Kevin Smith's first movie, Clerks, jump-started the DIY indie movement; his second, Mallrats, was a commercial and critical dud; his third, Chasing Amy, was one of the best--and most profitable--films of 1997. So when he began shooting his latest comedy-drama Dogma, you can imagine Smith was a bit hesitant. "When I started shooting there was this whole, oh God--this is The Even Movie. The odd movies always do well, the last even movie sucked," the fan-favorite writer/director says. And that was months before Dogma, which Smith describes as a pro-faith religious satire, became the target of fierce criticism from the conservative Catholic League and was dropped by its original distributor, the Disney-owned Miramax. Fortunately, it looks like Smith will weather the naysayers and break his even-movie curse--early word has it that Dogma, now being released Friday by Lions Gate Films, is a wickedly funny, irreverent and ultimately quite devout comedy. Smith recently spoke to Cinescape from his View Askew production offices in New Jersey about the firestorm surrounding his fourth film:

You've said you're surprised this movie is so controversial. Why?

I don't think it's controversial--There've been far far worse and blasphemous films than this movie. When we screened Dogma at Cannes, most of the press saw it there and were just like, 'Did you cut out all the controversial stuff?' But there was no controversial stuff to begin with. You're talking about one group rattling sabers without having ever seen the flick and just kind of raising a shitstorm for their own political agenda that made our movie the easiest movie around to attack. Plus at that point we were owned by Disney, and they was the true target of that campaign, not us and not our movie. I would say this movie isn't for anyone and while it does have a pro-faith message, its not a movie that preaches to the choir. It puts a very mainstream, positive faith message out there, but by virtue of the fact that characters curse or use vulgarity you're going to turn-off a [part of the audience.] But if you don't take offense to the language, then there's a lot of great stuff in there for you. If not, then I would suggest not going. Because there's some people who won't get past the language to hear the message of the flick.

All your other films deal primarily with human relationships; why did you want to explore faith here?

To me, this is an extension of the whole relationship thing. The relationship that man has with his religion or with God is probably the most mysterious of human relationships. So it was kind of key for me to tackle this because it's a subject that's pretty close to my heart as well.

On a different note, you saw Dogma's leading men, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, shoot to superstardom while you were making the movie, and you've assembled your first A-list cast for the movie: Chris Rock, Salma Hayek, Alan Rickman. Were you at all intimidated?

With Matt and Ben, thankfully, I'd worked with those cats before they went on to become very famous. So there was no intimidation factor. It's like, 'I saw this motherf-----r sleeping on my couch, so who cares?' But working with Alan, I was kind of like, 'Oh, Lord, how can I work with a British actor--aren't they the best at everything/' But it was cool. Nobody put on airs and they were really nice and boy did they do justice to the text. So there were no ego battles. And I didn't cast people who I knew going in were going to be complete tools.