Kevin Smith’s 1994 debut Clerks found the filmmaker already firmly intertwined with his narrative, with the movie’s hilarity bolstered by the writer/director’s profane stories about his struggles getting the damn thing made in the first place. What first seemed like charming promotion quickly grew into a canny empire, as each subsequent project emerged accompanied by increased flurries of merchandising, Twitter rants, and self-referential Easter eggs. All of which is fine, unless you just kind of want to watch a movie.
Judged strictly by what’s on the screen, Smith’s Tuskis a bit of a hot mess: an initially creepy slice of body horror that repeatedly fritters away its mounting bad vibes through shoe-horned flashbacks and lengthy improv digressions. When taken as a part in the ever-evolving chronicle of All Things Kevin, however, it becomes something more interesting.
When I first interviewed Kevin Smith a few years ago, during his press tour for Jersey Girl, I apparently caught him on a bad day. He was tired, distracted, stretched out on a hotel couch and chain smoking with an oblivious reflex. You don’t really expect a connection when you interview a filmmaker or a screenwriter or an actor – it’s usually just another in a long, long line of obligatory promotional obligations for the artist. The best you can hope for is to interest them with a challenging question or a perceptive remark. I can’t say I came through with either when Smith came back through Seattle to promote Zack and Miri Make a Porno, but he was far more engaged in this return engagement interview. It was like kicking back with a guy you just met at a party, relaxed and laid back and without pressure. And he certainly didn’t edit himself for print. His language is what you might call colorful, dotted so offhandedly and naturally with George Carlin’s seven dirty words that you hardly notice it. Until you start transcribing. I published an abbreviated version for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and scrubbed much of that language out of the piece. It’s intact in this full version of the interview, which was conducted a couple of weeks before the release of Zack and Miri Make a Porno.
Did you go to your tenth annual high school reunion?
Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks cast their porno
We didn’t have a tenth but I went to my fifteenth and just this summer they had a twentieth and I went to my twentieth, which they held on a boat. A three-hour tour, kind of like Gilligan’s Island, so that was a little nerve wracking. And it’s the kind of thing where you can’t get off the boat. If you’re like, “This sucks, I want to go home,” you’re stuck, you’re on the boat. Thankfully, it was kind of cool. I didn’t have any adversarial relationships in high school, there was nobody that I was like, “I can’t wait to see this motherfucker and tell him what an idiot he is.” I’m pretty cool with everybody and I stayed in Jersey for years after Clerks so I saw a lot of these people anyway, mostly every month.
So your reunion experience didn’t inspire you to make your own home porno.
No, it didn’t push me over the top. I had the other career going on. I mean, I can never really think about porn in regards to myself because I would just never want to see myself in a porno.
