Interview: Kevin Smith: 'I'm the Forrest Gump of film'

Published on Thursday 8 October 2009 19:06

LESS than five minutes into our interview, film director Kevin Smith tells me about the first time he had sex with his wife. Or rather, we're discussing how Jennifer Schwalbach Smith feels about him sharing his sordid account with hundreds of thousands of people. As a recurring anecdote in one of the epic question-and-answer sessions he routinely hosts, it was filmed for DVD )and can be found on the internet if you cross-reference "Kevin Smith" and "open wound").

"It's a horrendous story," admits Smith, 39, whose most recent film Zack and Miri Make A Porno rarely approaches it for explicit detail. "But come on, we've been married ten years, we have a kid and we're in love. I told it at a Florida Q&A, came offstage and she was there, pale as a ghost. 'I can't believe you would tell people that f***ing story and make me look like a total whore! Goddamnit, is nothing sacred?!' I didn't have the heart to tell her it was already on DVD.

"Pretty early on, I explained, 'It's my life and I've gotta talk about it.' And she's like, 'Well, it's my life too and you gotta find a way without talking about that!"

His friend Ben Affleck, whom he cast in Chasing Amy, Dogma and, to much derision, Jersey Girl, alongside the actor's then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez, has also apparently chastised him for his indiscretion.

"There's obviously some stuff I don't talk about," Smith says. "People quite often say, 'This is not for your blog or this is not for your podcast, you can't talk about this at a Q&A.' I'm always getting that disclaimer thrown at me. And rightly so, I don't blame them."

Recorded three times for DVD, Smith's Q&As are notorious for his willingness to divulge at length. He sold out Carnegie Hall this summer. At one engagement in his hometown in New Jersey, he spoke for more than seven hours on films, comic books, pop culture and the mundane details of his life. Notwithstanding a relatively short session he hosted at the 2006 Edinburgh International Film Festival, where Clerks II won the audience prize, next week's Glasgow appearance will be his Scottish debut.

Increasingly incidental to his movies' release dates, these live appearances offer unprecedented access to a "name" film-maker, not least one whose upcoming features include a Warner Bros-backed Bruce Willis action movie and – if he can secure funding – Red State, potentially a hugely controversial horror about fundamentalist Christianity in America.

It's ironic then that Smith is still best known for playing the almost-mute cult character Silent Bob, partner of the foul-mouthed Jay, in his interconnected quintet of New Jersey-based movies, as he consistently and volubly elides the barriers between millionaire celebrity and fan. He recently published Shootin' The Shit With Kevin Smith, a transcription of his "SModcast" with long-time producer Scott Mosier, originally conceived as a way just to spend more time with his best friend. And he can claim more than 1.3 million followers on Twitter. He's been engaging with fans online since 1995, within a year of his breakthrough debut, the $27,575 budget slacker comedy Clerks.

"A lot of people who follow me dig me because they recognise themselves," he reflects. "They realise, just as I do, that if I hadn't made Clerks, I'd be one of them. The guy on the other side of Twitter."

His most financially successful film, Dogma, which starred Affleck and Matt Damon, still hot from the Oscar-winning Good Will Hunting, only grossed $31 million. Nevertheless, Smith is arguably one of few contemporary American film-makers to have remained successful on his own terms. He's certainly the only one to have written himself a lightsaber duel with Mark Hamill, who played Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars trilogy.

"The reason people like that isn't because it's a particularly impressive duel," he says of the scene, from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. "But because they know that fat f*** is in heaven right now, because the other dude was Luke Skywalker. I've been able to prosper on the back of others' dreams."

With his loser-heroes, conversational style and unashamedly geeky allusions, Smith has also been hugely influential for a whole new generation of film-makers.

"Two years ago, Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright gave me a copy of Spaced, telling me, 'It wouldn't exist without you,'" he recalls. "Both had been to this Chasing Amy Q&A I did outside of London in 1997. That night when they left, they realised it was fair game to talk about comics and all this weird, obscure shit we're into. Now they're doing films and so is Judd (Apatow]." Likening himself to the journeymen ice hockey players in another of his forthcoming films, Hit Somebody, "all dream and no talent", Smith has been honing his craft publicly in the 15 years since Clerks thrust him into the limelight, an eager wannabe rather than a born filmmaker. Having alerted Miramax to Good Will Hunting's Oscar potential, he declined to direct it, believing himself incapable.

Now though, he's ready to pursue such challenges, having shot his first feature that he didn't also write, and his first without Mosier. Released in February and starring Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan, A Couple of Dicks is a cop buddy movie. Action scenes remain something of a departure for Smith but he angrily decries accusations he's sold out, maintaining he's taken a pay cut to make something that, first and foremost, his late father would have enjoyed.

"He liked Clint Eastwood movies" Smith explains. "He reckoned my movies were just 'you and your friends sitting around complaining about how you can't get laid. I can watch that shit for free in my kitchen!'

"We wanted Bruce because of the persona he carries with him, the one he's had for 25 years. In the first week, I was like, 'All right man, how about the next take you try it like this…?' And he does that slow head turn, the Bruce Willis smirk and just looks at me like I'm adorable. Then goes and does exactly what he's going to do. Because he's Bruce Willis and knows exactly how to play Bruce Willis!"

Regardless, Smith remains clear-sighted about his cinematic legacy. Along with fellow fan-director Quentin Tarantino, he was at the forefront of independent cinema's rise in the 1990s and the "Miramaxation" of movies, lamenting that movement's absorption into the mainstream by venturing that Clerks would never be risked today.

Despite shelving plans to shoot his own Green Hornet treatment and Tim Burton rejecting his Superman Lives script, his emergence also coincided with the explosion in superhero pictures. Having written for both DC and Marvel, he's currently working on a new Batman series. Most self-evidently though, his films paved the way for the loser-hero "bromances" of Judd Apatow.

"I am the Forrest Gump of film, dude," he acknowledges, "an idiot that doesn't belong there but who seems to be at the epicentre of every important movement.

"Still, it is kinda cool. When Judd started making hundreds of millions of dollars, it was validating. He's just way better at it, financially at least. He knows not to overstep the line with Middle America. And it was fun making Clerks, Mallrats and Chasing Amy because movies like that didn't exist at the time. People weren't making movies about me – movies about fat losers, people who read comics, played video games and didn't have their life figured out.

"I get guys coming up to me now with my face tattooed on them. But I'm still the biggest Kevin Smith fan on the planet, because Kevin Smith started making the movies I wanted to see."

&#149 An Evening With Kevin Smith is at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, 12 October, 7:30pm, 0141-353 8000