Chasing Amy question in The Pop Culture Quiz

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Kevin hit the airwaves in Vancouver again with his second KZED 95.3 appearance on the Nat & Drew show.

Listen in to the entire appearance (3 1/2 hours - commercials have been cut - thanks Will):

http://www.viewaskew.com/radio/kzed953.mp3

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Director Kevin Smith (Clerks; Mallrats; Chasing Amy; Dogma; Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back; Jersey Girl) speaks in one-liners, which is a great attribute for an entertainer who will be “a fat man sweating on a stage for four or five hours” in front of 1,000 Vancouverites Saturday night (July 9). For those who can’t afford the $50 admission to the Vogue, the former Vancouver Film School student poured his heart out via cellphone to the Straight:

The Straight question: What do you wish you knew in film school that you know now?

The one-liner: “The more you eat, the less you exercise and the wider your waist gets. If I knew I’d end up looking like my dad, I’d probably choose to eat differently.”

The real deal: “I wish I’d paid more attention in film school [he dropped out four months into his eight-month program]. If I had, I might have made better-looking films. I was never interested in cinematic things; I was interested in character and dialogue.”

The question: Your films aren’t polished. Why do you think they’re successful in spite of that?

The one-liner: “I sold my soul to Satan in ’92. Then I sold it to Jesus right after. I figure they can fight it out and I’ll have a successful film career in the meantime.”

The real deal: “I think they speak to a distinct pocket of youth….I make films for myself; apparently, a lot of people also identify with not getting laid.” (Smith is married and his wife has even appeared in Playboy, but he told the Straight that doesn’t mean he’s getting laid.)

The question: Film schools in Vancouver are booming; hundreds of kids go into the industry each year. So, is there a future in filmmaking?

The one-liner: “Christ, I hope so. I’m banking on it. I’ve had an 11-year run and I don’t know how to do anything else.”

The real deal: “The current crop of directors will die out or become terrible at what they do. So we need new blood and stories to keep cinema interesting.”

The question: Anything else?

The one-liner: “Please come to the show! It’s so much more fun when there’s more people there. Don’t go to the Alanis Morissette show down the street; buy her CD and see my show. I’m missing out on the Alanis Morissette concert, which is pissing me off. I’ll be at the Vogue sweating on-stage. The question and answers go on for a very long time. I’m not high on quality, but I am high on quantity. Plus, they sell booze there.”

The real deal: Uh, that was it. As of press time, a few hundred tickets to the show were still available. Buy them on-line at kevinthevan.com for $50.

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Clerks director will answer your questions, maybe even about Ben and Jen

On stage
An Evening With Kevin Smith
Where: The Vogue Theatre, 918 Granville St.
When: Saturday at 7 p.m.
Tickets: $50, at kevinthevan.com or at the door

Kevin Smith is grousing on his blog about Vancouver weather. He’s also not happy with the Sutton Place Hotel, a few restaurants around town and a snippy desk clerk in Squamish. But, after some great sex with his wife, Jen, and a TiVo’d episode of The Simpsons, all is well.

Smith tells everybody everything. We know he gets up in the morning and, in his words, “takes a dump,” then takes advantage of the down time to check his mail. He’s gained 30 pounds in the last year, quit smoking, and apparently isn’t too happy with buddy Ben Affleck right now — but so far, we don’t know why.

But you can ask him in person on Saturday, and he’ll probably tell you.

The verbose Smith, the infamous director, actor and oh-so-prolific blogger is staging a live question and answer session Saturday at the Vogue, an “audience as straight man” format that proved itself wildly successful a few years ago with the DVD release of An Evening With Kevin Smith.

Smith is in town acting in Susannah Grant’s Catch and Release, but he’s primarily a director himself. The 1994 cult classic Clerks is thought to be his first film, but fanatics and some Vancouverites know that honour belongs to Mae, I (a.k.a. Mae Day: The Crumbling of a Documentary), his Vancouver Film School effort — or lack thereof.

“I was here circa 1992,” Smith tells The Province. “I did four months of the eight-month program.”

It was worth it, he says, because that’s where he met Lower Mainland native Scott Mosier, who remains his production partner. They first teamed to pitch a 10-minute short subject documentary for a VFS major class project.

“I used to walk to the film school at eight o’clock every morning, and man, it was hooker central,” he says. Through that scene, Smith met Emelda Mae, a pre-op transsexual who sang in a club and decided to chronicle her plight in a sensitive character study.

“We had a reputation of being jokers in class, but we made a real serious pitch. We were going to treat it maturely and sensitively. And they bought it.”

Twelve films were pitched, but only four were chosen, with the unsuccessful bidders relegated to crew positions.

Their elation soon turned to dismay.

“We’re like, ‘Oh my god, we’ve succeeded, this is awesome!’” says Smith, “and then we were faced with the task of actually making the documentary. And it was like, ‘I didn’t know we were actually going to have to do it, I just wanted to be one of the ones that were picked!’”

There was little in the way of organization or progress, and Mae eventually dropped out. (”I think she went to have her sex change operation in the Philippines,” recalls Smith). The filmmakers were left with a short clip of a Mae performance at the West End restaurant Doll and Penny’s, and no interviews.

The crew, faced with the same failing grade as the slackers, was livid.

“They kind of turned on us, so I said, ‘Hey let’s do a documentary about how our documentary fell apart.’ So Mae I turned into Mae Day.”

In spite of this measured success, Smith had had enough of film school.

“I don’t think you need to go to film school to direct,” contends Smith. “It’s like writing. You either can or you can’t.”

Smith’s former VFS instructor agrees.

“He didn’t need it,” says Jon Stoddart. “He enjoyed not doing the project the way it was designed, and thinking around the rules. Film school is about structure.”

Smith got half of his tuition back — $4,500 — and threw it into Clerks.

Says Smith: “Ultimately I think I made the right decision, although there are a bunch of film critics out there who felt I should have done at least 10 more years of film school.”

Clerks won accolades from Cannes to Sundance, and Smith went on to make Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (the two characters played by Smith and Jason Mewes in almost every film), and Jersey Girl.

Mewes, says Smith, will definitely be in attendance at the Q&A, but he’s not sure about Affleck, the star of a number of Smith flicks and now the husband of Smith’s Catch and Release co-star Jennifer Garner.

“Yeah, what better wedding present to give your new bride than to take her to see your friend who she sees every day at work anyway,” cracks Smith.

“He might go to make sure that I’m not slagging off on him. This would be the one Q&A where I could be telling an Affleck story and he could stand up and say, ‘That’s bullshit!’

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Kevin calls in on June 30, 2005 and talks about last week’s Degrassi signing at Jay & Silent Bob’s Secret Stash:

http://www.newsaskew.com/misc/20050624_kevinandbean.mp3

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• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6

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Part One: Degrassi: Next Generation Signing at Secret Stash LA

Fans in the Los Angeles area will get a chance to attend a unique sort of Kevin Smith signing at his “Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash” store in Westwood. Smith and Jason Mewes will join Degrassi: The Next Generation stars Stacey Farber and Adamo Ruggiero to sign copies of Degrassi: The Next Generation: Season Two.

The event begins at 2:00 pm on Saturday, June 25 at Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash, 1045 Westwood Blvd, Los Angeles, CA. Call them at 310-824-1373 for more info.

In anticipation of the event, Kevin was kind enough to make time for a preview interview. He was in a hotel room in Vancouver between scenes on the film Catch and Release. Harley Quinn tried to make music with the phone buttons, and it sounded like I kept him from a date with his wife, but ever the gracious interview, Kevin selflessly endured all of my inquiries all for the sake of spreading the word about the Degrassi event with one day’s notice.

Don’t worry if you’re reading this after the 25th though. There’s still plenty of talk about Passion of the Clerks, Fletch Won, Ranger Danger, Episode III, Evening Harder and more. And note: the usual amount of swearing and sexual references are in this interview, bleeped where possible.

When do you fly in for the signing? I’m going to be flying in Saturday morning.

So you go right to the shop? Saturday morning I leave at like 7:00, it gets me in at like 10, so I got a couple hours before the signing.

How do you get through a signing now without smoking? It’s relatively easy. I celebrated a year of not smoking by smoking again, and in production it’s kind of hard to not smoke, especially now just doing the performance thing because I find that I have way more free f*ckin’ time than I do on my own sets. There, you’re the director, you’re running around, you’re getting ready for each shot. Here, I’m an actor, so I’m only needed when they’re shooting or blocking. So a lot of free time, I’ve been smoking up a storm, but I won’t need to smoke at the signing. I mean, I’ve learned especially after that year that I’m pretty good about putting it down, not needing it. I can go a whole day without smoking if need be.

Will this be your typical signing? I think it’s going to be different than any signing we’ve had at the Stash thus far because you’re talking about a completely different audience. I mean, there’s a little bit of crossover between our fan base and the Degrassi fan base, but the kids did tours across America last year to various malls in big cities. They were getting these turnouts of 2,000-5,000 screaming girls of a certain age. We’re talking from 11 to 15, so historically my audience has not been 11 to 15-year-old girls. They set a signing in New York, four different Degrassi kids than Stacey and Adamo who are coming for our signing. And they had a turnout of 1,000 and had to turn some people away. Based on the data that came from that, that Diane at Funamation provided me, again tons of little girls. So it’s going to be a decidedly different signing than the one that I’m used to.

Don’t you expect your usual crowd to show up because it’s you? We’ll get some because it’s us but we haven’t really pumped it as our event. We’ve really hyped it as a Degrassi signing. And Mewes and I are there just because it’s our store, but the episodes in the box set that the kids are signing, Degrassi: Season Two are episodes that we weren’t even in. We just did the three episodes of Degrassi last season and that DVD will be coming out in November I think. We’ll do another signing for that, and Me and Mewes feature prominently. That DVD is called Jay and Silent Bob Do Degrassi and features the three episodes plus we did commentary track, there’s outtakes, all the stuff that we usually try to put on our DVDs. So I think there’ll be some cats coming for us but largely, based on the calls we’re getting at the store too, it’s people who are not familiar with our flicks, have never heard of our store but know about the Degrassi signing.

How late do you expect it to go? I mean, it’s scheduled from 2:00 to 4:00 but we always try to get to everybody, so we’ll see. I mean, I can’t imagine that it will end at four o’clock. I think we’ll probably wind up going over.

How do you get people to pay full retail price at your store when you’re not signing there? Well, we only sell of course our DVDs. In this instance with Degrassi: Season Two, we’ll be carrying that for the signing, but it’s probably not something that we’ll carry after the signing because it has nothing to do with our stuff and we’re not a DVD retailer primarily. But the movies of ours that we’ve made that we keep around, I think the reason that we’re able to move them at full retail, and not above it but at the suggested retail price, is because all that stuff is signed. So somebody coming by, yeah, you can go to Amazon and pick a Clerks X DVD up for $15-20, but you can go to our store and be paying no more than the suggested retail price, but you’re also getting it signed, usually by me and Mewes.

We sign all that stuff. Even if we’re not at the store, we keep a surplus of signed merchandise, so even if people come to visit the store and we’re not there, they can walk away with something signed.

What was the fascination with Degrassi for you? I don’t know, it’s just a show that really clicked with me. I first discovered it when I was still working at Quick Stop. They used to run it on PBS on Sunday mornings. They’d run Degrassi Junior High and then Degrassi High back to back. It just kind of appealed to me because it was a great representation of high school, pretty authentic and also it helped that the kids looked like normal kids. It wasn’t like turning on 90210 or The OC where you’re like, “Where do all these pretty f*cking people come from? I didn’t go to school with anybody that looked like this.” These kids look like real normal kids. Some are ugly, some are cute, some are fat, some are thin. They just look more like real life. It was an accurate reflection of high school I felt. And it was kind of a melodramatic show and I really go in for that kind of thing. Just like a teen soap opera. So I started watching it ardently and then just kept following it. Years later, they started up this Degrassi: The Next Generation and at first I didn’t think it would fly because I hold the first series in such high regard and I was like, “Why go back to the well? How could they possibly outdo it?” And they did. The Next Generation keeps a lot of the characters that I love from the old show, integrates them with new characters and those new characters are just as interesting if not more so. The performers are even better this time around and the scripts are even more edgy and realistic and heartbreaking. So for 25 years, Linda Schuyler, the woman behind every incarnation of Degrassi has kept it an insanely topical and honest piece of television. So for that reason, it’s always clicked with me. And part of the reason why I felt just enough to go back and follow up Clerks with The Passion of the Clerks, which we get to in September, was because I was like, “Wow, if Linda could go back and revisit Degrassi and have it work so well…” it inspired me to do it with Clerks as well.

How long do you get to stay in LA? I’ll be out again on the Saturday night flight, the latest flight I can get out on because the morning after, Sunday morning is my daughter’s birthday. And they’re all staying up in Vancouver. We’re all in Vancouver at the moment. I want to get back here because I think we’re going whale watching.

How old does she turn? She turns six.

Can you believe it? Yeah, you know, it’s weird because you get so accustomed to life as it unfolds that it just feels like well, she’s always been around. Harley’s been in my life for six years and Jen’s been in my life for seven. It just feels like I’ve always been with Jen and Harley. It doesn’t feel like I’ve ever been without them. It was kind of the same way like when Clerks got picked up. Overnight I went from having a job to having a career. In short order, it felt like, “Wow, weren’t we always doing this? Isn’t this what I always did for a living?” You just get accustomed quick, otherwise life kind of just rolls over you. So I acclimate fairly quickly. So her turning six, if there’s any surprised, it’s like I’m shocked she’s not turning 10. It feels like she’s been around longer.

Did Catch and Release come about through the Affleck connection? Not really. It came about because of Chris Moore, you know Project Greenlight Chris Moore. He’s been with Jenno Topping, the producer for years. They got kids and everything. They were looking for somebody for that role and they went to Jason Lee. Jason Lee had passed because I guess he was getting involved in My Name is Earl. And Jenno’s like, “We can’t find the guy to play Sam.” Moore was just like, “Well, what are you looking for?” And they were like, “I don’t know, the last person we went to was Jason Lee and these are the qualities we want the character to have.” Apparently, Jenno says that Chris Moore was like, “What about Kevin Smith?” And she said, “For two seconds I stared at him blankly and then it clicked and I was like, ‘Oh my God, yes.’” So, she brought the idea to Susannah Grant, the director.

And Susannah was like, “I kind of know him but do we have anything on him we can see him in?” So I didn’t send over the movies because Silent Bob doesn’t really give you an insight into whether or not I can pull off dialogue. So I sent over those episodes of Degrassi that I guested on because I actually had dialogue. I’m playing myself but still had dialogue. And then I sent over An Evening with Kevin Smith. Apparently, it was An Evening with Kevin Smith that got me the job. She was watching that and there was a moment in there where Susannah said that I shifted between being funny and then answering a very real and honest question and then tagging it up with a joke. She was like, “That’s Sam. That’s the character.” So I came in and read and they gave it to me. About three minutes after I left the office, I called my agent and he was like, “They just called. You got it.” So it was pretty sweet.

Who is Sam and does he get to kiss Garner? No, Sam don’t kiss Garner. That’s kind of Tim Olyphant’s job on the movie. He’s a friend of Garner’s character’s dead fiancé. It’s me and this actor, Sam Jaeger, playing Sam and Dennis. We were friends with Jennifer Garner’s character, Gray’s fiancé who dies. So we’re all kind of thrown together. We’ve known each other for years apparently but we’re kind of thrown together and grow tighter due to our mutual grief. The movie’s kind of about how people deal with grief, but it’svery moving and dramatic and comedic. It’s kind of a dramedy.

You were really excited to begin Passion of the Clerks early this year. Has the whole Weinstein Company delay been frustrating? It’s been a little weird. Thankfully the Catch and Release thing came along at a time where I could kind of move Clerks by a few months because nothing has settled completely in the aftermath of Harvey and Bob’s separation from Miramax. I mean, they’re still there until September 30th anyway, but we don’t really have any firm details on The Weinstein Company yet. He keeps saying we’re going, of course, and we intend to go. He’s financing Passion of the Clerks, but there’s no concrete infrastructure that they’ve revealed to us yet. I guess that’s what they’re putting together now. So the long and short of it is if there hadn’t been a fallout between Harvey and Bob and Disney, and everything was the way it was, say, a year or two ago, I probably wouldn’t have done Catch and Release. I probably would have just been shooting on Clerks. I would’ve had to pass on Catch and Release. But because things at that point were kind of up in the air, it just kind of gave me a few months to go off and try something different, to do the acting thing, knowing that Clerks was waiting for me when I get back. But being on this movie just makes me more anxious to shoot Clerks because it’s weird being on somebody else’s set and just doing this one function that I’ve done on my own movies, but I do so much more on my own flicks as well. So it’s weird just acting for somebody and not calling the shots, not deciding when a take is done or anything like that. It’s been a real education and kind of an interesting process, but it does make me amped to go shoot my own flick.

Have Dante and Randall changed their views on Star Wars? No. No, but there is a Star Wars riff in there that I’m really happy with. But no, it hasn’t really changed. They don’t really go into the new trilogy as much because these dudes are kind of stuck in one place in their lives.

Did you think of new customer encounters? I definitely came up with new customer encounters but that movie was never really so much about the customers. It was always about those two dudes and the lengths they would go to to avoid working, to avoid thinking about even being at work. That’s kind of taken to the next level in Clerks 2 and it’s also about what happens to the angry young man when he hits his ‘30s, no longer young but still angry.

What happens to Green Hornet now? I don’t know. Green Hornet, I’m not sure where it is now. I don’t know if it went with Harvey and Bob or if it’s staying at Disney. But there’s a script out there and I guess whoever has it looks for a director next.
With Ranger Danger on your slate, how will you feel about directing big budget special effects by then? That one I’ll be happy to do because it’s mine. That’s the thing about Green Hornet. I was like, I don’t know, to kind of shoot my wad on a big budget special effects movie on something that I didn’t even create and don’t really necessarily have a close connection to the material for, just seemed odd. If I was going to make a big budget movie, it should be something that came from me from the get go, like everything else.

So I don’t know. When it comes to that, I think I’ll be ready and won’t be intimidated just because it’s my material. That’s pretty much how I’ve done every flick, which is why good or bad, whether people like them or not, whether they’re good or not, they’re mine from start to finish. I’m invested in them. They have my voice. So I don’t know. It won’t bother me having a larger budget on Ranger Danger or it won’t be intimidating because I’ll know from the get go as I’m writing it what’s going to be required, how much it will roughly be and what not, and I won’t be on uncertain ground or new ground because it’ll just be an extension of what I’ve done before which is write and direct and create stuff, and shoot it using whatever budget. I mean, on Jersey Girl, that was a movie that cost about $30-35 million and it was the most money I ever spent on a movie, although $14 million of that went to Ben and Jen. So roughly it came back to being close to the Jay and Silent Bob budget without the star salaries. But that was kind of a larger budget and I was fine with it, but again I was fine with it because it was my stuff from the get go. I didn’t create Green Hornet. I don’t have to answer to legions of Green Hornet fans or anyone who even remembers the show affectionately or follow in the footsteps of more popular comic book movies based on popular characters. Nobody could say, “Well, f*ckin’ Ranger Danger ain’t no Batman” because it’s not even in the same realm. And it’s mine, so I don’t know. I’ll feel much better about a larger budget on that movie.

Is Zach Braff a lock for Fletch? I guess. It depends. Hopefully, yeah, he’s in. We met, chatted about it. I got to get him a current draft of the script after I do some more work on it, bring the page count down a little bit. But he’d be a great choice and that’s who everyone’s leaning towards.

How did you do a mystery script? Did the book give you all the plot points? Yeah, I did not depart from the book much at all because the book is such an amazing road map. I’ve always been a big fan of the book so I tried not to stray as much as possible. So it was a pretty easy adaptation. I mean, the mystery was there. It was something that I felt like I love the source material so I want to honor the source material while sticking to it as closely as possible.

Have you contacted Chevy Chase at all for anything? Since it’s kind of a year one story, for the version I want to do which is close to the book, there’d be no place for Chevy Chase just because it’s a story about how Fletch first got his job on the paper. So he has to be much younger. So no. I haven’t spoken to Chevy Chase about it or reached out to Chevy Chase. I don’t think Chevy Chase likes me anyway which is fine. The feeling’s mutual.

What Fletch qualities do you see in Zach Braff? He’s kind of deft with a subtle comedic performance which is what the movie calls for. It’s not overt like the first two Fletch movies. It’s closer to the book and the books are closer to an Elmore Leonard type of thing. Whenever I think about Fletch Won, or my version of it, the version I want to do, it feels to me like Out of Sight, the Soderbergh version of the Elmore Leonard book. The first two Fletch movies, and one of which I absolutely love, is far more broad and involves a lot more physical comedy.

How many times have you seen Episode III? I think I’ve seen it three times now.
Do you still think it’s close to Empire? Yeah, oh I do. I think it holds up. Like I went and saw Batman Begins and I thought it was amazing and insanely well done and very classy. But to me, it wasn’t as fun as Revenge of the Sith.

How surreal is it that you get to be friends with George Lucas? I don’t know that I get to. I’ve never met George Lucas.

I thought you had a special connection. No, not at all. I never met the man. I sat across from him once in the commissary at Lucasfilm but that was it. Never spoke with him. Waved at him. That was it.

How validating is it that so many people line up to read what you think of the last movie? I don’t know.

I think that only came about because it was one of the first things, if not the first thing written about the movie out there. So it wasn’t like, “Well, let’s find out what Kevin Smith thinks.” It was more just like, “Hey, let’s see what some guy who saw it thinks.” And it’s never validating when you’ve got as many people grousing about it, like, “F*ck him, what does he know? It’s still going to suck.” Sh*t like that. The internet’s kind of full of those clowns. Yeah, it was weird. Put up that review and it crashed our site that day because we got so many hits. Over a million hits, so it was kind of weird.

Will you direct the Star Wars TV series? I don’t know, we’ll see.

Will you mention me in today’s diary entry? Yes, of course. If I get to today’s. I’m about three weeks behind on the blog and that’s what I was just working on earlier. But yeah, when I get to today, of course. And won’t that be weird? You reading about yourself on the blog. It’s always a weird experience for some people because some people clam up around you and stuff. I get this a lot: “Don’t put this in your blog.” That’s become the mantra for the 21st century really. “Don’t put this in your blog. This is not for the blog.” And then you get some people who start telling you some intimate story and then they’re like, “Wait a second. I don’t want to tell you. You’re going to write about it.” To which I’m always like, “Fool, I don’t f*ckin’ write about your life. I write about my life.” So generally when I do stuff like that, when I talk about people I’ve spoken to, if they tell me stuff that’s very personal, I don’t put it in the f*ckin’ blog. And I hate calling it a f*ckin’ blog so let’s not.

That’s why I said diary. Online diary. But when I write about sh*t in the online diary, it’s stuff that happens to me directly, or my thoughts and feelings. Not other people’s thoughts and feelings or tales. Unless they interact with me, and then it becomes my story. But somebody telling me their story, like you telling me, “Oh my God, I totally got some massive anal last night” giving me the full spectrum of details, I probably wouldn’t relate that in the diary “My Boring Ass Life.” I would just write, “Well, I spoke to Fred and we talked about nookie.” Rather than going into f*cking details because it’s not my place to reveal how much the copious amounts of anal you get.

And you have another Q&A coming up in Vancouver? I’m doing a Q&A on July 9th. I was here in town, I looked at my schedule and I saw that I had some time. I’d never done one here so I said, “All right, we’ll rent out one of the theaters on Granville, called The Vogue and do a Q&A there one Saturday night.”

Are there enough new questions for a new DVD? Yeah, I mean, we finished shooting An Evening with Kevin Smith 2: Evening Harder and that comes out for fall. We shot those two big Q&As, one in Toronto at the Roy Thomson Hall which is a big opera house, and the other at the Criterion in Piccadilly Circus in London. That two disc set will be out in the fall.

So this one won’t be part of the DVD? No, but I’ll put in a call to the guys that I did Evening with with to see if we wanted to pick it up. It’s kind of a production because you’ve got to bring people out and set up multiple cameras and knock out seats and sh*t like that. But I don’t know, there are some Q&As that I’ve done where I’m like, “God, I wish we had shot that because there’s some good stuff there.” It’s always dependent on the audience, right? Granted, you get some of the same questions over and over, but so much of it is based on the night and the person standing at the mic asking you a question. So much so that each Q&A is different in a weird and wonderful way. And some of them go very, very long. One of the recent ones I did three months ago, four months ago in Jersey, in Red Bank, the first time I’d ever done a Q&A in the home town at the Count Basie Theater went the longest I’ve ever gone which was seven hours on stage. So I think this one in Vancouver will probably be at least four, maybe five.

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It’s March 2005 and Kevin Smith is a tired man. As Uncut is ushered into an understated drawing room at London’s tastefully elegant Langham Hotel, the comic book-loving writer/director/raconteur/slacker icon is garbed in his infamous green and black Silent Bob overcoat and splayed out on a chaise longue, flat out asleep.

Smith tore up the international cinema scene with his breakthrough indie flick, Clerks, a fast-talking, eloquently profane low-budget masterpiece centering on the go-nowhere lives of two convenience store workers. Culled largely from Smith’s own New Jersey convenience store experiences, Clerks won the main prize at Sundance and was rapidly picked up by Harvey & Bob Weinstein’s Miramax. The Weinsteins parlayed Smith’s self-financed $26,800 black & white labour of love into a hugely profitable worldwide hit and swiftly installed Smith at the forefront of their trusted creative inner circle. “I came in right after Quentin’s Reservoir Dogs and before the release of Pulp Fiction. I’m very often – and rightly so – tied to that era, the Golden Age of Miramax, where they fucking exploded.”

Over the ensuing decade, Miramax’s fortunes have risen dramatically, netting them a total of 60 Oscar wins and ten blockbuster movies (from Pulp Fiction to Spy Kids) that have grossed over $100 million at the US box office. Throughout the same period, Smith has written and directed five modestly-budgeted movies under his View Askew imprint: two raucous gung-ho comedies steeped in the comic book-inflected mythos of his “View Askewniverse” (Mallrats and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back), one controversial religious fantasia (Dogma), one critically-lauded exploration of contemporary sexual politics (Chasing Amy, his best movie to date) and one almost universally-derided experiment in family-friendly comedy drama (2004’s Affleck clunker, Jersey Girl). All but the latter feature Smith and childhood pal Jason Mewes as drug-dealing fanboy icons Jay and Silent Bob.

In a bid to rival Robert Rodriguez as Miramax’s busiest multimedia-hyphenate, Smith has also found time to relaunch two major comic-book heroes (Daredevil for Marvel and Green Arrow for DC), maintain two award-winning websites (ViewAskew.com and MoviePoopShoot.com), film his ongoing series of Roadside Attractions shorts for Jay Leno’s Tonight Show, produce an infamously short-lived Clerks cartoon show for the ABC network and launch an outrageously successful career as a raconteur on the US college lecture circuit (spawning the never-less-than-100%-entertaining DVD ‘An Evening with Kevin Smith’).

The View Askew canon’s record-breaking performance on DVD has ensured that Smith, along with Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, is one of the company assets that the Weinstein brothers are taking with them following their acrimonious split from Disney. Harvey and Bob have had to sacrifice their beloved Miramax company name (named after their parents, Miriam and Max) but managed to keep their Dimension Films imprint. Dimension plans to release 15 to 20 films per year and the first of these is Smith’s soon-to-be-filmed Clerks sequel, The Passion of the Clerks, a production that promises to play to his creative strengths after the misfire of Jersey Girl.

As Uncut thuds down in a chair opposite, Smith gingerly opens one eye. He’s clearly fucked after a marathon five-hour Q&A session (recorded at London’s Criterion Theatre for his soon-to-be-released An Evening with Kevin Smith 2: Evening Harder DVD), swiftly followed by a long day promoting his new book, Silent Bob Speaks (a must-read collection of Smith’s sardonic magazine columns – reviewed by Uncut this month, June 2005).

Nonetheless, Smith is a man who’s incapable of delivering a half-arsed anecdote and, mere seconds after his wearily amiable greeting, he’s sat bolt upright, issuing forth with evangelical New Jersey zeal on ten years of Miramax, his real opinion of Tarantino, the brilliance of Shaun of the Dead and the raw animal power of iconoclastic Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein.

You’re the man who extended Miramax’s independent portfolio beyond the pure art-house aesthetic. Who, besides Harvey and Bob Weinstein, deserves the credit for Miramax’s initial rise to power?

You gotta give it up to Steven Soderbergh for Sex, Lies and Videotape in ’89, man.

Sex, Lies was Harvey and Bob’s first multi-million dollar grosser – they did $25 million with that. It was an independent film that travelled well beyond the art house ghetto. After that, Tarantino is the one that blows Miramax off the fucking map. Miramax became The House That Quentin Built because Pulp Fiction made over 100 million bucks at the US box office alone - unheard of at that time for an independent flick.

Now that they’ve stormed out of Disney, is it easy to assess the scope of the Weinstein brothers’ contribution to moviemaking over the last fifteen years?

Without Harvey and Bob, independent film doesn’t get into the hands of the masses. Essentially, without them, it stays within the art house community. Harvey and Bob are responsible for taking indie flicks and bringing them to the suburbs. I grew up in the fucking backwoods of New Jersey and if I wanted to see movies like Prick Up Your Ears or My Own Private Idaho, I had to travel all the fucking way into New York to see them. Harvey and Bob completely changed the game, they took those movies to the fucking suburbs.

They gave the audience the benefit of the doubt, something that the major studios hadn’t done since the late 70’s, when they decided that all American audiences wanted to see were these big budget fucking popcorn movies. They fucking forgot that there was a whole period of fantastic, successful movies that weren’t instantly commercial or marketable, made by the young turks of the 70’s.

Harvey and Bob essentially reinvented that period and put independent movies back into the hands of the regular neighbourhood people who weren’t metropolitan sophisticates.

You reference Quentin Tarantino’s importance to Miramax. As a fellow Weinstein employee, what’s your take on QT?

Tarantino? Brilliant. Without him, I don’t have a fucking job. I saw Reservoir Dogs and I was like “Oh my god, you can reference The Thing [from Marvel Comics’ Fantastic Four] in a movie? Ben Grimm? You can have a poster of The Silver Surfer hanging up? You can dissect a fucking song by Madonna?” So that opened up the door for me with Clerks.

Y’know, you sit there with Pulp Fiction going “Why can’t there be more movies like this?” and at the same time you’re so glad that there’s not more flicks like Pulp Fiction because you wouldn’t appreciate Quentin as much as you do. That movie was a total eye-opener, it’s like a masterclass in mixing tones. When I first saw it, I was like “Okay, you can make a movie where one moment it’s very funny and the next minute somebody’s getting their fucking head blown off.” He really is the progenitor, man – he’s the godfather of everything.

Is Tarantino a Jay and Silent Bob fan?

I saw Quentin on a US TV show when Chasing Amy came out. It was around the time that Jackie Brown was released and he was sitting in with a bunch of critics discussing movies of the year. Anyway [Time Magazine film critic] Richard Corliss asked Quentin what his favourite movie of the year was and he said: “Chasing Amy, because Kevin Smith took a quantum leap between that movie and his first two movies.” I mean, that meant everything to me - my fucking head almost exploded because I respect the guy so much.

A couple of years later, I saw him at the Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back premiere and he fucking loved the movie. I was like “You? You loved that movie?” But he really did. His only complaint was that he wasn’t in it. He said: “You made a fucking movie about Miramax and you didn’t put me in it?”

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back [Smith’s lunatic, self-reverential 2001 cartoon romp through the mythology of his previous four movies, full of returning characters, bad taste gags and celebrity cameos] was a real weird movie for me, ‘cause that was the one that – for some reason - seemed to gain me the credibility and respect of the dudes who’ve been doing this longer than I have. Robert Rodriguez fucking loved that movie. Richard Linklater was like “I really think that’s your best work, you’re on solid footing with this movie” and I’m like “That movie is my best work?”

Six movies into your film-making career, do you get debut fimmakers quoting Kevin Smith as an influence?

A while ago, Quentin called me up and said “I’m having a screening of this British movie Shaun of the Dead, have you seen it yet?” So I went over to Quentin’s and I fucking loved the movie. Last night, I was out in London with the dudes who made it, Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg – excellent fucking guys. They were telling me about seeing Clerks for the first time and that watching Dante and Randall have the Star Wars conversation was a real eye opener for them. They were like “My god, you can really talk about stuff like this on film?” and when they put things together a few years later, that scene informed what they were doing with their TV show, Spaced.

Two of Hollywood’s highest profile leading men, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and an Uncut favourite, Jason Lee, all received their first break working for you, right?

I met Affleck and Lee through the Mallrats auditions – we set open auditions and they were the two dudes who came through. When we were shooting the flick, I just fell in love with them both. I met Matty Damon through Affleck and just kept using all three of them from then on. Affleck is like one of the funniest people you’ll ever meet - a tall, good looking, smart guy who’s really fucking witty. He’s really got everything. There isn’t much difference between Ben and Matt then and Ben and Matt now, except now they work more steadily and have a lot more fucking cash.
Of course, Affleck, right now, is getting the shit knocked out of him - but that seems to have run its course.

What makes you think that open season on Affleck is over?

I think that Truth, Justice and the American Way (Allen Coulter’s upcoming movie about the mystery surrounding typecast 50’s Superman actor George Reeves’ sudden death, starring Affleck as Reeves] is the movie that’ll put him back on top. It’s Ben Affleck, a guy whose career has been troubled over the last year, playing George Reeves, a guy who’s career had been troubled for many years prior to his death. It’s a perfect role for him, and he’s not the lead – the movie’s really about the guy investigating Reeves’ death [played by Adrien Brody], so Affleck doesn’t have to carry the whole fucking thing. It’s a perfect comeback vehicle and we know this because we have Pulp Fiction as the model - this is the Travolta role from Pulp Fiction.

Were you around when Miramax picked up the movie that kicked Affleck & Damon into the big leagues - Good Will Hunting?

Back when I was writing Chasing Amy for Affleck, he gave me the Good Will Hunting script and asked me to put it in front of Harvey. I read it in the bathroom. I was there for two hours and just read the whole fucking script - y’know, fucking weeping on the toilet, which I normally do when I look between my legs. I fucking loved the script and I called Harvey and said “Boss, I know this sounds stupid, but this script my friends wrote, it’s like the best thing I’ve ever read, it’s fucking breathtaking. Like it’s good, it’s Oscar good…. I think. But it comes with a huge turnaround cost. It’s currently with Castle Rock, who picked it up for $800 grand - it’ll probably cost you a million bucks”. Harvey tells me that he never pays that kind of money for a script, that’s really fucking high, but what the fuck, send it over anyway and he’ll read it over the weekend. First thing Monday, Harvey calls me back and starts booming: “I’m buying this, I fucking love it.” So that put us all in the Miramax family – Matt, Ben and me. I was already kind of there with Chasing Amy, but that lodged us firmly in there with Harvey and Bob.

You’ve often described Harvey Weinstein as a father figure and famously defended him when Peter Biskind trashed him in his 2004 book, Down and Dirty Pictures. On the eve of your fifth collaboration with The Passion of the Clerks, what’s your final word on the notorious Harvey Weinstein?

He’s a fantastic man, a great beast. From time to time, he asks me “Why do you call me a beast?” It’s got nothing to do with his size, it’s just that he’s this great beast that doesn’t exist anymore, who’s all commerce and passion at the same time. With the US studio system, you get people who are all about the commerce and very little about the passion. Harvey just can’t be one without the other. He’s always a businessman, always thinking about how he can turn a buck off stuff, but how he directs movies into the cinemas and how he figures out what he wants to change about them and how he gets behind certain movies - that’s all about genuine fucking passion. He’s like an old-time Hollywood studio boss.
It’s easy to take shots at contemporary Hollywood and say: “They don’t care about the art.” It’s easy ‘cause it’s fucking true – they really flat out don’t care about the art and they fucking didn’t until Harvey and Bob showed up.

So, he’s just your average misunderstood movie mogul?

He’s just this unique dude who’s a real creature of the ego and the id. He has this powerful fucking demeanour that’s a combination of regal and street. Like, when he bought Clerks, Harvey called us over to this restaurant at Sundance and he was sitting there, eating the greasiest fucking pile of potato skins and smoking a cigarette at the same time, going from one to the other bellowing “I fucking love this movie, I’m taking this fucking movie and we’ll put it in fucking multiplexes. We’re gonna put a fucking soundtrack on it and we’re gonna fucking blow it out”. We were like: “Fucking A, he talks like us.”
He really is a splendid, splendid man. Kind of like Henry the Eighth, or Ray Winstone in Sexy Beast, but coupled with that edge that Ben Kingsley has in Sexy Beast. He can be very fucking dangerous at times. Thankfully, it’s never been turned on me but I’ve seen it turned on and, shit, he’s a fucking frightening dude when he wants to be.

Interview by Andrew Sumner

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Kevin presents a Spacey Award to Stan Lee

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Prove Me Wrong Silent Bob:

http://www.viewaskew.com/tv/simpsons/simpsons.mov

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