Posted by Brendo Man at 012.dsl.mcmsys.com on March 21, 2004 at 01:46:47:
March 21, 2004
O.K., So It's Not His Funniest Film
By BRYAN CURTIS
ERSEY GIRL," starring Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez, Liv Tyler and George Carlin, is a curveball from the writer-director Kevin Smith. Mr. Smith's previous features, including "Clerks" (1994), "Chasing Amy" (1997) and "Dogma" (1999), relied on rapid-fire obscenities and chatter about pop minutiae and on Mr. Smith's turns as the recurring character Silent Bob. "Jersey Girl," by comparison, is a PG-13 film with a Hallmark Channel plot: a high-powered Manhattan music publicist abandons the city, and his career, to raise his daughter after his wife dies in the delivery room. In this case, Mr. Smith has shed the anti-establishment vibe of his earlier movies for what he calls the clichés of mainstream filmmaking. Earlier this month, he spoke with Bryan Curtis, the film editor at Slate.com, about his career path, his fans, and fellow Roman Catholic Mel Gibson. Here are excerpts from their conversation.
BRYAN CURTIS "Jersey Girl" is your first PG-13 movie. How hard was that to pull off?
KEVIN SMITH Interestingly enough, it wasn't that difficult in terms of writing. You take Jay and Silent Bob out of the movie, and you sanitize any movie by at least 75 percent. And there's a little 7-year-old girl in it. So right off the bat, it was, "Oh, this is simple."
CURTIS Why did you want to make this project?
SMITH I'm not very creative — I just kind of crib stuff from my own life. Every movie's been a snapshot of what's going on in my life or what's going on in my head at the time. And having become a recent husband and father, this was what I was thinking about.
CURTIS It will strike many of your fans as not being Kevin Smith territory.
SMITH Particularly the 13- and 14-year-old Jay and Silent Bob fans, the boys. But you know, there are a bunch of fans who've been with us since '94 and are growing up right alongside us. A lot of my fan base has gotten married, started to have kids. So I knew I'd lose the 13- and 14-year-old boys the moment I started writing it. Because there's nothing for them to really identify with in the movie. It's about the three tiers of maturity: getting a job — a career — having a spouse, having a child. And what am I going to do? I can't make movies just for the audience. What's always worked out for me is making movies for myself.
CURTIS Why did you cast Jennifer Lopez?
SMITH The first person who suggested Lopez was my wife. She read the script and said, "Who's going to play Gertrude?" I hadn't really thought about it. And she said, "I just watched `The Wedding Planner,' and Jennifer Lopez was really good in it." And I said, "You know, Affleck has just finished a movie with her." This was before "Gigli" became infamous. And then I got a call from Affleck a week later: "You know, for Gertrude who would be really good is Jennifer Lopez." So I said, "I'm all for it."
CURTIS You've said you made this movie as a tribute to your wife. And then you kill the wife character in the first 15 minutes. How did that go over?
SMITH Yeah, it didn't go over very well with her. I've always told her, "This is a valentine to you." And she said, "I don't understand how it's a valentine to me. I die in the first 15 minutes, and then you wind up with Liv Tyler." All joking aside, it is about how devastated I would be if I lost my wife.
CURTIS You say in the press notes, "This isn't my funniest or most original film to date." That's got to be a first for movie press notes.
SMITH It's true — in many ways, people have seen a movie like this before. But there's nothing saying you can't work with clichés and make them your own. There's only three basic story structures in the world: man versus man, man versus nature, man versus himself. That's already a very small pool. I've always historically made relationship pictures. That's what I do. This is a relationship picture about fatherhood, the relationship one has with one's father and the relationship one has as a father. So I sat down and thought about it, and it's not that original. It's not a movie like, "Hey, man, everything you know about family movies we're going to reinvent." I'm not the guy that reinvents the wheel. I'm just the guy that adds another spoke, and hopefully it's a very strong spoke.
CURTIS A lot of people think of you as somebody running away from the conventions of genre films. But you don't see yourself as that.
SMITH Not at all. When I look at "Clerks," I don't think of it as, "This runs away from the genre conventions." I look at it as, "Well, we didn't have any money."
CURTIS You've said that you and Harvey Weinstein bonded over a shared passion for vulgarity. True?
SMITH Very much so. I was very attracted to him the moment I met him, and he was cursing. He's free. He's free with his language, and I kind of dug that. That, and he was smoking. He's cursing, he's smoking, he's a big guy and he's eating potato skins. I'm like, "I like this man."
CURTIS What did he say when you showed him "Jersey Girl"?
SMITH He cried. And he said, "I could watch 10 more minutes of that movie" — which for Harvey is high praise, because he's known for wanting to cut movies up. Without Harvey, I probably wouldn't be in this business at all.
CURTIS You made a controversial movie about Catholicism, "Dogma." What did you think about "The Passion of the Christ"?
SMITH I haven't seen it yet. I think it's funny, though, that people bring it up and ask me, "What do you think of the controversy?" I'm like, "What controversy?" The dude made a movie about Jesus in a country that's largely Christian — a very traditional movie — and it's made over $200 million in two weeks. There ain't no controversy, people. That's a hit. They took one or two Jewish leaders in the beginning and said, "This may be construed as anti-Semitic," and then spun it into a must-see movie for hard-core Christians. You've got to go see it if you love Jesus. I wish to God I had thought to do that when I was making "Dogma."