“He wanted to be part of it, so he asked if he could be a background extra, but he wanted to get paid for it. I told him Gigli must have tanked harder than I thought”, Smith, who constantly takes the piss out of his friend Affleck, laughs. “I told him to come on out, but I knew he would want some dialogue. He came out and shot his scene, which was just him reacting in the background and we shot it twice and got it right and then he came up to me and said it felt like he should say something. I said, “Of course you do, here’s a line of dialogue for you.”

Smith, who says Matt Damon was also asked to appear in the film but had to decline the offer to do a role in a De Niro film he was doing, explains that the film would only have made sense if it were again headlined by the original stars, Brian O’Halloran and Jeff Anderson as the slacker cashiers of the original film.

“I thought since Clerks is a story about what it’s like to be in my twenties, why not use Dante and Randall as the way-in again? It’s nice. There is a built-in poignancy of showing those guys 10 years later, especially if you open up your head, why not use the dudes who helped you the first time around, the characters particularly.