Kevin Smith Vows ‘Clerks 2′ Language, Content Ups The Ante Of The Original ‘A Hundredfold’

No nudity, no graphic violence and ‘no way it gets an R’ the director says of the sequel to his indie classic.

PARK CITY, UTAH — Loyalists swear by the movement he spearheaded with the help of his foot soldiers; others wonder why he still has a job. His common-man persona and disarming grin might be masking a brilliant mind, or he might be as simplistic as his detractors insist. Now, he has returned for a second term that’s shaping up as even more controversial than the first.

No, Kevin Smith isn’t the president — although the polarizing figures have more in common than one might think. As the famously indie writer/director made the rounds at the Sundance Film Festival to support “Small Town Gay Bar,” a documentary he executive produced, Smith admitted with some trepidation that his next mission could go disastrously wrong if he’s rushing into a battle that can’t be won.

Still, in the form of the upcoming sequel to his breakthrough 1994 comedy he claimed to have substantial weapons of crass production at his disposal.

” ‘Clerks 2′ came out phenomenally, and I couldn’t be happier with it,” the bearded, not-so-silent Bob said. “We were really hoping to come to Sundance with it this year, which would have been great because it’s the 25th anniversary of Sundance, and it would have been the only sequel to a Sundance film to ever play at Sundance. Then Harvey Weinstein — the chairman of The Weinstein Company, who we produced the movie with — said, ‘No, we want to go to Cannes instead.’ ”

“The movie itself is kind of a look at what happens when the angry young man enters his thirties. The movie is primarily set in a fast-food joint, but it has so little to do with working in a fast-food joint.”

“Brian O’Halloran and Jeff Anderson, who played Dante and Randall in ‘Clerks,’ are back and Jason Mewes and I play Jay and Silent Bob,” Smith continued. “Ben Affleck showed up for a day. Jason Lee came in for a day. Wanda Sykes came in for a day. There’s a guy named Earthquake, this really funny comedian, and Kevin Wiseman, who plays Marshall on ‘Alias,’ he came in.”

“There’s this kid in the movie, Trevor Fehrman, who’s really funny,” Smith said. “I think he’s gonna pop in a really big way off this film. Rosario Dawson’s in the movie; she’s one of the main characters. My wife, Jennifer Schwalbach, is in the movie,” he laughed. “So for a movie that’s about two dudes, it’s got a really well-rounded cast.”

Although some vocal fans and film purists have expressed their displeasure with the revisiting of, arguably, a classic, Smith insists that by moving Dante and Randal to the fast-food industry, he simultaneously moved his own game to the next level.

“It’s my favorite of all the movies I’ve ever done,” Smith said of the sequel. “It used to be that ‘Chasing Amy’ was my favorite, but this has supplanted ‘Chasing Amy.’ ‘Clerks’ was what it felt like to be in my twenties, but ‘Clerks 2′ is what it feels like to be in my thirties. A portrait of that. It’s about how people have to struggle to grow out of a role that they’ve filled for the better part of their adult life. It’s really poignant, but it’s insanely funny.”

As with previous flicks, such as “Clerks,” “Dogma” and “Amy,” the New Jersey auteur intends to balance the aforementioned seriousness with his bread-and-butter: “di– and fart jokes.”

“We’re not even going to rate it — we’re going to go out unrated,” Smith declared defiantly. “If we put it in front of the ratings board they’d be like, ‘You’re insane. We have to create a new rating for that.’ ”

Even more noteworthy, however, is that the boundary-busting film is devoid of the nudity or graphic violence that typically pushes the NC-17 envelope. Instead, when these clerks say “I assure you, we’re open” this summer, the phrase will likely be peppered with even more four-letter words than the original.

“I’ve never been a nudity dude,” Smith insisted. “We did nudity once, in ‘Mallrats,’ and it was just such an uncomfortable thing to shoot. Anybody can get somebody to take their clothes off. ‘Clerks’ was a movie that the MPAA gave an NC-17 for language and content alone. This movie ups the ante by a hundred-fold, and there’s just no way it gets an R.”

As for everybody’s favorite drug-selling, adventure-seeking, bootchie-snoochin’ duo, Smith says that they’ve grown up — so much so, in fact, that they’ve gone from grade-school humor to something closer to junior high.

“Jay and Silent Bob in ‘Clerks 2′ have about as much, if not less, screen time than they had in ‘Clerks,” Smith revealed, “but it’s a different Jay and Silent Bob, a slightly more mature Jay and Silent Bob.”

“Slightly,” he laughed, after a moment. “Ever so slightly.”

No need for euphemisms—I’m blown away by Small Town Gay Bar. Maybe I was expecting something sort of whimsical or “inspiring,” but Ingram has crafted an ode to what we really mean when we call ourselves a “gay community.” Looking at two bars in Mississippi—one that’s about to be sold and one that’s about to reopen—the film shows us how, for people who live in rural areas, the local gay bar is the only place where people can go to be themselves and find other people with whom they have any kind of kinship.

And in addition to introducing us to the drag queens and butch dykes you might expect to see in a documentary with this title, Ingram takes his camera into the belly of the beast, interviewing religious hatemongers Fred Phelps (who gets just enough screen time to become wholly ridiculous, not that he wasn’t already) and Tim Wildmon. In perhaps the film’s funniest sequence, Wildmon—whose father Donald founded the American Family Association, where Wildmon fils also toils—professes a live-and-let-live philosophy about gays while the film’s queer interviewees remember how Donald Wildmon and other AFA members would write down license plate numbers of cars that visited gay bars, then would read those numbers on the radio the next day. Ultimately, Small Town Gay Bar is a powerful portrait of gay men and lesbians who refuse to decamp for gay meccas like New York, San Francisco, or even Dallas: They choose to stay and fight—to lead the lives they want to lead in the place they’ve always known as home.