DMG: Are you excited about writing and directing the Green Hornet project?

KS: I am. I scared as all fuck, but pretty pumped at the same time. I really tried to back out of it at one point. It was one of those things where I’m like, “Yeah, I’ll do it in a heartbeat.” Then I thought about it, “I’m not up to this task at all. There’s no way I can pull a movie like this off.” Then I started writing an outline and I’d sent Harvey an e-mail and sent him the few pages of the outline that I’d done and I was gracefully bowing out going, “I don’t want to screw it up. It’s your big tent-pole movie and I appreciate the gesture, but there’s no way I can handle this. Here are some of the pages I wrote for the outline in case this helps you out at all.” And he called me back and he was like, “Grow up. It’s time for you to step up. You can make those talky pictures all you want, but sooner or later you’ve got to grow and it’s good that you’re coming from a place of fear – you should be afraid. You should be really afraid to make a movie like this cause it’s going to make you work harder.” I was like, “Alright – helluva pep talk. I’m back in.” At least there’s not “too many cooks” right now. When I wrote the “Superman” script in ’96, I was dealing with Warner Bros, the head of DC Comics, the producer, and there were just too many cooks. It was just nuts. Everybody’s got their own ideas on what should be there. At least with “Green Hornet”, I got one guy to answer to and that’s a relief. And generally he tends to stay out of our grill during production. Harvey lets you go nuts during pre and production and then comes in on post and starts telling you what to do. At least I’m only answering to Harvey Weinstein, as opposed to Harvey Weinstein and like 5 other groups of people. The other benefit is that it’s a character that people know, but they don’t know very well. Most people know Batman and they know Batman’s back-story and they know all the characters. Same thing with Spider-Man – a lot of attention is paid to shit like Peter Parker’s webshooters, whether they were organic or self-made. That kind of base is tough to work with. Green Hornet has a smaller fan base, this many hard core fans who are like, “Don’t fuck it up, man.” As long as you’ve got Kato and a Black Beauty, you’re doing good. It’s a character that’s got a lot of history that goes back to the 30s, but never had a great rogues gallery so there’s room to wriggle around without worry about a fan-base that’ll go around saying, “Smith fucked it up!” I dig that very much. I was a fan when I was a kid and it was nice to be offered to do it. I just figure I surround myself with people that know how to do their job and help me bring my shit to life. If everyone equips themselves admirably, we’ll have a pretty cool movie. I’m not gonna choreograph a fight scene. I’ll hire a great second AD because that’s apparently the thing to do. It’s a big secret. They were just like, “Kevin, you won’t direct every scene!” and I said, “What do you mean?” They go, “The director doesn’t do a lot of the big action scenes and I said, “Get the fuck out of here! Does anyone know about this? Is it legit? Bryan Singer didn’t do all that on “X-Men 2″?” And they said, “Bryan Singer barely shot that movie!”. That was a big releif to me because that means I can spend more time at home. I’m just hired as the guy who’s going to make sure that the movie is interesting when shit’s not going on, when there’s not an action sequence. Often times in these flicks you wind up with characters that are not nearly as interesting as the villains or characters that are only interesting when they’re in costume and it’ll be nice to actually give it a shot, to try to make a flick where you care more about the dude before he’s in costume than when he is in costume.

Comic book aficionado (and Jersey Girl director) Kevin Smith, who appeared in Daredevil as a lab assistant, says Typhoid Mary was one of his favorite Marvel Comics villains. “She was always a hot character,” says Smith, “someone Daredevil could sleep with and fight at the same time.”