“I wish I could have made his version,” Smith said. “The parameters that we had in our version of ‘Green Hornet’ – he’s not suffering from the same parameters At the time they were like ‘We want to make a big straight-forward action movie” – the wrong approach for the character, Smith insisted.

“You can’t really compete with Spiderman and Batman and stuff like that with Green Hornet,” the director contended. “So it’s best to take a different approach to it all-together.”

Which, according to Smith, is what Rogen is finally getting a real chance to do.

“He’s Seth Rogan, the man of the moment. He can do anything he wants with that project,” Smith said. “It’s not a comedy what he’s doing, but he gets to do his with a better sense of humor than we would have been allowed to. He’s in a great free place to do something fresh with that material.”

Q: With its fascist interior design, we never think of the Death Star as having restaurants, happy hours, luxury flats and recreation areas.

A: We start from the point that not everyone on board was a villain. As Kevin Smith pointed out in Clerks, someone had to be the plumber. That’s where we’re coming from. There’s got to be bars, places to eat.

The book, which focuses on the life as an everyday worker on the space station, sounds like a fun read.

Jason Reitman, the 30-year-old director of “Juno,” added that the youth brigade was something of an old story. “I feel like I am just following in the footsteps of Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Kevin Smith, Wes Anderson, the list goes on,” he said.

Kevin Smith’s uber-grungy Clerks captured the low-key, agreeable vibe of smartass go-nowhere buddies hanging out and talking shit. It was cinematic democracy in action, a triumph of proletariat ingenuity over technical wizards with film-school degrees and elaborate storyboards.