“Fanny-fun” is not a phrase you usually expect to hear coming from the mouth of a successful film director. It’s not every auteur that will entertain a crowd by acting out how the Lord Of The Rings trilogy should have ended (clue: it involves hot ‘n’ heavy hobbit-on-hobbit action). And it’s not — as far as we know — standard practice in Hollywood for an industry heavy-hitter to dress in a massive overcoat, shorts and chequered slip-ons.

So the man in question had to be Kevin Smith — and indeed the Clerks director was in London last night to entertain the masses at An Evening With Kevin Smith 2: Evening Harder. On stage with his good friend Jason Mewes, Smith riffed hilariously on things he likes (Star Wars, Meet Joe Black, Law & Order, his wife’s Playboy spread) and things he doesn’t (the 3am Girls, chavs, Camilla and Charles). In fact, the View Askew main man gabbed almost non-stop for over 4 hours — so it was inevitable that he’d spill a few morsals of movie news along the way.

First up was the forthcoming Southland Tales, Richard Kelly’s first movie since Donnie Darko. Smith confirmed that he will play a key character alongside Sarah Michelle Geller and Seann William Scott — more specifically, “a guy who runs a really popular website running gossip for Southlands, an area in south Los Angeles”. He only recently learned that his character won’t have any legs (”I’m gonna be Lieutenant Dan!”), although he refused Kelly’s request a couple of weeks ago that he lose 50lb (”You lose my legs, you lose 50lb right there”) and shave his head (”No way, man, this shit is thinning already”).

When grilled on Clerks 2, he revealed that the sequel will be a lot more visually sophisticated than the black-and-white original, mainly because his regular cinematographer complained that “he can’t get work making shitty-looking movies”. The casting for the film is complete — and it won’t be chock-full of cameos like Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back. Instead, “it’s about the same dudes ten years down the line, older but not the least bit wiser.”

Oh, and for all you Jason Mewes fans out there, the ultimate slacker dude is keeping busy too — after celebrating two years out of rehab, Mewes will be joining Paris Hilton and Paul Walker for a $3 million movie “about fucking”.