The short, thick, bearded Mr. Smith is familiar to moviegoers for the small parts he plays in his own films. (In his latest one, he is the wordless Silent Bob to his co-star Jason Mewes’s motormouth Jay.) And as he moved through the suite of offices and into the editing room to watch “A Man for All Seasons,” he looked very much like Silent Bob, right down to the doleful eyes and the backward baseball cap. Once in the editing room, the door closed and the DVD slid into the bank of technical gizmos, he pulled out a pack of cigarettes and began to snap it loudly on his forearm.

“Why this movie?” he asked as he watched the credits roll. “It’s been a favorite of mine since I was a kid. The first time I saw it was when I was about 13. It would have been 1983. I watched it because I was going to a Catholic school in Jersey at the time, Our Lady of Perpetual Help. I had this teacher, Sister Theresa, who was great, and Thomas More was her favorite saint and she loved this movie. For our eighth- grade production one year, she did an adaptation of Bolt’s stage play for us to perform. She chopped out a lot, but we still put it on. I played Cromwell. She picked a guy in the class to play Henry VIII because he had red hair. She was kind of fanatical about the details.”

Sister Theresa encouraged her class to watch the film when it was broadcast on a local television station, to introduce them to the story and prepare for the class production. “I watched it and I just fell in love with it in general,” Mr. Smith said. “Even though it was on television and interrupted by commercials, it knocked me out. I don’t know why Sister Theresa loved it so much. I think it had something to do with the integrity of More. He wasn’t one of these fanatical kind of martyrs who wanted to die on the sword. He was a lawyer and tried like mad to get out of dying but in the end found no way that didn’t involve violating his faith. But for me, I loved it just because it was so well-spoken and yet incredibly spiritual at the same time. Here’s a dude who held one of the highest offices in England at the time but was still able to maintain his faith.”

Mr. Smith said his family had just bought its first videocassette recorder, and he made a copy of “A Man for All Seasons” and watched it at least 10 more times in the next weeks. “It got to the point where my parents were, like, ‘C’mon, move on, watch something else,’ ” Mr. Smith said. “But I didn’t want to. It was the language. It was the story. It was being 13 years old and admiring somebody who was able to go down for God. Maybe I even felt I could identify with Thomas More a bit. I can appreciate the way More’s mind worked, how he was able to juggle the two worlds of the spiritual and the everyday. I mean, it’s easy to say we don’t want to sin, but it’s very hard not to sin. Here’s a dude who found a way to do it, to walk the line.”