Q: Did you like the musical aspect of JERSEY GIRL?

LT: I’ve always wanted to do a musical, or a film where I could play a singer. That would be an absolute dream come true for me. [The SWEENEY TODD sequence] was actually the first thing we all did together. We rehearsed those scenes. It was very WAITING FOR GUFFMAN. We were in this room with this guy who was [just like] Corky. We had to play it very precisely. I’m playing a boy, which is weird, and a cockney boy. I’ve never done a cockney accent in my life, so I just made that up. My husband said that it was a little bit too good for a school play…so I said, ‘Maybe because she works in a video store she watches movies all the time and she can do all kinds of accents.’ [Laughs] I’ve never seen SWEENEY TODD, so we were just kind of winging it. We recorded it in a studio. I was sitting there in headphones, and Kevin was sitting there on the floor in front of me, and we just couldn’t stop laughing.

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AT: Will you work with Kevin again?

LT: You’d have to ask Kevin, but I’d love to. I really enjoyed working with him. It was great fun for me. I feel like it’s such amazing timing that this is coming out two weeks after the whole Oscar/LOTR thing. It’s nice for me because it’s such a different character, and people just sort of feel like I’m Arwen. I’ve been looking at trailers for HIDALGO and seeing that it says, ‘Viggo Mortenson is still the king’ I’m thinking, ‘Poor, Viggo!’ [Laughs] I’m just really happy that I get to keep working. I really liked working with Kevin, and I’d be more than happy to do it again.

“…It’s still a Kevin Smith film. He can’t help but drop the occasional comic book reference. The comedic banter has his rhythm, and the comedy scenes have a structure that goes back to Clerks. The awkward parental moment mentioned earlier pays off later with the daughter turning the tables. This works because the original moment was funny enough on its own. It wasn’t there only to set up a later joke. The later joke is awesome because you never expected the first moment to pay off. That’s how Clerks built to a comic finale, and it takes more of a backseat to the drama of Jersey Girl, but it’s still Smith. I mean, a character breaks down into tears in the porno room of a video store, and the emotion totally works. That is Kevin Smith. (9/10)”