I look at a movie like “The Aviator” as a film by a director who was born to direct. I look in slack-jawed awe and know I could never have done that, and I am ashamed to call myself a director in the same breath — it’s like comparing a surgeon with a guy who hands out Band-Aids at the free clinic.

Think about the sequence with [Howard] Hughes locking himself in his screening room: You feel like you are in that fucking screening room with him. Scorsese didn’t do the simple film-school thing of shooting forced perspective to make the walls come in on Hughes, or the high wide-angle that gives you a sense of isolation; he shot that sequence in such a way that you feel you are trapped in the room, too. How did he do it? If I knew how, I would ape it in my next film!

There’s also a wonderful scene in which Errol Flynn reaches over and grabs something off his plate. All of a sudden, Hughes’ mood completely shifts and changes, and Scorsese gets that just be cutting between Hughes’ look and the plate, between the plate and Hughes and over to Errol Flynn.

It’s this really quiet moment in the middle of this massive, loud scene where you go: “I get it! I get it!” He really conveys that mania quite well.

The wonderful thing about “The Aviator” is, it is a story that all comes down to one swear word, when Alec Baldwin’s character finds out that TWA is going to get its international air [routes], and he stops at the globe [in his office] and he just suddenly says, “Fuck!” That whole movie comes down to that word — it is really about how this dude beat the odds — and in that respect, I can relate to what Martin Scorsese is trying to do.

I would give Scorsese best director because this took the most to direct, to keep all of those plates spinning at once. Directing is answering a series of questions: Red or blue? Light or dark? That’s what a director does — field 4 million questions — and in a movie like that, imagine the questions you have to deal with on a daily basis?

The scope of the picture is something very few directors could have handled; add to that the fact that the story is as gripping as it is. It is a movie about passion; Scorsese is a very passionate director, and boy, that translates in the film. For heaven’s sake, isn’t this man due?

Smith originally offered to direct a Degrassi episode, but Schuyler said no because the show’s key staff have to be Canadian.

“Which was the first time I’d ever been told no with that reason — you can’t do it because you’re not Canadian. But she said, ‘How would you like a cameo?’ So I wrote her back a week later with this idea of a three-episode arc.”

Smith shows up at Degrassi to research a new movie, Jay and Silent Bob Go Canadian, Eh? His Clerks sidekick Jason Mewes appears next Monday, along with Los Angeles-based Canuck singer Alanis Morissette, who played God in Smith’s films Dogma and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.

“I said, ‘Do you want to come up and play the principal in the fake movie we’re doing in the show?’ She was really sweet about it,” he says. “That’s one of the nicest things anybody’s ever done for me, was just to jump on a plane and come to Toronto just to shoot that one scene.

“But just because she knew it meant a lot to me, that was really kind of cool of her.”

Now, Smith would like to do an entire episode in which Morissette just plays herself. And he’s already thinking of making his own comeback when Jay and Silent Bob Go Canadian, Eh? makes its fake screen debut.

“I told them I gotta come back next season to premiere the movie.”

Marilyn Ghigliotti checks in with us on that newsbite we ran about an early film appearance yesterday:
“So not worth checking out. Very cheesy movie I did about 3 – 4 yrs prior to Clerks when I was still green. One I wish I hadn’t done.”