The first thing you notice about Kevin Smith (or at least his voice) is that, like his characters, he’s a very articulate speaker. Before a recent virtual round-table interview, he’s warned by his publicist to limit answers to three minutes, to which he counter-warns that he’s not typically able to keep his answers short. However, every response is well phrased, and any wanderings are relevant and useful in some way.

The discussion is ostensibly to promote the DVD release of “Clerks II,” but the subject of the actual disc is touched upon only once, when Smith is asked if fans and critics have any impact on special features.

“Generally when I’m in the midst of making a flick,” he says, “I’m always thinking about the DVD anyway. I mean fuck films, I like making DVDs. But in order for people to treat your DVD seriously, you gotta go the theatrical route first. When you present the flick in theatres,” he continues, “you’ve shown the movie and that’s that. On the DVD, you get to draw back the curtain and show ‘em how it all happened. So when I’m in the midst of even writing the script I’m thinking about what you would do for the DVD and I always try to pack ‘em with as much material as possible because I figure anyone buyin’ wants to know as much as they can about the flick.”

He admits there’s a less altruistic reason too. “It also stands as the final ultimate record of any given movie you make. It’s everything but the kitchen sink or including the kitchen sink, put out there for posterity. As the final record it’s just great to put together what to me is a scrapbook, an album of how I spent that year of my life.”

And then he returns to the question. “There’s never something where I’m like, ‘well, based on public reaction I’ll do more,’” he says, “unless somebody requests a feature that I’ve never thought of before.”

One of the interviewers asks him whether he thinks the underlying message of a movie like “Clerks II” is overshadowed by the vulgarity.


“I’m always thinking
about the DVD anyway.
I mean f*** films,
I like making DVDs.”


“I don’t know, that’s up to the audience,” he says. “I mean, for me, not at all. For me I watch the flick and I’m like, it’s all there, the jokes are there, and the message if there is one… granted there are some films you have more to say than others, like obviously ‘Clerks II,’ ‘Chasing Amy,’ ‘Dogma’ I got a little more on my mind than with ‘Mallrats’ and ‘Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back’ … If somebody watches the flick and they’re like, ‘oh, they’re dog shit, it’s just a bunch of dirty jokes,’ I can’t necessarily say that they’re wrong, that’s how they’ve perceived it. But of course I prefer people to see it the way I see it, which is like, ‘yeah, they’re jokes, but there’s always something else going on beneath it as well.’”

Another asks him whether this is the end of Jay and Silent Bob.

“I reserve the right to do Jay and Bob in the comics, or cartoon form,” he says, “but in terms of me and Jason Mewes playing Jay and Silent Bob… we’re gettin’ a little old, man. I’m 36. Can you imagine me playing Silent Bob at 40? It would not be funny as much as it’d be sad. And Mewes is aging wonderfully, like the dude still has that boyish face, but I mean we got away with doing it six times in flicks, without people being like, ‘it’s tired dude, take off the backwards baseball cap.’ So I think rather than overstay the welcome… restoring them to their place in front of the Quik Stop at the end of ‘Clerks II’ feels like a nice way to go out with them.

“I could definitely see revisiting Dante and Randall in my 40s… ‘Clerks’ is about what I felt it was like to be in my 20s, and ‘Clerks II’ is what I felt it was like to be in my 30s, I can envision somewhere down the road a ‘Clerks III’ where we check in on Dante and Randall in their 40s if I feel I have anything to say about being in my 40s. But, with Jay and Silent Bob, if at age 44 they’re still standing in front of a convenience store, yipes. It might be a tragedy more than anything else. So for now this feels like the way to go out.”

I’d suggest having them buy the video store next door as cover for their drug operations, but this isn’t that kind of interview. I ask him where he got the inspiration for the sequence where everyone begins dancing to the Jackson Five, which leads to a tangent about the use of dialogue in his movies.

“After years of reading reviews where people were just like, ‘he’s a real tell, don’t show kind of director, and cinema’s about showing and not telling and why can’t this dude ever write a scene where visually the story is told as opposed to exposition through dialogue,’” he says, “rather than do a kind of dialogue-driven sequence in which Dante’s expressing his love for Becky I was like, ‘well maybe I’ll try it visually.’ So I started thinking about it in terms of like how does one visually represent falling in love, and there are different kinds of love; you fall in deep, fucking, abiding, and romantic love, and that’s expressed through soft core sex in movies where the music gets all low and there’s really beautiful shots of people fucking in a way that I’ve never seen people fuck in my life; or you can go the route of the pop song, because that’s primarily what the pop song is, generally, it’s about falling in love. And there’s no better pop song than ABC. Suddenly the dance number kinda kicked into my head, and I was like ‘yeah man!’ The idea of this dude kinda fallin’ for this shtick, weakening, and the whole world breaking into song and dance… it was a little goofy and it sure was a step outside what we’d ever done in the first Clerks, but for me it kinda fit.”

Personally, he says, he’d much rather hear what the characters have to say and move the story along that way, but it’s a visual medium and you’re expected to show things. “Maybe I’m in the wrong line of work,” he says, “and I should be doing radio plays instead, but film pays better.”

Then he’s back to addressing the question: “I always figured it’d be something of a lightning rod in the flick where people would either love it or hate it, like ‘what the fuck? A dance number in Clerks?’ But generally it seemed to be well received, and there were a few people who kind of groused about it but generally people seemed to dig it.”

“Clerks II” on DVD is in stores today (Nov. 28).






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