We caught up with Kevin Smith in a penthouse overlooking Edinburgh, before the UK premiere of CLERKS II at this year’s Edinburgh Film Festival and he was in fine vocal form.
SCI-FI-LONDON: Is it true that while working on the 10th Anniversary of the original film you got the notion you should return to these characters and develop a sequel?
Kevin Smith: There was that. There was also opening up my mortgage bill and that led me to it as well. It had something to do with JERSEY GIRL as well. I was like, “Man, something is not working. Let’s retrench and see what’s worked and what hasn’t worked.” Something like that. And being in my thirties I wanted to write a story about what it’s like to be in my thirties. I kinda tried that and had varying results on JERSEY GIRL, but I still had a little bit more left to say. Then I figured that CLERKS was my flick about what it felt like to be in my twenties, when I used Dante and Randal as the way.
SFL: It’s hard to believe but it has been a while since I was in my thirties, what are your thoughts on that period of life?
KS: Honestly, for me, and that’s what the film’s about, it wasn’t that different from my twenties. There’s a bunch of us that hit this wall and didn’t really grow up. It’s like we’ve been given an extension as a generation, to our forties when we are actually expected to produce or do anything of any note, or something like come into our own, or what not. My situation is such that because of what I do for a living I’m afforded this extended adolescence that even most people I know aren’t really given, or at least I can still do it and pay the bills, but they’re living on friends’ couches or at home with their parents to some degree. So because of what I do I am afforded this weird, extended adolescence. I get to make pretend for a living, it’s not really a proper job. Based on that my thirties haven’t been that much different to my twenties, I just don’t live with my parents anymore and I have my own kid, and I’m married. That’s the only differences.
SFL: There’s a lot of profundity amongst the profanity. You were bringing in themes that were in DOGMA and the romantic elements of CHASING AMY. Do you think this shows your maturity as a writer?
KS: I don’t know. When people look at this one they go, it’s a little more grown-up. CHASING AMY was grown-up, to me, as well. There was a bit in DOGMA. I think we just run the gamut sometimes I do things that are a little weightier than others, sometimes I do like JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK, which is juvenilia for the sake of juvenilia. To me, I look at the flick and it’s some sort of weird hybrid between CLERKS and CHASING AMY to a certain degree, with a little bit of JERSEY GIRL whipped in there, which I probably shouldn’t say, ’cause it’ll hurt the movie, but we couldn’t have got to CLERKS II without JERSEY GIRL.
SFL: The way you keep talking about JERSEY GIRL makes it sound like you have some regrets about it.
KS: My only regret about that movie is that people didn’t like it. You know, I liked it. It’s shitty that some people bag on it as hard as they do. Particularly on the ‘Net. It’s ruined my credibility of being able to make fun of other movies, which sucked. I loved being able to make fun of other movies. Then after JERSEY GIRL I can’t make fun of a movie like RAISING HELEN, because people are like, “Bitch, you made JERSEY GIRL.” Yeah, You’re right. My only regret is people didn’t like it as much as I did. I have the same regret of almost every flick I’ve done. Sooner or later you hit people that just don’t like what you do. I stand by it [JERSEY GIRL] completely. I get that it’s not for everybody but it’s not like I look back at it and go uggh, let’s put a bullet in its head. I love the movie, but sadly it didn’t work for everybody.
SFL: Is there anything you would do differently?
KS: Yeah. I wouldn’t cast that dude’s fucking girlfriend! I didn’t in the beginning. I didn’t know it was his girlfriend. I was like, “Who do you want to play Gertrude? Who do you think?” And he was going, “Well I just worked with Jennifer Lopez in this movie GIGLI and she was awesome, and the movies awesome.”
SFL: You hadn’t seen GIGLI then?
KS: No one had seen it. It would be a year or more before they saw it. And he was like, “I really like her.” Really, so your thinking about working with her. Usually they like to work with different actresses each time. “You’d be willing to work with her again so quickly?” And he’s like, “Yeah, I really believe in her as an actress, she’s really great.” We went on, and Harvey was happy about the notion of casting Jennifer Lopez. And when we show up for rehearsals and you have to knock on Ben’s trailer door because he’s busy fucking the other chick, you’re sitting there going, “No wonder he wanted to cast her so badly.” Apparently he does like working with her.
SFL: Don’t you want to say allegedly?
KS: Oh no. They were fucking. I think everybody knows they were fucking. Although at the same time, when I was making the movie, I thought there stuff together worked really well because they were in a relationship. I thought, I’ll always work with actors that are dating because you get a something a little more real out of them. But then there is always the possibility, or probability or even the likelihood their relationship dissolves and suddenly you’ve got fight that battle. It was a weird period.
SFL: You say that CLERKS II is your favourite of the films you’ve made. Why is that?
KS: I don’t know. Up till now it was CHASING AMY and I think it might have supplanted CHASING AMY by virtue of the fact that number one, it’s a better looking movie. Like, I’ll never get credit for being a visual filmmaker and I think, visually, this is our most accomplished flick to date. I look at it and go, wow that shows growth and experience and stuff like that. Like after 12 years we’ve finally learned how to move a camera. But at the same time it speaks to me more than JERSEY GIRL does. Each flick is like a snapshot of where I am in my life at that point.
When I made CHASING AMY I was that very sexually insecure male who was hung up on girlfriend’s past, like how many people they fucked and were they better than me. Now I just accept that everyone fucks better than me and it’s much easier to deal with life. But at that point, when I wrote CHASING AMY I was in that mindset but now I look at that movie and I think it is well-made and I did the performances, but I don’t identify with the Holden character anymore. Now I’m like, dude get over it. You want to be with someone with a lot of experience. Be with a total whore. She’ll teach you things. That’s why I married my wife. With CLERKS II I very much identify with Randal. Now I’m so dialled in on that movie. Here’s me at this moment in time, so of course I like that the best, just because I think it moves along better. It’s us firing on all cylinders, as filmmakers – me and my guys.
SFL: How confident were you that you could get everyone back together again? Like Jason Lee is really busy with MY NAME IS EARL.
KS: I was pretty confident, but at the same time I underestimated their willingness to do so. When I asked Brian and Jeff, neither of them were all that ecstatic about it. Brian was like, “Oh the cartoon?” because we did a CLERKS cartoon. Brian was more interested in doing the cartoon than the feature. Jeff Anderson, I really had to sell him on it hard-core. I said, “Just give time to write the script and if the script sucks we don’t have to do it and I think I’ve got something to say.” And, thankfully, with the script he kinda came on board, but even then he was reserved, holding off judgement. It was until about the fourth day in that he actually got on board whole hog.
Like he talks about the second day, driving to the set to go to work and almost driving past the set, catching a turn and going back home, because he was like, “I don’t know if it’s a good idea.” His philosophy was, “some people seemed to really like that movie, for whatever reason, and we run the risk of making a sequel that sucks and alienating people that like the first one.” And I said, “Yeah, but when we made the first one there were a lot of weird things that happened to that movie over the last twelve years. Some people, for whatever reason, call it a cult classic, a seminal indy film of the Nineties and stuff. It’s great and it’s flattering, but they’re all kinds of attachments people put on it that we never intended when we made the movie. We just wanted to make a movie about two dudes sitting around talking about STAR WARS and sex for 90 minutes.”
When I broke it down that way and CLERKS 2 was no different, it de-mythologised the first one, in terms of the attention or reverence that people attach to it. So it wasn’t until the third day of shooting, and I’d cut together some scenes and showed Jeff and Brian and Rosario some of the cut footage already, that’s when Jeff turned around and it was the scene of Dante painting the nails in the back office and Jeff was like, “That’s better than anything in the first movie. We might be onto something here, I hope we don’t fuck it up.” That was pretty high praise from Jeff.
Jason Lee hadn’t been in the first one, we made that before I knew him, same with Ben, but when I asked them to jump on they were totally cool with it. Jason was coming off a full week at MY NAME IS EARL, where he was doing like eleven pages of dialogue a day, or something ridiculous like that. Ten he showed up on Saturday on our set and I gave him twelve pages and he was like, “What the fuck!” And I was like, “Welcome back”.
Affleck, I called and said, “Dude we’re heading into CLERKS 2, do you want to be part of this? There’s a role in here you’d be kinda cool for.” I was thinking of having play the role that Jason Lee ended up doing, and Ben was like, “Dude, I’m trying to keep a low profile right now cos it’s been a tough couple of years for me”, And I know I was part of one of them. He’s like, “I’m trying not to act and I’m putting together this movie I’m going to direct and I’m going to pass.” And I’m like, “I get it. It’s just weird that this is the first movie in ten years that I’ve made that you’re not involved with in any way, shape or form.” And he’s like, “That is fucked up. All right man, I’m gonna come out, but I’m not going to do any dialogue. I just want to be a guy in the restaurant, eating a sandwich or something like that.” So I said, “That’s fine, I’ve got something I can use you for as an extra, but I know you, you’re a glory whore. You’re gonna want to do dialogue.” And he was like, “No way. No dialogue for me.” So he comes down, we shoot two shots, reaction shots and shit, he does. We check the gate and he comes over to the monitor and says, “That’s it?” “Yeah, I got it. Just two reaction shots.” And he’s like, “I feel like I should say something.” So I’m thinking, here we go, so he got a line. So yeah, it was pretty easy getting people to come back.
SFL: What about the other Jason [Mewes]. I heard you only agreed to have him in the movie if he kept himself clean and healthy.
KS: Back when we finished shooting JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK I kinda swore off doing any more movies with Jay and Silent Bob in because Mewes was such a hard-core heroin addict, an oxycon addict. When he couldn’t get his hands on heroin or oxycon, he’d do crack. He was really, really bad. Then he cleaned up about three/three and a half years ago and I went to see him when he was in rehab, like the state run rehab, because we put him into some really posh type rehabs. Like one out in Malibu that me and the wife went to look at the joint, to visit Jason and she was like, “This is a fucking rehab? I’m an alcoholic. Sign me up.” It’s right on the beach in Malibu with waves coming in under the building. It’s really fucking sweet. And we signed him up to those places but they never took, and it was the state run one, the one that was mandatory because he’s gotten pulled over for some offence, and he was on probation for a while, and the day he was supposed to show up for his hearing where the judge goes, “You finished your probationary requirements, you’re free to go”. He didn’t go to that. So they issued a bench warrant for his arrest. He was wanted in Jersey for a year and a half, so he couldn’t go back to Jersey. Then he finally decided to go back to Jersey and the judge said you could either do two months in county jail or six months in rehab. And Mewes was so bad off at that point that he was like actually had to think about it, and was like, “maybe two months in county wouldn’t be that bad, because I could still get heroin and dope in prison.”
Thankfully he chose the rehab one, and for whatever reason that was the trip that turned him around. Suddenly he was on a better path. He wasn’t one of these dudes that was, kinda cramming it down your throat, but he reached a point where it was obviously not working for him. “I’m ruining my life and I’m losing my friends. I’m just going to put it down and see what happens.” So he put it down and at the end of his six-month term I went to see him and he was like, “I’m gonna get out in two weeks, and you said if I got clean you’d do another Jay and Silent Bob movie.” So I said, “I’ll do CLERKS and Jay and Silent Bob can be in it.” And he was like, “That’s fine.” But he was a little ticked because there were more characters in the movie. Like we added that Trevor Fehrman’s character, Elias, and throughout the shoot, whenever we shoot something for Elias he’d be like, “Why is this fucking dude in the movie? It could be a Jay and Silent Bob scene here.” And I was like, “You’ve got really proprietorial in your old age.” At this point in time it’s been three years and five months he’s been completely clean and sober. And he’s living proof that anybody can clean up because he was as fucking bad as it gets. He wasn’t like one of those dudes that parties a little too hard. Like Affleck went to rehab a few years ago and I always thought that was kinda unwarranted, cause he wasn’t like some hardcore alcoholic. The dude just partied too hard. He was a dude in his early twenties who won an Oscar, and is gorgeous. What dude wouldn’t fucking party? And he partied a little too hard.
Mewes, on the other hand, was born of a junkie, stone-cold fucking junkie. Like lost everything that he had, was living on the streets at one point. Stole money from me. You know, the typical bad, bad story. We had a recent fan event and we did a signing at Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash Comic Store and 2,000 people showed up. This one dude who’s gone to every event we’ve ever had, brought a book full of pictures of all the events we’ve ever done and he showed me the progression of Mewes. He started off looking healthy and then really looks like a living skeleton with flesh pulled across it, and then works it way back up to looking better than when he started. Mewes is the only one in CLERKS II, I think, who looks better than he did in the first one. Like me and Jeff Anderson and Brian, we all look paunchy. The unspoken star of the first CLERKS was the shitty look of the movie, the black and white look, and the unspoken star of CLERKS II is the gut, because we’ve all got them, except for Jason Mewes who looks healthier than he did in the first one.
SFL: Maybe his recovery can be put down to supportive friends like you.
KS: I wish I could take credit, I really do, because I’d ride him for the rest of his life, like. “You owe me.” But I can’t. I tried to clean up that dude so many damn times and it didn’t take. It’s the old adage of leading a horse to water, you can’t make him drink. He really had to decide to clean himself up and eventually he did. It wasn’t like one of those TV movie of the week moments, where the dude was in tears breaking down in a therapy group. He just hit a wall where he was like, “Fuck it. This isn’t working any more so I’m going to try this.” And he asks me every once in a while what I want for my birthday and I say, “Dude, just promise me you’ll never go back on drugs again.” And he’s like, “Dude, I can’t do that.” He’s actually responsible about it. “I can’t make that sort of promise as it would be irresponsible. I can’t make that deal with you as I don’t know what is going to happen tomorrow, but I can tell you I won’t ever lie about it again. If I go back on I’ll let you know right away.” It’s weird hearing that voice coming out of that dude, which is proof that he’s actually grown up.
SFL: Joel Siegel [a well-known US film critic] had a very vocal reaction to CLERKS II. Was his reaction to the film because of the generation gap and he just didn’t get it?
KS: I think the thing is, he really liked the first CLERKS. What really surprised me about him walking out, wasn’t that he walked out. I get that what I do is not everyone’s’ brand of whimsy, but that he did it such a kind of boisterous fashion. If you’re a film critic, my heart goes out to you. I sat in for Roger Ebert recently and I had to go and see four movies that I probably wouldn’t have chosen to see until their DVD release, anyway. So it’s weird when someone says you have to go and see something, and I get it that if you have to do that every week and are forced to see everything that comes out, it may get to you. So I understand the dude wanting to walk out, even though it’s weird cos that’s your job, right? You watch a movie, no one’s saying you’ve got to talk about it, the cool part is you get to tell people what you thought about it. So it’s weird that he walked out for that, and I understand that maybe it wasn’t his cup of tea, but if you’re going to leave, you just do it quietly. Like I’ve left movies and you don’t go out in a big fury. He was in the front row of a very small screening room with about 12 other journalists/critics and at the forty-minute mark when the characters are talking about a donkey show and not even by the end of the movie when we show them a donkey show, which I might have understood a bit more, he just got up and was like, “That’s it, I haven’t walked out of a movie in thirty fucking years. Goodnight.”
I thought it was kinda interesting that they guy was leaving the movie because he fundamentally disagreed with the morality of the movie, yet he used an expletive as he left! It was kinda odd. Just, if you’re gonna leave, just do it quietly. Don’t make the show about you. Then he went to page six of the New York Post and talked about it, as opposed to, if page six calls you up for some kind of quote you’d be like, “Whatever”, but he went on record. That was the weird thing. That was the thing I didn’t dig too much. Then I got to talk to him on a radio show in the States, the Opie and Anthony Show, and called him up and I was on the phone with them and he and I were back and forth about it. It was kinda weird and sad because I grew up watching this dude. He was the face of film criticism when I was a kid in New Jersey and we watched the New York feeds of the press. He was the guy that reviewed films on Eyewitness News every night. It was kinda like arguing with my dad, to some degree, if my dad looked like the biker from the Village People, cos he’s got this really huge cum-catcher moustache.
SFL: As Kevin Smith/Roger Ebert what did you see, and give us your candid reviews…
KS: I didn’t catch all that. I heard Kevin Smith stroke Roger Ebert and thought, now that’s a movie I’d like to see. What did I see? I saw WORLD TRADE CENTER, I saw SCOOP, I saw HALF NELSON and STEP UP. HALF NELSON was by far my favourite and probably one of the best movies I’ve seen in the last five years. A really great independent flick. STEP UP was a little kids, not little kids but a teenage dance movie, which I actually kinda liked and I expected not to like whatsoever, and is the one I’ll take crap for from now until the end of my days, for liking. WORLD TRADE CENTER is austere and very well done but doesn’t look like any Oliver Stone movie ever made. And SCOOP was not my fave.
SFL: Tell us about your culture evenings and how you get Johnny Rotten to come and read poetry at your house.
KS: For that I’ve got to give props to Daniella Milton and Russell Milton, who are London ex-pats who live in LA and their kid goes to school with my kid. Daniella was a huge Sex Pistols fan, so she was like, “I’m gonna send an invite off to John Lydon”. We figured he would never say yes. This was the dude who told the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to fuck off. Oddly enough he came and when I met him I was like, “Why did you come to this?” and he went off on a very long rant about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but then said, “Your letter was cheeky.” I thought, shit, my cheeky letter did it.
SFL: So what did it say?
KS: It just kinda called it what it was, which was, I’m asking you to do something because of what I do for a living I can do this kind of thing. Now I’ll owe you and be your bitch. If you need something from me, I’ll owe you. But it was like a form letter that we sent off to everybody, but I guess he liked the attitude.
SFL: Did he live up to your expectations?
KS: Beyond my expectations. What was awesome about the evening… He’s a real sweetheart of a guy and is one of the five most impressive people I have met in the last twelve years. There’s a dude who no one can ever accuse of selling out. He’s very much an artist and very much the same person, I imagine, that he was when he started. I think that’s a great thing. Some people would say it’s a negative that he hasn’t grown but I think he has such fierce integrity it humbles you to be in the same room with the guy. God, I put my fucking face on T-shirts but this dude is a legend. But he was real charming, the night was totally fun, people getting up, doing poetry and everyone laughing. It wasn’t like sincere. There was a lot of levity to the evening.
Then John gets up and does what John does, and boy, the whole crowd was polarised. There were some people that were just horrified and there were people that were delighted by it. There were people who were Sex Pistols fans, or thought they were Sex Pistols fans, and by the end of the night were like, “That was horrible.” Then there were people, like myself, that were so charmed by the whole notion of watching 200 people go white-faced. I was like, “This is fantastic.” What a note to go out on. We had talked about putting him up first, but I’m so glad he was the last thing, the last reader to go. It made a deep, deep impression. By that point everyone was kinda drunk, so it was even worse. I remember very clearly, there was this woman in the front row, kinda nervously laughing, and he just seized upon her. “Is that fuckin’ funny to you?” Then she laughed even more because she didn’t know if it was part of an act or not. I was going, it’s not an act. It was pretty genius. It was fun.
SFL: Was it his style of delivery or the content?
KS: It was the content. Basically he read Bodies, his song, and also later he closed with an a cappella version of God Save the Queen, which saved his ass with a lot of people, because they were, “Oh that I know. He’s not yelling at me.” He got up and he blamed everyone in the room for putting George Bush in office, and about how the war was all about oil and one after one, he was just great. [in a mockney accent] “You don’t need fuckin’ oil, oil’s for your arse or for your head”, and there was a bald dude in the second row and he started Benny Hilling him. You know, slapping his bald head. I was just thinking, “This is fucking phenomenal”. It was a very cool evening.
SFL: Are you going to work with him then?
KS: After that night, I was fan but not one of those hard-core fans, I always respected the Sex Pistols and kinda respected him as well, but I respected him so much more after meeting him. I was like, God there’s a dude whose life story is kinda interesting, especially if you read his book, his autobiography. A really interesting life story. There’s something to be said for doing what I’ve been doing for the last twelve years, but that dude’s been doing it for thirty years or more. There’s something to be said for maintaining your voice for thirty or forty years and not having it diluted. Like he has no JERSEY GIRL in his history. There’s nothing that dude has that like, “That didn’t work”. He’s maintained who he is from day one to the present.
SFL: Have you had any reactions from the armies of LORD OF THE RINGS fans, who will pissed off about the way you take the piss out the trilogy.
KS: The thing is, I think most people who would be mad about that kind of thing wouldn’t even express it, they would just be more dismissive. “Well this is the guy that made JERSEY GIRL, so fuck him!” They haven’t really taken the time out, or they recognised the fact that it was done with a bit of affection, but also kinda true. They were three movies about walking. It’s a hard point to argue. They could get and say, “You’re a fucking hack dude”, and I’d be like, “Tell me I’m wrong.” And they’d be, “Yeah, well they are about walking but you’re still a fucking hack.”
SFL: You went towards the mainstream with JERSEY GIRL and you did a script for SUPERMAN, aren’t you tempted to do some more mainstream movies?
KS: I don’t think I work well within those parameters. Everyone writes them off and says they’re all hacks and shit, but it takes a gifted sort of writer to write for a mainstream audience, to communicate something to a mass audience. I haven’t seen that new PIRATES [OF THE CARIBEAN] movie but whoever wrote it and directed it, those dudes are gifted, man. To put together a story that makes that many people want to go out and see it, and seemingly enjoy it, word of mouth travels very well on it. It’s just some sort of gene I don’t have. I kinda write for myself. Maybe that’s problem, I’m too masturbatory, I write for myself first and foremost. So the shit that appeals to me, my brand of whimsy is not going to be everyone’s brand of whimsy and won’t appeal to a massive audience, and will appeal to like this many people. Thankfully, because we work at the budget level that we do, which is rather inexpensive, it doesn’t matter, it turns a profit and I get to make another one.
SFL: On paper you and SUPERMAN sounds like such a good fit, because comics are one of your passions.
KS: On paper, sure. That was the same reason they gave me the GREEN HORNET gig at one point, which I eventually passed on. I got that job because Harvey Weinstien’s like, “You like comic books, right?” And I go, yes, very much. So he says, “Why don’t you do the GREEN HORNET movie then?” Not a great criteria to give someone 57 million bucks. It’s like there’s a bunch of people out there that like comic books, who are far more gifted at telling a visual story than I am. So, I don’t know. I like what I did on the SUPERMAN script ten years ago. I think I would have felt worse about it being chucked to the side if so many other versions since mine hadn’t been chucked to the side. Like JJ Abrams makes this really great joke about being a prerequisite for being part of the Writers’ Guild is that you have to have worked on a failed version of SUPERMAN at some point or another. There’s a lot of bodies in the wake of that movie.
SFL: How was your script different from the Bryan Singer film that opened in the summer?
KS: We didn’t treat Superman with as much reverence as they seem to treat Superman in this movie. We didn’t treat him with a lot of irreverence either but the movie, or the script at least had a sense of fun to it and this new movie felt like you were going to church the whole time. Especially as he was hanging in the air like this [spreads his arms out] the whole time. It looked like you were looking at Christ. It was strange. A lot of reverence. It’s further proof that you can’t please an audience, no matter how hard you try. I give Bryan Singer big props for making that movie. Very rarely does a director get to put their exact vision up on screen without someone fucking with it along the way. Usually you get noted to death or people tell you you can’t do that, you goota change it, you got to put this in to appeal to that demographic. You look at that movie and clearly that director got to make the exact version of the film he wanted to make, and not only did he do it but he did it on a budget of over $200 million, and that’s even more rare. That being said, I wish his vision of Superman was more in line with what I wanted to see, because it felt just a little too reverent. I remember reading about that movie in the beginning and going, “He’s dovetailing off SUPERMAN 2, that’s fucking genius.” Then you see it and you think, “Oh shit, I wish he’d put a giant fucking spider in there, or something like that.” That’s what I was forced to do and I used to think John Peters was fucking crazy and then after I watched SUPERMAN RETURNS I was like, “It would have benefited from a giant spider.” He would have had something to punch, you know. But it’s weird, at the outset, if you’d asked me a year ago which version of Superman I would want to see, the one I wrote or the one Bryan Singers doing, which is dovetailing off SUPERMAN 2, I would have said, the Bryan Singer one, hands down. Then, when I saw the movie I was like, “Huh. Maybe this is just setting up and the next one will kick ass.”
CLERKS II is in cinemas now.
Titan Books have published the screenplay of CLERKS II and have kindly given us two copies to give away. Go to the competitions page of the forum for more details. CLERKS II: SCREENPLAY can be ordered now from Amazon. If you Kevin Smith’s view of the world entertaining, SILENT BOB SPEAKS, also from Titan is a good read.