Kevin Smith: Comic Book Men
by Fred Topel for SuicideGirls (http://suicidegirls.com/)

Kevin Smith is used to working a crowd. His forte career-wise is really as a public speaker at his live Q&A shows. His movies made him a name and he still makes them. Well, at least he’s making one more. But his bread and butter has been live shows. He can take a question and spin it into a 20 minute anecdote and keep the crowd laughing along the way.

The Television Critics Association could have been a tough room for Smith. An organization of veteran critics from the print days of newspapers, they gather twice a year to work, not to humor performers. So when Smith had a new AMC television series to present to the TCA, he took the mic and answered questions. He joked about how he’s enjoying talking to the TV press, because they don’t hate him yet like the film press do.

It has been a tumultuous year for Smith in the film world. He premiered Red State at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2011, and then auctioned the film off to himself to take the film on the road and self-distribute. After saying on Twitter that he would not do press or screen the film for press, many of Smith’s loyal followers began lashing out, even more so after the “auction.” Yet Smith has been on the road with Red State, giving Q&As at sold out shows and the film is now available on VOD, Netflix and DVD/Blu-ray.

Comic Book Men is a reality series set in Smith’s New Jersey comic book store, Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash. The dialogue between the staffers behind the counter may feel very similar to Smith’s movie Clerks, but he’s not writing any of it. It’s all real. After his TCA session, I found Smith in the hall of the Langham Hotel in Pasadena and I asked him for a follow-up interview. We ended up doing a full interview, ironic for someone who threatened to stop doing press. Our talk veered away from the TV show as a follow-up on his new distribution venture lead to spiritual life lessons, which only underscores the point that a conversation with Smith can really be about anything and go anywhere. It all ties into the voice that is making his final film, Hit Somebody, and launched the new TV venture Comic Book Men.

SG: You joked about how the movie press hates you, and the ones that do are harping on this idea that you said you weren’t going to do press anymore. You have NOT stopped doing press, because here we are.

KS: I know, I know. I remember I talked about in advance of Sundance last year, I said, “I don’t even think I’m going to do press for Red State.” And I didn’t at the end of the day. I wound up doing a Rolling Stone interview but we never city by city did anything.

SG: But in the entire year since, you have still talked to press.

KS: But all I do is talk to the press, man. Just not about that anymore. I guess I was done talking about the movies.

SG: And they harped on the word auction, like “You said you were going to have an auction and there was no auction.”

KS: They were so angry about something that didn’t involve them. That’s what I thought was weird. It’s like if I did have an auction, were you going to bet? Were you going to buy the movie? No, so what are you upset about? But whatever. They had their moment and then I had the rest of the year

SG: There were a lot of haters and naysayers after you announced your self-distribution roadshow plan. Has the last year been a success after all?

KS: Yeah. Look, it was for me. Financially it was a success, spiritually it was a success. The last two years I was all about going after fears, eradicating all my fears and shit. Critics were a big fear and I certainly eradicated that fear. So it’s all about conquering the shit that would hold me back. Now this year lately it’s been a little bit different, not about conquering fears as much as let’s just see where this goes. Let’s see how far one can travel with this. Let’s just see if this develops because things have happened really organically lately. Just making decisions not based on what’s good for the career or what’s good for this but just is this fun? Do I like this?

SG: It’s a spiritual perspective. Once you start thinking on the right path, more stuff comes to you.

KS: It is and it’s crazy. I hate saying that because I like to think I’m a practical no nonsense guy but it’s fuckin' true, man. The moment you start honoring yourself... The thing that frustrates me is I knew that. I knew all these things. This job, film particularly, is like well, I’ve never done it. I’ve been around Jason Mewes for long enough. It’s like heroine. Once you get it into your system, you can’t easily stop. Think about the lifestyle that working in film has afforded me for nearly 20 fuckin’ years.

I came from a lower, lower, lower middle class government cheese eating family. I have a house in the Hollywood Hills, bigger house than fuckin’ anyone in my family’s ever had combined, put all their houses together. They don’t give you that money unless you give ‘em something back and you get used to that relationship, man, real quick. For a while I got to do my thing within their thing, using the framework and what not and telling the stories I wanted to tell. Yeah, people take Jersey Girl to task and what not but I still maintain yes, it’s very predictable, you’ve seen that movie before but this is my version of it. For a while that’s what I tried to do, career manage. Try to make View Askew movies out of the movies that were getting made. What was going to get greenlit and can I bring my sensibility to it so I can comfortably balance art and commerce?

SG: Even Cop Out?

KS: Well, Cop Out was more important. Cop Out was about I want to work with Bruce Willis and what an important life lesson. But the great Cop Out story is as much as the whole time I was like oh my God, that’s literally getting two days into a movie and finding out not this isn’t going to be easy, but this is going to be hell, this dude doesn’t want to be here. When I sat down with one of the investors for Red State, we were talking, I was like, “Did you read the script yet?” He goes, “No. I don’t have to read your script.” Really, why? “Because I saw a movie with Bruce Willis in it, had your name on it as a director so I know you know what you’re doing.” He wrote me a two and a half million dollar check. So I was like that’s why I did Cop Out I guess, to eventually get Red State made. But this is the year about being not lazy. Oddly enough podcasts were a big influence because in podcasting I got to exercise the chatty muscle. So when it came to the movie, suddenly I was like I’m all chatted out so let’s work with pictures. It also helped with editing. It was insane. For a year of cutting podcasts, I’m used to standing on stage for years now talking, I know how to self edit. When I started sitting down with people that don’t ever talk, sometimes they’re brilliant and sometimes they say boring sh*t. So I’d go in and start cutting out all the boring sh*t and it’s all based on listening.

You’re just going, “Okay, that don’t sound right, I’ll pull that.” You look for smooth edits and make it seamless to the conversation, still all make sense, it doesn’t feel like you pulled anything out. That’s just editorial. By the time I sat down to cut Red State picture cut, I’d been ninja training for a year on just audio. So man, I hit the deck. It was magic, dude. It was crazy. It was like that line in The Hunt for Red October. “You give me a stopwatch and a map and I can fly a plane with no windows through the Andes.” Same kind of thing. You just get into a zone and you’re like, “Oh, this makes sense. “And when you’re the director it’s even easier to be the editor because you’re cutting the movie even before you shoot it. Then you’re cutting the movie in your head while you shoot it so that when you hit the deck, the actual cutting you’re doing, you’ve already kind of made an EDL list in your head, an Edit Decision List. So by the time you hit the deck, it’s just hands operating, executing what you know, what you see in your head. So that’s why we were able, Red State we started shooting so late, we weren’t even supposed to go to Sundance. We were going to go to Cannes. So we were like, “We start shooting in September, there’s no way we’re going to be ready for f***in’ January.” But I was cutting while we were shooting and the editorial process went like this [SNAPS] because I was only shooting what I needed really. I didn’t overshoot. Michael Parks did that f***in’ long monologue one time, the first take. That was it. It was spellbinding and I was like, “That’s great. Michael, do you want to go again?” He goes, “Why?” I was like, “You’re absolutely right. Let’s move on.”

SG: I thought Red State still came from the same voice that wrote Dogma.

KS: I agree with you there. I’d say it’s kind of like the dark twin of Dogma, dark cousin. Honestly I think Red State came from the same voice that wrote Clerks. To me, those movies are a good double bill because one shows pure passion of a dude with no means, the other shows pure passion of a dude with limited means and both are kind of made in the same spirit and sensibility. Like I don’t give a fuck. I just need to do this.

SG: Are all your investors even for Red State?

KS: Yeah, they’re even. We took care of those motherfuckers, and I don’t mean motherfuckers like they’re bad guys, I say that with affection. They were wonderful in letting us go out and tour, but we got them paid back, the moment we struck our deal with Lionsgate for DVD and VOD and Netflix, boom, they were in the clear.

SG: So far you’re still the only one going out on the road like that, but wouldn’t it be great if movies became events again instead of just one weekend and out?

KS: That was the nice thing about Red State was we took what would’ve just been a screening and turned it into an event. Every screening was like a film festival screening. You don’t normally get that with flicks. You watch the flick and then you go write about it online and stuff. You don’t interact with the filmmaker, you don’t hear about why, you don’t spend more time talking after the movie than watching the movie. As long as you can make it worth it for those folks to leave the house, it’s harder to fucking convince people to leave the house. Especially when they’re like, “If I wait fucking a month I can just watch it on Blu-ray.” Or shit, dude, let’s be honest, “If I wait 10 minutes I’ll bomb it off usenet.” So getting them to come out, you’ve got to give them something they’re not going to get anyplace else. If they just want to watch the movie, they can watch that on their TV. But if you give ‘em a little something extra, like hey, I’m going to be there after the movie and we’re going to fucking record it so you can be part of that and hear it later on for posterity, suddenly there’s more of a reason to leave the house. Still, you’re not going to necessarily get everybody, but the people that are on the fence will be like, “All right, that’s worth getting a babysitter for.” I’ve got to consider that because a lot of my fanbase has kids at this point. They grew up watching our stuff and now they’ve got families of their own. It’s not as easy for them to get out. So if you’re going to ask them to leave, be there. That’s our new philosophy. That’s why if you look at that Silent Bob Speaks blog that I put up right before the end of the year, it just lists every appearance we did, all the road stuff, every tour date we had. We spent a lotta time on the fuckin’ road because the philosophy now is “go to them.”

Anybody can make a movie, dude, and put it on fuckin’ 2000 screens. Anybody, because I’ve done it. I’m the bottom of the barrel so if I can do it, anybody can do it. Not anybody can get 2600 people to show up to Carnegie Hall and sell the place out. That’s magic. And you’re more in touch with the audience. It’s one thing you make a movie and they screen it. If you’re not in the room, you’re not part of that experience. It’s another thing when you make a flick and then fuckin’ afterwards you’re communing with the same audience that shelled out good money to see it which means something. Especially with us, because it wasn’t like hey, pay 10 bucks to see a movie. They were paying the same price they pay to see me stand there and do Q&A or do Jay and Silent Bob Get Old. That’s the crazy thing. Some people were like, “$50 to watch a movie, you’re out of your mind.” People were paying $65 to watch me and Mewes sit there and talk to one another without a movie. That’s why I didn’t understand the people that attacked it. I was just like how could you feel it would’ve failed based on the fact that I’m on the road all the time anyway. It was a hedged bet at best in terms of me going, “I’m going to take the movie out on tour, why would I do it unless I could f***in’ hedge it.” I knew I’m going out on tour in the f***in’ winter anyway. I know people are going to show up like they did the previous season. If I go with the movie and then just donate all the money to the f***in’ movie, ta da. But boy oh boy, some people got out of their sorts about it.

Comic Book Men premieres February 12 at 10 p.m. on AMC.

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