed "Gigli" in the way I enjoy most of Marty Brest’s stuff - I didn’t like it as much as "Meet Joe Black" but nobody liked that one either.

As for the real leading lady of the film, Ben had worked with Liv Tyler before as well.

Yeah, from "Armageddon". I remember watching the first dailies of our movie and thinking back to the complete lack of chemistry I felt they had in "Armageddon", I felt proud that we had gotten something that they missed in "Armageddon". Of course, in "Armageddon", you didn’t care about that relationship-it was all about the big rock and two seconds of the animal crackers going down her blouse. I don’t think they had met before that one but they have known each other since and I think those years of acquaintance lent to the better performances in our movie. Plus, I just rode them a little bit harder. I tend to do that with Ben more because I’ve known him for a while and I can get away with asking him for more than he gives at first. I’ve seen him in a bunch of other movies he has done and it seems like other directors are kind of content with just the first or second take, even though he is much better if you ride him because he is a hell of an actor, I think.

Have you challenged him at all about taking the work more seriously by staying away from the big-budget stuff or going back to writing again?

That’s what he does. He has always been able to mix things up and he always to put us in, so I can’t sic him for that. Besides, he makes a mint to do stuff like that. However, I think he is more effective when he is just acting and not being Joe Action Guy. There was a rumor that he and Matt were doing another screenplay, but it wasn’t a true rumor. He was working on an adaptation for Paramount but he and Matt haven’t come close to writing something together since. Right before "Good Will Hunting", they were talking about writing this movie called "Like a Rock", which I think they did some work on, but nothing came from that.

Wasn’t there a rumor that part of that was because William Goldman actually wrote the shooting script for the film?

Yeah, but as someone who had seen the very first draft up until the shooting draft and all of the various permutations in-between, including times when they were answering notes from Castle Rock asking them to make it more of a thriller, I can say that Goldman did nothing. He met with them and talked with them and stuff but Goldman did no writing on it. That was always theirs.

Besides, it isn’t as if Goldman has done anything in a while to warrant the thought that he wrote it...

It wasn’t really "Year of the Comet". If you read the first draft and the last draft that Gus shot, they are insanely close. All the stuff in-between, there was one draft where Castle Rock had Chuckie get killed, an NSA subplot and other weird sh** that just never fit that story. Thankfully, Gus was strong enough to bring the story back to what it was, which was a story about a guy and his friend. I remember that Lawrence Bender, who was the "name" producer on the film, or the producer-in-name-only, I should say, was urging them to write more animosity between Will and his friends. He felt they should resent him because he was so smart. That wasn’t the point of the story-the was that they didn’t give a sh** how smart he was, he was just their boy. Thankfully the script survived any number of terrible suggestions.

The celebrity who Ben Affleck’s character loses his job over was not the person that you originally tried to get for the part.

Originally we tried to get Bruce Willis, who I had written it for, but he never responded. I thought it was a no-brainer; it would take him a day and give him a chance to be funny and act because he was another guy who kind of got lost in the whole action world. I thought he would be into it and Ben said "I’ll get it to him - we both ran from that f**king rock in that space movie." We never heard from him, never even heard if he had read it or not. He was off making a movie in Hawaii at the time, "Tears of the Sun", an we never heard back.

I was kind of sad because I was a Bruce Willis fan. It was good because at that time, the film was set from 1986-1994. By getting rid of the Bruce Willis angle, because 1986 was when he did "The Return of Bruno" and became a music star, I was able to set it more in the present and count back seven years to see what was going on in the cultural landscape and I realized that Will Smith wasn’t that famous at that time - he’d done "Bad Boys" and the TV show, but he wasn’t yet an international movie star - and so I wrote the scene for him, I sent it off to his manager and then Ben and Jen helped us push him over the fence. He was a sweetheart - he came in and did it for free. That dude is so squeaky-clean and such a family man that the material hit home with him. We got insanely lucky.

One definite point of departure between "Jersey Girl" and your other films is in the visual style. In the past, you have been criticized for having a pedestrian look to your films, but for "Jersey Girl", you are working with Vilmos Zsigmond, one of the world’s most highly renowned cinematographers.

It was a sheer pleasure to look at the dailies and realize that a film that I did could look that good. It was great because he is a creative DP and not just a great lighter. Even a half-hearted suggestion from him would be better than anything I could come up with. He comes from an old-school sensibility where he believes in the auteur theory - he thinks it is just the director and the DP and everyone else just answers to them and their opinions are secondary. I’m far more collaborative and lean on everybody for advice and approval. Sometimes there were moments where that came into conflict - I think he felt that we didn’t need those other people’s opinions.

Now that you are doing "The Green Hornet" and "Fletch Won" as your next two project, are you worried that doing genre films like that will cause you to lose your voice as a screenwriter?

Not really. "The Green Hornet" is definitely a leap away-from "Clerks" to "The Green Hornet" is a stretch. At the same time, I’ve been doing this for ten years now; I’ve had to do one thing that I know that I can do well for a very specific audience. It would be nice to see if I can do "The Green Hornet" the same way. I’m totally scared sh**less but I think that is a good place to start from. We are going to try to honor the Van Williams-Bruce Lee stuff, especially in the first act.

In other words, no giant spider?

No giant spiders in this one. That is nice - the ability to go into a movie like this without receiving asinine notes. I have only one person to answer to on this one and that is Harvey Weinstein. Generally, we work well together and he doesn’t know sh** about comics, so he seems to trust me, whereas the "Superman" stuff was a clusterf**k of answering to any number of cooks in that process. There was one point, and I have told this story a zillion times, where I was reading my outline to Jon Peters and referring to Superman as Kal-El. He asked "Wait, who is Kal-El?". Kal-El, of course, was Superman’s Kryptonian name and if you are producing "Superman", you should know that. Also, there isn’t as much history to trip over with "The Green Hornet". You remember the mask and the music and maybe the car, but you don’t have the years and years of history or the hard-core fans.

Considering your well-documented problems working on the still-unmade "Superman" film, any observations on why DC has been so off on jumping on the comic-book bandwagon?

They used to be it - back in the day, it used to be Marvel that was terrible in getting their flicks made properly. The closest they came then was that "Punisher" movie where the guy didn’t have the big skull on his shirt. Oh, they had that "Fantastic Four" movie that they shot for a million bucks. The producers said they made it just so they could hold on to their option and that it wasn’t meant to see the light of day, but no one must have told the cast that because they all thought that it was getting a theatrical release. I don’t know, because I remember seeing posters for that one.

Back in the day, it was Marvel that couldn’t put a movie together to save their lives and Warner-DC who were cranking out "Superman" and "Batman". Now it seems to have flipped and it doesn’t look like it is getting any better for Warners with that "Catwoman" movie. Heavens, did you see that outfit? She looks like she is from not a poster for a movie but from a Vivid Video box for a "Catwoman" porn knockoff. It has no connection to the history of Batman, though I heard a rumor that he does show up - that might just be wishful thinking. I guess we have to hope that Chris Nolan hits it out of the park - he’s a good filmmaker and David Goyer is a good writer whose comic-book stuff is pretty good.

It has been ten years since "Clerks" and in fact, "Jersey Girl" opens with an animated View Askew logo that makes reference to that. What have you learned in those ten years that you didn’t know then?

What I know now is that logo cost more than the first movie, which is telling and a bit surprising and a little sad. What I know is that I had a lot of suspicions and hunches confirmed. I’ve certainly learned to become a better visual storyteller than I once was and I’ve learned to rein in the dialogue. Back then, I was in love with words and sometimes less can be more. I think I have a better handle on that - if you dole it out in doses, it has a more profound effect. I still think that it is all about making movies with your friends because it doesn’t seem like work that way and it is still about telling the stories you want to tell. The moment it becomes about the paycheck, I think you are kind of f**ked.

You supported a few films made by friends through your production company, the most notorious being Bryan Johnson’s "Vulgar". Is that some thing that you have felt obliged to do?

I certainly felt so in the beginning. Those to me were payback flicks because those people helped shape the person that I was and still am. Without them, I wouldn’t be the same guy - hence, I wouldn’t have made "Clerks" and I wouldn’t be sitting here today. For me, it was like "I did it - now you guys can too". I think about half of them wanted to do it, the other half I sort of goaded them into it. Now I am done - I’ve paid them back - and the only person I feel obliged to pony up for if they wanted to do one is Jason Mewes, but he doesn’t want to be a filmmaker. I always wanted my friend Walter Flanagan to do a movie - he came up with the idea for "Vulgar" but he didn’t want to write or direct it.

How is Mewes these days?

Mewes is great - I’m so glad to talk about it because it is no longer delicate. He dropped far down the rabbit hole, to borrow Errol Morris’s phrase from last night that has now entered my lexicon. He was lost for a bit and then last April, he got into rehab - probably the fifth rehab, but this was court-ordered because he had been busted with heroin - and after two months, he got out and came to live with us. This April, he will be one year clean of everything - no drugs and no booze, because on "Jay and Silent Bob", he got off heroin but he would drink every night. He got to this place where he just got tired of it and being on the run from the law certainly helped. Obviously, it wasn’t working out for him and it was a bad lifestyle. He’s in a great place and hangs out with a group of sober people. Him and Jack Osbourne and a couple of others are moving into this sober-living house a couple of blocks from mine. They still go out but they don’t drink or do drugs - they just pound Red Bull; Mewes will drink 20 Red Bulls in two hours and I will be wondering "How is it that you are still alive and your heart hasn’t exploded?"

Kevin Smith as Silent Bob and Jason Mewes as Jay in
Dimension's "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back" (2001)
Photo © Copyright Dimension Films

There was talk at one point of a continuation of "Clerks"; where does that stand?

We had talked about it at one point but we did "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back" instead. I started recently thinking again about the live-action sequel, as it were, but I don’t know if they would let me get away with it the way that I would want to do it. If I was going to do it, I’d go back and do it the same way as the first - shoot in black-and-white on 16mm - just to see if I could do it. There is also something a little sad about it. It reminds me of the story of a couple who go on a date to a great restaurant and it is the best date of their lives. They get married and twenty years later, the marriage slows down and to put a spark in it, they go back to the same restaurant and have the same meal in order to jump-start things. It just doesn’t work.

The "Clerks" cartoon movie, which we had talked about and which Harvey Weinstein has been bugging us about, we just don’t want to do it theatrically anymore. The TV version just didn’t work - why would we make a feature version of it? We thought about just skipping theatrical and going direct-to-video, which is where the hard-core audience will see it anyway. That is where we are right now-going straight-to-video and maybe doing one every year. It is just a matter of finding time to sit down and write it.

There has also been talk about a 10th anniversary DVD of "Clerks". Can you shed any light on what that will entail?

That is well underway - I think we lock that at the end of May. It has everything that was on the other one but it just looks better. We have a new transfer and they transferred the cut scenes as well. Nobody could find the cut stuff that we never intended to be in the movie. We wanted to find all the negative and create the 140-minute version but we couldn’t find those trims, which was frustrating. We are recording a new commentary track with everybody, hopefully, and there will be a big documentary. We hope to put the terrible "Clerks" pilot that the WB made on as well and the Jay and Silent Bob things we did for MTV. A few years ago, we did in comic-book form what we referred to as "The Lost Scene" that we never shot because it was too complex, which was the scene where they actually went into the funeral home. These guys in Austin are doing an animated version of that scene and at a certain point in the film, it will branch off to that in animated form.

Any reactions to "Down and Dirty Pictures", the book on Sundance and Miramax by Peter Biskind that has caused much controversy and which includes you quite heavily?

I read it. When I agreed to do it, I was happy because I was told that Biskind was doing the definitive book on indie film and I didn’t know it was going to become what it did. Nobody did. People who I have spoken to who are in the book are like "I wasn’t’t told it was going to be a hatchet job!" I think a lot of us were mislead. When I read it, it was just such a sour book. It chronicles all the stupid little sh** but it misses the big picture - how amazing it is to see a movie that you have never seen before and how it changed the face of cinema. It is easy to tell shi**y stories about Harvey Weinstein - people who haven’t even met him can tell stories of bad behavior about the guy. It is much more interesting to me to talk about how the dude really did change the landscape of American cinema and how much he has done for movies in the last 10-15 years. None of that is in there - none of the surprise or wonder of seeing something that you would have never seen before. When I finished, I felt like the last ten years of my life was a waste and that I had sold out.

For me John Pierson’s book {"Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes"} is still the high-water mark because he captured the fun and joy of indie film. He has gossipy stuff in there, like the Rob Weiss chapter, but that was one bad moment in a book full of great stuff. It was just republished as "Spike Mike Reloaded" - he did a new intro for it and I did a new intro and then we did a new dialogue - but his new intro, which fills in the gap between when it came out and today, is a far more inspired piece of writing in maybe 13 pages than all of Biskind’s book. John is cynical but there is still hope in the dude; you don’t close the book and think Thank God that period of film is over. The Biskind book was just very sour to me.

-- PETER SOBCZYNSKI

Copyright © 2004 Peter Sobczynski
All rights reserved.
Used with permission
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