Filmmaker Kevin Smith sliced and diced the work ethic in CLERKS and shredded sexual myths in CHASING AMY. Now he’s set his sights on a bigger target: Organized religion
Playboy Profile By STEPHAN TALTY
“Sad, isn’t it?” Kevin Smith says, grinning. A bit dazed, I can only nod. In my hands is Chronic Odyssey of the Anachronistic Enigma, the first of two bursting scrapbooks of notes, rejection letters scripts, vital statistics, pictures and report Cards—in fact, seemingly everything except the foreskin from his circumcision—that the director of Clerks collected during his youth. “I’ve got trunkfuls of the stuff,” he says matter-of-factly. Never let it be said that Smith is afraid of public exposure; some would say he has made a career of it.
We’re hanging out in Smith’s apartment in Red Bank, New Jersey. In person, the 28-year-old Smith is irrepressibly witty and sharp-minded; his voice shakes slightly at first, but his natural confidence soon shows itself: The dark eyes behind his metal-rimmed glasses are coolly appraising, but they flare with warmth when he laughs.
I return to the Odysseus Among the love letters and break-up notes (“I feel lied to, cheated, used deceived, misled, foolish, gullible, angry hurt, naive and basically pissed on—good job” writes “Amy”) are clues to the beginnings of the slacker sensibility that shot Smith to stardom. “There is a large, esoteric sense of humor at work behind the universe,” writes the teenage Smith. “And you spend your whole life straining to understand the joke. The best you can hope for is to counter with your own brilliant one-liner.”
Smith has countered well. With Clerks, his 1994 breakout debut, he became one of the godfathers of Nineties indie film and helped shape its priorities: low budgets, sharp wit, personal revelation. After Clerks came the humiliating defeat of Mallrats and a brilliant comeback with the boy-meets-lesbian story Chasing Amy.
Next spring his most daring, ambitious and expensive film yet, a religious black comedy called Dogma, will, he hopes, debut at the Cannes Film Festival. Dogma is bound to be hugely controversial; if the Vatican issued fatwas, Smith would certainly earn one for this movie. His comment on the picture— “I think we have a movie that will knock people off their chairs”—is a rare understatement.
It’s been a hell of a ride for the kid from a clam diggers’ town.
Later, Smith and I walk down Red Bank’s Broad Street, which has the charm and the bustle of It’s a Wonderful Life’s Bedford Falls. “Did you hear that young George Bailey’s having trouble down at the bank?” Smith jokes. The director is dressed in his trademark semi eccentric ensemble: khaki shorts and green-and-black wool overcoat in 30-degree weather. The long coat sweeps along like a cape and is either a tribute to the comic super heroes he loves or a cover for the weight he is trying to lose.
Smith is often recognized in town; a brown Camaro beeps at a stoplight and he gives a wave. The younger faces on the street nod to him; Smith is like the secret mayor of Red Bank youth. But unlike George Bailey, the director left his Bedford Falls and got burned in the big world. Now he seems to have found his place in the world—his world, small town New Jersey—again.
Smith was born in Red Bank on August 2, 1970 and raised in the nearby clamming town of Highlands. He is Highlands’ most famous native son, but he recently got into trouble with the locals by calling it a white trash enclave—a term Smith used with a certain working-class pride. A resident, Dotty Kovic, wrote him an irate letter: “How dare you call Highlands white trash? I think you’re the white trash.”
When Smith was a child, his days were scheduled around his father’s late shifts at the post office. The elder Smith began as a go-getter but grew to despise his job. “I always pitied my fucking father,” Smith says. He remembers his dad getting up some days and being unable to face the grind; he would ask someone to call him in. If some people see slackers as rich kids who can’t be bothered to join the rat race, Smith comes from a tougher school. Early on, he vowed never to work at something he didn’t enjoy. His admitted laziness is a kind of proletarian statement.
Smith was a B and C student who videotaped the school basketball games and put on Saturday Night Live-style skits. A chubby kid, he had a mini crisis when his humpbacked fourth grade teacher pointed out “the gut on you, Mr. Smith!” (an event recorded on the Odyssey time line). Like many an overweight kid, he became an observer— and a joker. “I found humor is a real great aphrodisiac,” says Smith “Just make a broad laugh and you’re m like Flynn.”
After high school, Smith drifted through a series of jobs at delis, convenience stores and community centers. A stab at college didn’t work out. Smith was headed toward a life of under achievement and what-ifs, an existence out of a Springsteen song.
The burning bush that spoke to Smith and sparked his career was a 1991 film by a 30-year-old filmmaker from Austin, Texas. On his 21st birthday, Smith went to see Richard Linklater’s comedy Slacker and came away a changed man. “That was the first movie I saw that was set in the director’s hometown. It wasn’t shot on a soundstage, it wasn’t shot in New York or Los Angeles or Chicago. I mean, how great is that? And when I started thinking about it, I was like, ‘Well, right, if Richard can make this movie in Austin, I can make a movie where I live.’ And then it started to appeal to me—the idea of regional cinema. You know, as much as you think you’re talking about where you live, you wind up talking about where everybody lives.”
Smith was working in a local Quick Stop convenience store and decided to set his film there. He borrowed the life-in-a-day structure from Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, maxed out more than a dozen credit cards and sold his beloved comic-book collection to meet the $27,000 budget. For talent, he looked around him. Where others might have seen blue-collar layabouts, Smith saw possibilities.
“A lot of people wrote us off,” says Smith. “I have friends who are amazingly gifted, very talented. But they weren’t really open to the possibilities. When they watched movies, they said, ‘Oh, other people do that shit.’ I sat two of my friends down and said, ‘I’m going to go to film school and when I get back we’re going to make a movie together.’ And they looked at me like I had said, ‘I’m going to give you two guys a blow Job.’ ”
The shockingly witty Clerks tells the ribald story of Dante, an indecisive convenience store worker who is besieged by a former girlfriend, annoying customers, hilarious but maddening friends and the myriad pressures of working-class life. The picture draws directly from much of Smith’s experience and sketches out many of the themes that run through his work. The fascination with Star Wars, the surgically precise social caricatures, the dick jokes, the humid closeness of male friendships and the laziness of the main character all reflect on the writer-director. So does the obsession with female infidelity.
If Slacker was the event that shaped Smith’s professional life, the one that marked his personal existence had to do with a girlfriend named Kim Loughran, a pair of corduroys and a hand job. Though it happened more than ten years ago, Smith still tells the story with passion. He was a super romantic teenager at the time and had not yet been burned in love.
“Kim was driving back from a track meet with this dude, and they were real chummy and shit. This dude was wearing corduroys, and she’s rubbing the corduroy on his pants, and she says, ‘I always liked the feel of corduroy.’ And all of a sudden she winds up giving him a hand job. So for a year, I mercilessly hounded her about it: ‘Is that all that happened? Did you touch his dick? Were lips involved?’ I was real childish. But that was the darkest time, man. I think that’s where a lot of Clerks comes from. And after that, I never wore fucking corduroys again.”
When we get to his office, we meet Kim as we walk in. she is now Smith’s assistant. “I told him the hand job story,” Smith announces blithely.
Kim looks up. “Did you also tell him about the time you practically threw me on the cafeteria floor because of it?” she shoots back. They crack up. It’s weirdly like high school never ended.
Clerks was a Sundance baby. Smith took it to Robert Redford’s indie festival, but by the final screening it still hadn’t sold. It looked as though Smith would be working at the Quick Stop for life, until Miramax’ co-chairman Harvey Weinstein showed up. At a restaurant after the screening, Smith got the proverbial nod to join the big table where Weinstein told him he wanted to buy the movie. Then Weinstein, “full of piss and vinegar,” according to Smith explained how he would market the movie and open it up to the widest audiences. “I loved this guy,” recalls Smith. “He’s smart and he smokes a lot and eats a lot, and that’s my kind of dude. And he says buck’ an awful lot.”
Clerks made 5.8 million and established Smith, for better or worse, as a voice of American youth. Even corporate America has come calling. Late in the day we’re driving through New Jersey looking for locations for two Coke commercials Smith is shooting.
“We’re involved in the cola wars now, dude,” Smith tells his troops as we cruise Red Bank in his green Jeep Cherokee. “We should show up on the set with some Food Town cola. They’d be like, ‘Why aren’t you drinking Coke?’ ‘Coke? Who can drink that shit?”‘ The Jeep rocks with laughter.
Clerks also had a profound effect on the indie film community. “It’s pretty obvious that the first two most influential debuts in the Nineties were Clerks and The Brothers McMullen,” says producer John Pierson, author of Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes, a history of low-budget films. “We started hearing about films described as the ‘Canadian Clerks’ and ‘Clerks in a Graveyard.’ One day this guy calls my office and says, ‘My film is just like Clerks, only without the jokes.’ And that’s when things get scary.”
After his hit debut, Smith himself was full of piss and vinegar. He planned a teen hit, a populist bonehead comedy about young Americans who roam a mall in search of excitement and love. It would also be a tribute to Eighties filmmakers John Hughes and John Landis, who had moved and entertained him during his adolescence. He would give it a catchy name: Mallrats. Smith’s then girlfriend and Mallrats star Joey Lauren Adams remembers that he told her not to consider chicken shit roles because this film was going to make her a huge star. Instead, the $6.1 million Mallrats bombed. It grossed less than Clerks did and was eaten alive by critics.
If dinner with Harvey Weinstein signaled his arrival with Clerks, there is a parallel memory to go along with 1995’s Mallrats. Smith was in LA driving the freeways the week before the film hit the theaters. He had a studio movie coming out and a new actor-girlfriend in the waif like Adams. He had, in LA terms, arrived. “Everything was gangbusters,” he remembers. Flipping on the radio, Smith came across an easy-listening station where a “chick’s voice” announced that she had just seen a screening of Mallrats. The disc jockey went out of her way to warn people about it. “I was just like, ‘Wow, that’s pretty weird,”‘ Smith remembers.
He had clearly misread his own gifts. Mallrats’ broad comedy, free-floating vulgarity and physical humor are exactly what he doesn’t do well. People stayed away.
At the 1996 Sundance festival, Smith ate humble pie, saying, “I want to apologize for Mallrats. I have no idea what we were thinking.” With his career at risk, Smith admitted his mistake. But with the success of Chasing Amy, he now defends the film like it’s a troublesome child nobody likes.
“Personally, I’m a fan of Mallrats. I think that it’s funny, a real watcher. And people were just like, Well, this is what happens when one of these kids gets money, and shit like that. But I think it was unfairly bashed, just as I think Clerks was over praised. After Chasing Amy, people said, ‘The kid has redeemed himself.’ Which was really insulting, because it was like, redeem myself from what? What did I do wrong? I made a movie you didn’t like. But guess what? I’ll show you 50 fucking people who did like it.”
Smith contends that Mallrats bypassed the critics and urban hipsters who had praised Clerks and found its audience in the great American leveler: video. It was a movie for his people, the dudes of New Jersey and elsewhere, the comic book readers, the potheads and the dropouts.
Then staying in Los Angeles, Smith found that his life had shifted off its moorings. His friends were back in New Jersey. His sidekick Jason Mewes—who played “Jay” in the films—was going through a rough period. And Smith was no longer the indie golden boy. Still, he was desperately in love with Adams—he even declared his desire to marry her in Time magazine. But he felt her grow cold when he talked about staying in Los Angeles permanently and starting a life with her. When his grandmother got sick, Smith went back to Red Bank and realized that that was where he belonged. He stayed. Those who applaud Smith’s Red Bank operation say he has dedicated himself to the regional cinema he preached about. Critics say he wants to be a modern-day Peter Pan, never leaving his second childhood. His films share the same actors, characters, in-jokes and geography. As with Mark Leyner or Whit Stillman, Smith has built a small world to live in, explore and unmask.
Smith admits that he still hangs with the same eight or ten friends he has had for years. He indulges his fascination with Star Wars and comic books his offices and apartment are crammed with everything from replicas of Luke Skywalker’s light saber to artwork from Smith’s favorite comic, Batman. Looking under his feet as we drive through the New Jersey countryside, I see that he has even tracked down Caped Crusader dirt mats for his Jeep.
What other young men found in Dostoyevsky or Burroughs, Smith found in the story of Bruce Wayne. “It’s just flat-out literature with pictures,” he says. “It deals thematically with literary terms and devices and characters that are so exciting. I had no edge as far as culture goes until I got into dark, literary comics.” His obsession has even had a Hollywood payoff: He was given $400,000 to write the script for the next Superman film for Warner Bros. Director Tim Burton admired the script when he was brought onto the project, then he tossed it. But Smith is established as a writer Hollywood can go to for the voice of the young and the restless.
In Chasing Amy, his best film, two comic-book writing buddies are torn apart when Holden, played by Ben Affleck, falls in love with a lesbian, played by Adams. Then, in a replay of Smith’s corduroy hand job crisis, Holden learns that his girlfriend has a wild heterosexual past, including multiple partners. He freaks out and the two are torn apart.
In a way it was his instinct for autobiography that saved Smith’s career. Much of the Amy script—apart from the lesbian focus—was drawn from his real-life relationship with Adams.
“Holden was definitely the character closest to myself I’d ever written,” Smith admits. “Here’s a guy who’s a typical Nineties liberal male who’s like, ‘Yeah, I’m from the suburbs, I got myself a black friend, me and my friend do this underground comic-book thing, I’ve got this girl I like and I’m very OK with her homosexual past.’ It’s in the arena you imagine he’d be most comfortable with—the heterosexual arena—that he completely malfunctions.”
Amy is a piercingly funny film—a taboo-shredding social comedy. Some lesbians bristled at the movie, saying it reinforced the old canard that all a gay woman needs is the right man. For a gay-conscious filmmaker such as Smith, it was a frustrating accusation. But fans and detractors alike had to admit that the defiant juvenile of Mallrats had produced one of the most emotionally challenging films of the year.
The film was a critical triumph that earned an impressive $11.1 million at the domestic box office. But Smith’s relationship with Adams was tested by Amy. “We had our biggest fight ever on the set,” Adams told me when the film was released. “We started screaming at each other. He’s damn witty and a brilliant filmmaker, but he has a lazy side to him. I told him he was a bad director, and he didn’t take it well.” The two broke up in June 1997.
After the split, rumors began to circulate that Adams had dumped Smith for rising star Vince Vaughn. Smith posted on the View Askew Web site an explanation and a defense. “She’s a funny, funny chick, a wonderful person to talk to, warm and friendly,” Smith wrote. “But she’s also extremely self-involved and something of a careerist who had an innate ability to make me feel flawed.” Smith said it was he who had broken up with Adams and included assessments of the relationship (and scathing reviews of Adams herself ) from Mosier and Affleck. It’s almost as if the Internet had become Smith’s public scrapbook.
In his films, women are central and empowered, but Smith’s attitude toward them is complex. In the Odyssey there is a midterm evaluation from a woman who taught writing at Eugene Lang College, which Smith attended briefly: “Kevin is a good writer. He has wit, a command of language. Honestly, though, his depictions of women in vulnerable positions, being taken advantage of sexually and violently, are very disturbing.” And yet the scrapbook also includes a love poem from the unlucky “Amy” that shows the other side of the director: “You never let me fall/You seem to understand exactly what I want to say before I speak.”
Smith’s films alternate between the highest romanticism and a brutally clear and distressed evaluation of his female characters. The director says he loves women (and “their genitalia”), but in his life and films he does invest them with great power—he admits to “deifying” Adams—and then resents them when they use it. Adams told me that she was puzzled by Smith’s statement that she was the funniest woman he’d ever met. She thought that was going overboard, almost as if Smith were endowing her with dazzling qualities he wished her to possess.
Smith believes women learn faster than men and thus hold the upper hand in most relationships; they are cannier. “Every woman I’ve met, even teenagers, is fucking well beyond her years,” says the director. “They have a cold-hearted realization of the world. Women have always had the goods on every guy I’ve ever met.”
Smith’s Web site, his ruthlessly honest interviews and his films all represent a kind of ongoing public therapy. “You get to put it out there, and you always feel less alone after a movie comes out, because you get to see how many other people are as fucked up as you are. After Chasing Amy, I was shocked at how many guys were like, ‘I know exactly what you’re talking about—my old lady’s a whore, too!”‘
With Amy, Smith also went all out in the matter of homo-eroticism, topped off by the scene in which Affleck kisses costar Jason Lee on the lips. It’s a subject not confined to his films. Hanging out with the View Askew posse for a few days, one is struck by how rampant gay humor is here. When we visit Smith’s comic-book store (bought with the proceeds from Clerks), his longtime friend Bryan is behind the counter. “Kevin has made several passes at me” is one of the first things Bryan says, and they instantly crack up. Jason Mewes kids that the director requires him to dress up in frilly costumes on special occasions. The jokes are almost reflexive.
Smith, who has a gay brother, believes sexuality is much more fluid than people think, and that what prevents people from playing both ways is not lack of desire but social taboos. Highlands was not a hotbed of tolerance when it came to gays. As a fat kid, Smith often made a joke about his weight before others could—and the same goes for homosexuality. “I realize you have tendencies in either direction, but eventually you pick a hole and stick with it. But that’s not to say you can’t ever have a fucking-across-the-line thought in your life.”
If Smith decides to cross the line, Affleck had better watch his ass. “Ben Affleck is the king of my world,” says Smith. “He’s the only male crush I’ll probably ever have. Ben is a god among men.”
If bisexuality weren’t controversial enough, Smith’s next film will tackle organized religion with a raucous, black comic energy. Dogma is the story of two disgraced angels (Matt Damon and Affleck) whose attempts to re-enter heaven may bring worldwide apocalypse. A young Catholic woman (Linda Fiorentino) who works at Planned Parenthood is chosen to stop them. Along for the ride are a monster made of shit, a militant 13th apostle (Chris Rock) who reveals that Jesus is black, various horrors from hell and a female Godhead. If members of the Catholic League don’t picket this one, they’re comatose.
It will surprise many to learn that Smith is genuinely religious. He attended Catholic school and still shows up at mass regularly. When, in his early 20s, he began to have doubts about his faith and found the Catholic mass “dry and lip-servicey,” he went to a priest for advice and was told that faith can be compared to liquid. “When you’re a young kid, you’re a shot glass that’s easy to fill. But the older you get, the bigger the glass gets. The amount of liquid that filled the shot glass isn’t going to fill a tumbler.”
Smith went out to fill his tumbler. He read voraciously on Christian subjects, looked into other religions, read the Apocrypha, tried a Pentecostal congregation and generally thought hard about faith. Dogma is the result.
The film combines Smith’s beloved dick jokes with the Old Testament. Smith swears he isn’t trying for shock value; it’s just that this is his sensibility. “It’s the idea of saying ducking God!’ without being blasphemous; it’s a very human experience,” says the director. “To me Dogma is a reverent script. It’s pro-faith, pro-God. It looks at what we built around religion.”
What scared Smith before he began shooting Dogma was not the possibility of a religious backlash but the personal fear that, visually speaking, he would not be able to pull off the most complex, effects-laden picture of his career. Clerks proved that Smith could write snappy dialogue. Chasing Amy proved he could write emotionally complex adult dialogue. Dogma would be different: Smith’s no-holds-barred attempt to show the world that he could be a visual stylist as well as a literary one. “I was terrified,” he admits.
Now that the film is in the can, Smith believes he has succeeded—in spades. “If the naysayers walk away from this movie saying, ‘He still sucks visually,’ well, this is about the best I can do. I don’t want to sound arrogant, but I really pulled it off—it looks phenomenal.” As he edits the film down to its planned two-and-a-half-hour running time, Smith seems almost intoxicated by what he is seeing. “I’d be shocked if Ben Affleck didn’t get an Oscar nomination,” he said. Whether Smith is again tempting the fates that buried Mallrats will be known only when, if all goes according to plan, he unveils Dogma next spring.
Despite their juvenile trappings, all of Smith’s films have involved a search for faith—in working-class dreams, in women, in male friendship and in God. In an era of $100 million films about nothing, such a theme is increasingly rare. But as he gears up for Dogma, Smith is convinced his singular film odyssey is not in vain
“I watched Die Hard and loved it,” says Smith. “But I’m not that guy. I would not jump off a building, shoot a terrorist or take my shirt off in public. But I watch something like Chasing Amy and I’m like, ‘Well, I know that guy pretty damn well.’ And, you know, there’s got to be more people out there like me.”