The pope probably doesn't give much thought to Chris Rock's comic riffs or director Kevin Smith's films (Clerks, Chasing Amy). But that may change with the November release of Dogma. Miramax has already made plans to hand off the Catholic satire to another distributor. But the real shocker of Dogma, which features cussing angels, a demon made of excrement, and Rock as the thirteenth apostle, is that it is an earnest exploration of faith.

PREMIERE: What were your concerns about doing a film that satirizes the church?

CHRIS ROCK: My biggest fear is that God doesn't have a sense of humor, that God doesn't get it.

KEVIN SMITH: Yeah, I guess the big fear would be that the other people are right.

PREMIERE: But in the movie, Alanis Morissette plays a God who does headstands and does have a sense of humor. So you don't think that's true?

CR: I don't know. I'm just the comedian guy.

KS: C'mon, you know. Once you get into that fat, million-dollar celebrity club, they let you in on certain secrets. One of them is whether or not God has a sense of humor.

CR: Well, me and Bruce Willis, we were talking to God the other day . . . [Laughter]

KS: That explains Bruce Willis.

PREMIERE: How did Chris get cast in Dogma?

CR: I had a meeting with Harvey [Weinstein, Miramax's cochairman]. But they pitched me Ride. They're like, "We got a movie with Lil' Kim on a bus." And I was like, "What's Kevin Smith doing? I want to work with that guy."

CR: I don't believe you can make a good comedy about things you don't like.

KS: A lot of people think you're the angry black man. It's not true. Chris is one of the least angry people I've ever met.

CR: When I'm doing stand-up, I am like the Hulk. When it's over, I'm like, Who did I hurt? [Laughter]

PREMIERE: Did you think about whether you're being blasphemous when you made Dogma?

KS: None of us felt this movie was blasphemous. If I had thought for a heartbeat that it was, I wouldn't have done it.

CR: [Biting into a scone] Kevin's gonna be saying the intelligent things. I'm gonna eat my biscuit.

PREMIERE: What was your religious upbringing?

KS: I'm Catholic. And I've kind of come around the bend on Catholicism. I reached a conclusion in confession, oddly enough. There's a scene in the movie where Janeane Garofalo's character talks about faith as being like a glass of water. She says, "You're a shot glass when you're young. The older you get, the glass gets bigger and the same amount of liquid doesn't fill the glass, and then you have to refill it." That's paraphrased from something a priest said to me. He was like, "You have to go out and bring something to it." You can't sit in church and expect them to do it all for you.

CR: You know what's weird? My grandfather was a Methodist reverend. But my grandfather loved women, cursed all the time.

KS: A true man of the cloth. [Laughter]

PREMIERE: According to the movie, Jesus was black.

CR: Jesus was black.

KS: Yeah, historically it's been kind of proven that Jesus was black.

CR: You can say Jesus was black without hating the white man. [Laughs]

KS: Right. But I do hate the white man. [Laughter] I hate him with a passion.

PREMIERE: Kevin, if you're a man of faith, why would you attack the church by making this movie?

KS: The movie's not an attack. It's a challenge. To me, Christ is like a friend I've known my whole life. You know, the friend that doesn't talk to you. But everyone tells me he said a lot of things while he was here, so you follow what he taught. When you've had a friend for 20 years, I think you're allowed to joke around with him.

PREMIERE: Do you guys think you've hurt anyone with this movie?

KS: No. That's what's weird about being attacked by . . . by one group. It's not even the church. The church hasn't seen it, nor has it taken a stand. The Catholic League, the group that has an issue with the movie, they haven't seen it either. And I think that their issue is with Disney [which owns Miramax], because how could Disney, a family company, be making this? If you could point to anyone right now that the movie has hurt, I guess it was them. But the movie's so pro-faith, I feel like I'm doing the Catholic League's job.

PREMIERE: And yet Miramax has been inundated with protests from all over.

KS: It runs from postcards like, "We object to this movie," to letters that are like, "You Jews better invest in some flak jackets 'cause we're comin' in there with guns."

CR: Hey, Kevin spoke about the Jews, not me.

KS: It's sickening. And these are Christians, you know?

PREMIERE: So what was Harvey Weinstein specifically scared of?

KS: Dying. The mail that came in was unreal. And you can't underestimate the lone nuts.

PREMIERE: What was your goal with this film? To make people laugh or make people think?

CR: Make people laugh. There're a lot of people that make you think. There're 100,000 smart guys in the world. You know how many funny guys there are? About nine. [Laughter]

PREMIERE: Chris, were you on Saturday Night Live the night Sinéad O'Connor ripped up the photograph of the Pope and said, "Fight the real enemy"?

CR: Yeah, I was there for Sinéad's tirade.

KS: It was career suicide. It was the wrong arena.

CR: Do it in a song. I do it in a joke. You can get your message across doing the thing you do really good. If Betty Crocker wants to kill the President, she can get an Uzi, or she can bake a poison cake. But she's probably gonna get him with the poison cake. [Laughs]

KS: Yeah. Feed them a message in a spoonful of sugar, and then maybe later on they get it. The best satire is funny because it's kind of true.