“Totally. I’m only gonna make soft pictures now. That’s it. Next time I’m gonna make a movie about a puppy. [Big laughs.] Nah, this was sort of a one-off for me. I just really wanted to see if I could pull off something like this. After making five movies that were interconnected, where each one references back to the other movies for kind of an easy laugh and whatnot, and that Jay & Bob were always there as my kind of safety net, I wanted to see if I could make a movie without a safety net. One that stood on its own, because it occured to me that with the exception of Clerks, which was the first one, every movie kind of leaned a little bit on the ones that had gone before it. So I wanted to see if I could make something that just kinda…stood by itself. Every once in a while you gotta try a little growth spurt. So that’s fine. I’ve grown enough. And then we’re gonna regress after this picture and make a comic book movie.”

“Jersey Girl” almost found itself north of the border.

Not the New Jersey-New York border. The U.S.-Canada border.

With it would go Paulsboro’s shot at celluloid immortality. J.Lo and Ben Affleck would be strolling the streets of Toronto, not a small Cape Cod on Thompson Street.

All over $1 million that Miramax pictures wanted to trim from the film’s $35 million budget.

Filmmaker Kevin Smith’s reaction to the news?

“It’s called ‘Jersey Girl,’ dude,” Smith recalled saying Thursday as he discussed the making of the film and how his 10-year movie career has skyrocketed.

Smith protested: “We got to shoot in Jersey.”

Miramax wanted its cuts.

Affleck “spearheaded” a compromise.

“He had the most juice,” Smith, sitting in Philadelphia’s Four Seasons Hotel, said of the star. Affleck was set to make $10 million for his role as a work-driven Manhattan publicist suddenly finding himself being both father and single parent when his wife dies giving birth to their daughter.

He agreed to surrender $500,000 in salary. Miramax matched the reduction.

Smith’s “valentine” to his wife, Jennifer, would be made where he wanted it to be made. With Paulsboro subbing in most places for Highlands, the Jersey shore town where the movie is set.

The romantic comedy — whose PG-13 rating is a first for Smith — will debut nationally March 26.

The bearded and bespectacled Smith — wearing a Green Hornet baseball jersey to promote his next film project — called it a “sweet movie. A date movie.”

Miramax Co-Chairman Harvey Weinstein has twice moved the release date — from November to March 19 to sidestep “The Matrix Revolutions” and from March 19 to March 26 to hopefully capture Easter audiences, Smith offered.

Both moves have placed a distance between the release of the Affleck-Jennifer Lopez screen dud “Gigli” and their overly publicized decision to cancel a wedding three days before the nuptials, Smith said.

A wedding scene involving Affleck’s and Lopez’s characters that had made the movie’s final cut was trimmed once their real-life marriage plans were canceled, Smith said.

She was in a wedding dress. He wore a tux. The crowd threw rice. Maybe “12 seconds in length,” the filmmaker stressed.

“We did not need it,” he asserted, thumping a cigarette on a table.

To leave it in would have detracted from the movie.

“Why leave it in if it would pull anyone out” from the film’s intent? Smith asked, not expecting an answer.

In many ways, the film reflects on the changes in Smith’s life.

He went from determined, workaholic filmmaker to husband and father.

“Suddenly you realize what’s important. It’s family.”

In a director’s statement for the film, he observed, he would come home to watch his wife put their daughter, Harley, to bed.

“And what was I? The guy who came home at the end of the day. A tourist.”

It struck him one evening what would happen if he had to deal with the loss of his wife and be left to raise their daughter. The first 50 pages of the script was done in two hours.

Yeah, Smith had to improvise a bit on the child’s role.

“When I wrote the script, all (the baby) did was look up,” Smith told an audience following a Wednesday night screening in Philadelphia. “It did not make for a great movie.”

The Red Bank native relied on his own experiences – especially his relationship with his father, Donald.

“Wednesdays and Fridays at noon, we would go to see a movie,” Smith recalled. Dad worked the 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift at a post office sectional center in Monmouth County.

“He was really fulfilled with his family.”

Smith noted his parents — mom is still living, dad died in July — stressed “simple lessons.”

Somehow, they could save all year to take their three children — Kevin is the youngest — to vacations in the Bahamas, Virgin Islands and almost every state in the nation.

“I can’t make a buck last,” he mused.

Harley, approaching 6, is very much a “Jersey Girl,” Smith said.

She was born in Red Bank, in the same hospital where Smith was delivered.

He recalled being in California with his wife when she “started to pop.”

A person that pregnant is not going to be allowed on a commercial airliner, Smith noted.

Weinstein loaned the Miramax jet to “get us home.”

A day later, Harley was born.