Interview with Kevin Smith

Kevin Smith’s a filmmaker that everybody knows at this point. He’s been in the game for over thirty years, creating cult hit after cult hit. Whether it’s Clerks, Dogma, Chasing Amy, Tusk, Mallrats or Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Smith’s career is a fascinating one to look at and it’s bound to have at least one film that you’ll come away from loving. His latest feature, The 4:30 Movie is an ode to the experience of seeing films in a cinema and I was lucky enough to sit down with Kevin to chat about the film, as well as geek out about the work of David Lynch and more.

Note – The following transcription has been edited to remove instances of repeated words, but a video version is also available below if you’d prefer to watch that. 

How’s your day been? 

It’s been absolutely lovely, I’ve gotten to speak to people who are like “You don’t totally suck as a filmmaker!” and that’s the best way to start the day, honestly. I know Chris Nolan’s met with “you’re the greatest” but I’m met with “You know what? You’re not that bad” and I’m like “thank you” so that’s a great morning for me. People seem to like The 4:30 Movie and that makes me happy.

I’m so glad to hear that, and to see that you’re so passionate about making films all these years later. One of my earliest memories of collecting DVDs was picking up the Clerks X DVD at an age where I was way too young to be watching Clerks. I was blown away by how anybody could make a film about anything. A guy and his friends made a movie while hanging out in a grocery store/a convenience store. 

To be fair, you’re right. The store was called Quick Stop Groceries. But thank you, honestly, the first thing you said about Clerks X, what ran through my head was “Fuck, we just missed the chance to do Clerks XXX, for the 30th anniversary. But then, in my head, I was like, we just have to make it six more years to get to Clerks 37 and that’s the fucking one.

You need to do that! That’s when the 4K comes out. 

By the time we’re there, we’re probably at 10K and that’s when you’re going to see every little bit of grain in Clerks blown up.

That would be amazing. In terms of Clerks X, the thing that blew me away was how many bonus features, like alternate cuts were included and I was curious if any of your other films have that treatment coming in the pipeline, new or old? 

I mean, if I had to guess, we haven’t started the process yet but next year, it looks like we get to play extensively with Dogma again. Which will be delightful, we’re almost there, we’re almost there! I keep being warned in the home office to stop talking about it but we’re almost there. That one, expect everything but the kitchen sink. New documentaries, restored footage, shit like that, the restored movie. Let’s see, Mallrats turns 30 this year, Chasing Amy turns 28, Dogma turns 25 in two weeks. I think the only one that’s on the horizon, because physical media is on the wane in most places, so people aren’t rushing to make brand new prints of everything. I would imagine, the next thing that gets the “oh my god, look at all this behind-the-scenes shit!” or “let’s treat this as if it was an important film” would probably be Dogma. 

I have something for Clerks that I’m going to put out online, maybe tomorrow on my YouTube channel. We found in the basement of Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash, this box of short ends from a 16mm workprint that survived from when we made Clerks. We didn’t cut or shoot digitally, we shot on film and cut on film so we had three garbage bags of a workprint that we’ve sold off at 10 frames of a clip on cards signed by me at Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash. So I found this box that had some left and was like “Maybe we should stop doing this, I’m going to hold on to this” and Stephen Frezza who works at Smodcastle found the box and he digitised it then gave it back to me. What it was, was all the clapper moments on Clerks. So there’s young me and a shirtless Jason Mewes doing it, it’s the only behind-the-scenes footage of the making of Clerks, and I haven’t seen it in thirty-fucking-years, and some of it I never saw at all. So I cut it into this little short film and we played it on Thursday at the third annual Smodcastle Film Festival. I think I’m going to put it up online, man, so people can see how young and stupid we were when we were running around making Clerks. Expect that to be on Clerks 37! 

I’m holding you to Clerks 37 now, I’m going to be waiting for this now! 

Good idea, man, and you and I are taking credit for it. You said Clerks X and that started me thinking. 

I’ll take a special thanks in the credits! 

Done and done. 

One of the films that The 4:30 Movie reminded me so much of was Spielberg’s The Fabelmans. I was curious if that was an inspiration at all? 

Oh, I loved The Fabelmans, particularly that last scene with David Lynch. But I had written this before The Fabelmans happened. Honestly, the movie that this owes its life to is Licorice Pizza by Paul Thomas Anderson. When I saw Licorice Pizza, I remember watching it and going  “Oh, how great! He went back and told his origin story. We’re doing that now? We’re old enough to do that?” To me, it never occurred to me to tell my origin story because Clerks was my origin story. I worked in a convenience store and became a filmmaker and shit! But suddenly, I was like “Oh, that’d be fun, to kind of romanticise the days of yore and childhood.” So it started there in my head, kind of lodged as an idea and when we bought the movie theatre that I grew up going to, the Atlantic Highlands Twin Cinema and called it Smodcastle Cinemas, suddenly I had a whole theatre. Sort of like Clerks, I had a convenience store and I was like “Let me write a movie in a convenience store.” With 4:30 Movie, I suddenly had access to a movie theatre so I was like “Oh shit, let me write a movie in a movie theatre” and instead of making it about the knuckleheads who work there, like ‘Clerks in a movie theatre: Ushers!’ I felt like that would be stolen valour as I haven’t worked in a movie theatre but I have sat in the seats, particularly in the seats of that very same theatre, so, I was like, let’s tell the story of the kids who go to the movie theatre like I was, at this theatre when I was a kid.

It all came into being, not in the way that I’ve been waiting to tell this story my whole life, it wasn’t until I saw Licorice Pizza where I was like “Oh, good to know, man. Maybe one day, I should do something like that” But honestly, it felt somewhat redundant to go back and tell the story of young me on some level because Clerks functions as that. I was like, what if we go further back? What if we go back to when I was a teenager, to my first date with my first girlfriend and take a snapshot of that? That was predicated on the movie theatre just looking old inside. It wasn’t a great plan where I was like “I want to do a story about youth” even though I’d seen Licorice Pizza and it lodged in my head, I wasn’t working towards it. But when we got the movie theatre, I was like “Oh my god, they haven’t changed this place since I saw fuckin’- these are the same seats that I saw Friday the 13th Part II in, for heaven’s sake. As long as I point a camera in the theatre, it’s 1986, we could make a period piece. This could be my Merchant Ivory joint and stuff.” It owes its life more to PTA than Steven Spielberg. But I loved The Fabelmans. That scene with David Lynch, like number one, I’m a Lynch fan. Number two, him playing John Ford was amazing. But also the fact that he was dressed like Captain Quint tells a story in and of itself. Like oh my God, he got Quint’s look from his hero director, like how fucking nuts is that? So I loved that movie, particularly that scene!

It’s such a great film and it’s so interesting to hear that you’re a Lynch fan. What’s your favourite David Lynch film? 

Honestly, it has to be Wild at Heart, man. It’s the one that I do the most lines from, still to this day. Like, “Hey, my snakeskin jacket. Did I ever tell you that this expresses my individuality, my belief in personal freedom?” “Only a hundred million times!” Shit like that. That was the Lynch movie that oddly enough, it’s tough to identify with people in a David Lynch movie but I identified with Sailor and Lula’s quest for freedom. And it is a coming-of-age movie of sorts, you know, about as coming-of-age as David Lynch gets. So Wild at Heart, hands down for me. When they gave it the Palme d’Or, that didn’t hurt either. Other people obviously felt it was pretty good but you know, the one that was my entry point was probably Blue Velvet. I’d seen Eraserhead when I was a kid and it was terrifying and shit, but before I became a filmmaker, when I got into film, I remember watching the Blue Velvet Laserdisc incessantly, over and over. I was a big Dune fan as well, The Elephant Man made me cry when I was a fucking kid. He’s an absolutely wonderful filmmaker and Twin Peaks, that was my jam when it was on TV, the first run. When it revolutionised television. David Lynch was doing the kind of TV that they’re now doing on streaming, on HBO and network fuckin’ TV. He really moved the bar, like the Coen Brothers, who entered this business and were like “We do what we do and we’re going to stay here and do it” and everyone’s like “One day, they’ll stop and move closer to the business” but they never stopped, they kept doing themselves and instead, the business just migrated closer to them. Same with David Lynch, man. Lynch and Frost make Twin Peaks and it makes such a fucking impact that thirty years later, we’re still seeing Twin Peaks-like programming. He helped to teach people that with the one hour format, you can do so many things. It doesn’t have to be Dallas or Dynasty. Talk about influencer! What an influencer. I would like to see his TikTok! 

That would be fascinating to say the least! One of my favourite aspects of The 4:30 Movie was the faux movie trailers and I wanted to ask about the process of conceptualising and creating those trailers? 

All credit goes to the Grindhouse kids. When I saw what Quentin (Tarantino) and Robert (Rodriquez) do it, I was like “That’s fucking fun!” The thing you don’t realise when you’re a low-budget filmmaker is shooting a trailer is expensive, because generally, a trailer has multiple locations in it. When you’re watching a trailer, they’re like “Look at this image! Look at this image!” and they’re taking little sections of many, many scenes. So when you’re shooting a trailer, it’s kind of cost prohibitive on a low-budget movie because it’s like “We need twelve locations for a 90 second joke” that we have to build into the schedule, go to this place and then this place to shoot a tiny piece in the midst of other things so there was a budget consciousness. When you look at the movie, there are three and one of them is one long shot of somebody running toward a camera for the horror movie The Health Nut. That came in late, like we’d shot most of the movie and I felt like two trailers was too little so I was like “I’ve got an idea of one long shot, it won’t cost anything” but I had to cut the Bucklick trailer because it had fourteen different locations and budgetarily, we just couldn’t do it. It was like “Do you want to do this or something that’s important to the story as opposed to a throwaway joke?” We had to be sparing with which trailers we did and how much we shot. Two of the trailers, The Health Nut and Booties are one-scene oriented, where trailers in the 80s if anything, they were long and gave away the entire fucking movie! The one that’s closest to a theatrical trailer where we took our time, shot multiple locations to make it look like there’s a whole movie that we cut this from was Sister Sugar Walls. Honestly, I think that’s the one that holds up to scrutiny. If somebody was like “I’ve got money, finance one of those fake movie trailers!” I’d be like “Let’s do Sister Sugar Walls, it’s ready to go!”

It looks like an Abel Ferrara film, I was thinking of Ms. 45. 

Right?! Thank you, oh my God, what an excellent fucking pull! There was a movie big in the video stores and on cable when I was a kid called Angel and the poster looked very much like the poster for Sister Sugar Walls and their poster said “High School Honor Student by Day, Hooker By Night” so I was like “Nun by Day, Hooker by Night” That one was fucking fun to shoot and we were able to do multiple locations and make it look like a real trailer. Now I can see why it’s tougher to pull it off, low-budget wise if you don’t have the money because you’ve got to shoot a lot to make something that resembles what people process and realise “that’s a trailer!” 

One final question… Moose Jaws. Is it still happening? 

Moose Jaws, like cancer, will be with us always. You can’t get rid of it, try as you might. We’ve been working on it. Me and Justin Long have been going back and forth on this key role that he’s going to play. This is a movie I’ve been talking about making for almost ten years, from when I made Tusk, I was like “I’m going to make Moose Jaws one day.” For people who are like “What is that?” It’s Jaws with a moose instead of a shark. So I think we’re closer than ever and Justin’s enthusiasm gives us a lot of wind in our sails. The idea that he has is Mel Brooks/Peter Sellers level of comedic brilliance in terms of how much he can do with the part comedically. I can’t wait to start working on that. It’s now more real than ever. 

The 4:30 Movie is currently available to rent and purchase digitally courtesy of Altitude Film. Linked below is a video version of the interview, for your viewing pleasure. 

Where to watch The 4:30 Movie