Kevin Smith has directed his most emotional film with a decidedly non-emotional title with Zack & Miri Make A Porno. Rife with penis and poop jokes, it’s not really a departure from his entire Askew-niverse, but the film does hit some emotional chords that Smith had only really hit before in Chasing Amy. Granted, I wasn’t a big fan of Clerks 2 (although I loved the original), but I found myself really liking Zack & Miri.
In our in-depth interview, Kevin Smith talks about Jason Mewes’ penis and Ben Affleck’s reaction to it, dealing with the MPAA’s obsession with poop, and how this movie came together. He also talks a bit about his next project, Red State. Don your flak vests and kevlar helmets, because there’s quite a few f-bombs in here, as well as a slew of spoilers from Zack & Miri.
How’s it going?
It’s going well, sir, it’s going well.
Did you come straight here from Toronto, or did you get to go home for awhile?
No. After Toronto I went to Jersey, and we were based out of Jersey for about a week. I had things to do at the latest screening in Westchester for Janet Maslin and her theater group, and then I went to the IFP, Independent Film Week for the 15th anniversary for Clerks and a keynote. Then I did a Q&A, a college gig at South Carolina last night, and I got on a plane and came here. So, tomorrow I get to go home for the first time in two weeks. I’m really looking forward to it.
So, did you get to see the movie yet?
I did, I saw it yesterday in a press screening.
Right on, thank you. How did it play with the small group?
It was really small, like ten people. Harry Knowles seemed to love it.
Did he? Right on!
I mean when you see him laughing you’re like, “Oh, you know that’s going to be five more exclamation points in the header.”
[laughs] It’s always frightening when you have a screening of a comedy for a very small group, because laughter is kind of infectious. When you’ve got 300 people laughing, people who were maybe on the fence who don’t like it will be more kind to it. They’re inclined to be more kind, because “Obviously, I’m missing something.” But if you get a small group and nobody is laughing, your all unified frontward, just like, “This sucks!”
I’ve never sat through it with a full audience. I mean I guess I did at the test screenings, but I didn’t sit; I just kind of skulked in the back. At Toronto I just popped in for the key sequences. I’m like if the reunion sequence works, then the rest of the movie is going to work. If I ever get nervous I pop in on the first porno, and if that works I feel good. And then I’m like, “I got to see how the love story plays,” so I go back for their love-making scene, and then I check out until the end.
This is probably your most emotional film. I mean it’s close to Chasing Amy, because that had some emotional moments, but this one was like this had like naked, open emotion in it. Was that the hardest part of it for you, or the porno part the hardest part?
The porno part was definitely the hardest. The naked emotion stuff, I feel like we had in Chasing Amy, I feel like even in the last movie Clerks 2 they’re sitting between Dante and Randal in the jail scene, which is just emotionally devastating. You watch one dude who’s always confident, always a wise ass, like laid bare. That to me is like devastating, because that’s a dude completely unguarded.
So doing a version, not a version of that, but doing a girl-boy type emotion that lay bare, that was easy. Shooting fake sex––that was definitely something I wasn’t ready for. Mercifully, the first scene we shot was Lester and Stacy, was Mewes and Katie Morgan. You couldn’t ask for two better people in the scene, your first sex scene to kick it off with. Because you have one person who sprang forth from the womb pretending to **** everything in the room anyway, and you have someone else who’s day job is the adult film industry, and nothing you ask her to do in your movie will ever compare to like the lightest day in her day job so to speak. So I felt like I was in good hands.
So I cleared the set, and just talked to those two for about 15 minutes, and we kind of mapped out everything. I was always like, “Is everyone comfortable with this?” They’re looking at me like, “What, are you insane? Of course we’re comfortable with this.”
So once we got into it, it was fun and weird. You felt like you were really directing porn, because from the vantage point of the monitor he could have been in her for all we knew. I knew he wasn’t, but it just looked convincing.
Yeah.
Everyone was just kind of standing around and not like, “This is fucked up, isn’t it?” and like everyone is just kind of concentrating on their jobs. It just seemed like a porno set for some reason. So it kind of worked out, but that was the one I was most nervous about going into.
Well, Jay in Clerks 2, he’s got that Silence of the Lambs scene. He looks pretty heroin thin and everything, and now he looks all buff.
[laughs] Yeah.
Did he buff up for this movie, or is that just what he looks like?
I think that’s kind of what he looks like.
What, you don’t see him naked all the time?
I’ve seen that dude’s dick, more than I’ve seen my own to be honest with you. And in this movie, that’s the biggest I’ve ever seen his dick.
Because in real life, it’s an average dick. When we were shooting that sequence and he comes out that door, like he was hanging low! I was just like, “Did Mewes sneak a prosthetic onto the set, because that doesn’t look like Mewes…”
Maybe he got fluffed backstage or something.
He was fluffing himself, sir. He was fucking tugging furiously. Although he’s fond of saying, “That wasn’t on its way up; I was on its way down,” and I was like, “I don’t want to know about that.” I had it confirmed too by Affleck. Affleck came over the house to watch the movie. He hadn’t read the script or anything, so he kind of went in fresh. The third thing he said about it after it was done, he was like “You realize Mewes was one pump away from being totally hard.” I was like, “Right!” He said, “Because his dick has never been that big.” I said, “I realize that.”
I don’t know if it’s frightening that you guys know that much about Jason’s dick.
It’s a sad commentary really, because either it means that he is way too comfortable in exposing himself, or that my gut is so big I haven’t seen my dick in years. So I’m just more familiar with his dick than my own by this point.
Did he have to work on his porn faces? He nailed those.
Dude, he has been that guy forever. In many ways even more so than Jay, in Jay and Silent Bob, he was born to play this role. It caters to all of his shrines: cluelessness, sweetness, utter filth and raunchy, pretend fucking. It was just so right up his alley.
Yeah, it seems like he could pick up the porn and the business tomorrow if he needed to.
Totally.
So, you put Jeff Anderson in this film. How did that happen? Was that sort of natural? Did you always want to put him in, or did you just think “Hey, let’s stick Jeff in this role”?
When I was writing it I was like, “I’m going to write this role, the Deacon role for Jeff,” just because I love working with Jeff. I thought he did a bang up on job on Clerks 2, but I just wanted to have him for the next flick as well. I was worried when I gave him the script that he would be like, “I don’t know, it’s kind of a small part comparatively,” but he was so elated to like not have to carry the movie. He was just like, “It’s going to be fun to just kick back and watch somebody else carry the movie, and just come in when I need to come in.” So, it kind of worked out.
Yeah, he was good in that. I was reading in the notes how you were kind of really jazzed when Seth Rogen wanted to do this, and you hand delivered the script to his house, which you’d never done before. Then by a weird chain of events he had turned out to be a huge fan of yours, having grown up quoting Clerks and everything.
Yeah, yeah.
Could you imagine making this with someone else? I mean he seems to sell this film, him and Elizabeth both.
Yeah, but him even more so than Elizabeth, because it was written expressly for him. At one point the Weinstein Company was just like, “What if he says no, who’s your backup?” I was like, “I have no backup. This is the only guy who can play this role. Let’s not let any negative thinking into this process. Let’s just all hope that he’s going to say yes, and do the right thing,” because he was the guy.
I had been working on this idea about a movie set on the outskirts of the porn industry since ‘96, since we wrapped Chasing Amy. It’s gone through various permutations, but it wasn’t until I saw him in 40 Year Old Virgin that I was just like, “I’ve got to work with that guy. That guy is amazing! He sounds like one of my characters, ” and suddenly I was like, “Oh, my God! He’s the guy!” Then I built it around the notion of having him in the movie.
So without him there is no Zach & Miri Make a Porno. Me, him and that flick are very tied together. I think if he’s said no I probably wouldn’t have made it, I’d have just made Red State instead.
He said he brought in Elizabeth Banks, he suggested Justin Long, but you and Justin had been in Live Free Or Die Hard together.
We did Die Hard together.
Did that kind of happen because of Seth’s suggestion, or did you guys kind of know each other after working on it?
I knew Justin after working with him, because we spent a week together on that flick, but never…the dude didn’t cross my mind for some reason when we were figuring out who to play Brandon. And Seth was just like, “What about Justin Long?” And I was like, “Oh, my god, yes. Justin Long.”
I had a lot of moments like that. He brought in Craig Robinson, who played Delaney.
Oh, yeah, he was great in this.
Because I had written it for this dude Earthquake, who was in Clerks 2. And Seth was like, “That guy’s very funny, but I just worked with Craig Robinson on Pineapple Express and he was fantastic.” He’s just like, “Let him come in and read. If he sucks, don’t worry about it.” And he came in and he just kind of knocked it out of the park, so boom, he was there.
Banks was––it was written originally for Rosario Dawson. I wanted Rosario to play Miri. But she wound up taking this role in Eagle Eye and the dates didn’t work any more, so she was committed to that. I couldn’t blame her, it’s a fucking Spielberg movie with Shia LaBeouf and whatnot, so why not?
But we were going to be shooting in the fall and she could have done it, but then when we moved into January and March, she was committed to that, so it was all over. We were at ground zero and we started looking at actors’ availabilities of all the agencies to see who was going to be free from January to March.
We narrowed it down to six possible names of chicks who might be interested in doing this movie. Because the material’s not for everybody. I’m sure we would get a lot of “no’s” is we went out into the world with it. So Banks alphabetically was at the top of the list.
Seth comes over and we’re talking about a bunch of other stuff, and I was like, “Let’s talk about possible Miris. I’ve got a list here.” And he was like, “Elisabeth Banks is your first choice. She would be my first choice too. She’s amazing.” And I didn’t have the heart to tell him that alphabetically she was first. [laughs]
But he was just like, “Oh my god, she was so good in 40 Year Old Virgin, and she made it so far in the Knocked Up auditions.” She was almost the chick in Knocked Up. So he was going, “I vote for Banks.” And I like her in Invincible, I like her in everything I’d seen her in.
So I said, “Let me just see her whenever.” She came over to the house, read the script, and then we sat talking for like two hours, and I was like, “You are so it. The movie’s yours if you want to do it.” And thank god, because she’s hands down the best actress I’ve ever worked with.
She really…I mean Miri kind of is the emotional sign and grounds the movie and makes it very real, makes it plausible for some reason. And she pulls it off is all. Because Banks is that good of an actress and that good of good of a comedienne on top of it.
The whole process with the MPAA, with submitting it multiple times for approval, going through the approval process, did you guys originally submit like a really nasty cut thinking, “All right, we can cut it down based on we’ll put more in and they’ll ask for certain cuts…”
Ow!
You all right, man?
Ow, ow, ow. Crap. My calf.
Those are no fun.
Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow.
Think happy thoughts.
Charlie horse.
Oh, those are not fun.
No. Bad one, bad one, bad one. Ow! Ow, ow, ow. OK, it’s going now. Holy shit, that hurts.
Oh, shit. Ow, ow, ow, ow. OK. Ow.
I’m glad it’s not a seizure.
That’d be weird.
It’s like, “I’m going to have to shove something in Kevin Smith’s mouth, or he’ll just bite his own tongue off.”
Hold on, just let it work itself out. Oh, shit.
No, take your time.
That’s one of those things where you really feel your age.
Yeah.
Oh, shit. Come on. Come on. I would just like to see what it looks like inside.
I don’t even know what causes that. It’s like blood gets starved to one area or something?
It literally feels like the muscle gets inverted around the bone. Like it feels like it shifts into a place it shouldn’t be.
It’s some kind of weird muscle spasm, I guess.
It usually happens to me in my sleep. I wake up in fucking agony.
In pain like that?
Oh, yeah. I think it’s about gone now.
I’m sorry, what were we talking about?
The whole MPAA thing. Did you guys submit harder cuts?
What we did was we didn’t submit something where I was like, “Let’s give them the worst and see what happens.” We had an hour and forty five minute cut of the movie and we had just test screened it in Kansas City. We had a great test screening and scored really well.
So I said, there’s stuff in the movie with now having seen it with 300 people at once, I hear is just not as good as the other stuff. Ow. Oh, shit, dude. Ow.
It’s a bad day for the Smith calves.
Hold on. Yeah, man, just the one. Let me just stretch it. Oh, shit.
So I submitted the hour and forty five cut that we had test screened, knowing that I was going to take out at least 10 minutes, probably 12. So I said listen to this, that way if there is any problem, chances are I’m going to be addressing with the cuts I make anyway.
At the very least I’ll be able to turn in another cut in three days, and they’ll think I did a massive amount of work on it. So we submitted the 1:45, and they immediately said it was a NC 17. So we waited a few days and submitted the shorter cut, which I think was 12 minutes shorter.
And they said, “Wow, you’ve done a lot of great work, but there’s still the two scenes that you need to focus on. One is the first porno sequence with Lester and Stacey. And the other is the shit shot. The shit shot is never going to play in a R rated movie. It’s not going to work in an R rated movie.”
And I was like, “Well, I’ve seen it play with an audience and I’m really hesitant to lose it. I just can’t. I’m married to the shot. It works like crazy.” And I’ve seen shit in other movies, so it’s not like it’s without precedent.
And they were like, “Maybe you can work with some of the other elements involved. Like maybe if you bring the sound down on it. Maybe the sound is the problem.” And I’m like, “Really? It’s the egregious visual of shit hitting somebody’s face? Fake movie shit?”
But I felt like I was on good ground, because it’s not even a second long. It’s 14 frames. And I felt like I think I can win this fight. So I did what they suggested, I submitted a version with the sound turned down and they were like, “No, no. It’s still not working.”
And at that point I was like, “Look. Let’s just go to the appeals part of the process.” And they were totally content to do it. I put everything into the movie. I submitted like the perfect version of the movie for me. Like, this is everything I want. Because I’m like, if we’re going to get this second bite of the apple, let’s do it. If we win, let’s make sure it’s the movie that we really want out there. So they did the appeals process and they flipped it without us having to make any cuts. So it was kind of delightful, but still like a process that you didn’t really want to go through in the first place.
No. Not that many times at least.
No. And it’s not even the frequency or how many times we had to do it, it’s just like it’s kind of embarrassing. You don’t want to go out there in the world and be like, you know, they have a problem with the movie. You just don’t want to send anything out there in the world.
It’s tough enough to open up a movie. It’s tough enough to make sure you’ve got good buzz and not bad buzz. And then deal with the reviews when they come out and shit like that. All that stuff’s difficult. Making a movie, all that stuff. But it’s a necessary part of the process.
This part of the process, not really. Not everyone goes through it. In fact, after we won I said to Joan Graves, the woman that heads up the MPAA––who’s really lovely and I was very friendly with. I said, “Do you have another one of these today?” And she’s like, “We do maybe––maybe––10 of these a year.”
10 appeals?
Yeah. And I’m like, “Really? It doesn’t happen that much?” And she’s like, “No, most people just do the cuts.”
Wow.
But I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t go for it. It’s worth it. At the very least, what are they going to do? Uphold the rating you already have? And the very most you could flip it, without having to cut anything.
I was always shocked though, they focused on two things and I was just like, “Really? That?” The sex scene to me––and I argued it when I was doing the appeal thing––it’s just so cartoonish. It’s like a caricature of sex. It’s a caricature of a caricature of sex, because it’s porno sex.
Porno sex is over the top to begin with. I don’t know anybody that does 26 positions in 10 minutes. But in order to make fun of it or lampoon it, you have to be bigger. But still, it was very much a cartoon and not meant to titillate. Clearly it was meant to draw laughs out of people.
And the shit shot to me was so brief and clearly it’s movie shit and not real shit. To me it’s like, “Yeah it’s a gross out gag and maybe it might not be everyone’s cup of tea. But it’s not egregious, it’s not like this thing you have to protect children from.”
The things that I thought they would hit us with, were there’s a shot in the strip club where one of the strippers, you flat out see the labia, man.
Yeah, I did notice that.
And if you look really closely, and I have because I have it on the Avid and I got frame by frame, you see a little bit of brown eye in there.
That’s what Seth said.
And I’m like, yeah, it’s definitely there. And I felt like that would be the thing that they would harp on. And because of that, when we were shooting it, we shot I think five takes of completely nude, and before that Scott Mosier was like, “I don’t know if we’re going to get this through. There are flat out pussy lips all over the shot.”
And I was like, “All right. Let’s grab one of here in a G string. So we had that in our back pocket in case the MPAA came down on it. The other shot I thought that they could have tagged was Jason’s **** shot. Not because it’s just a shot of a dick, but that dick is so close to being fucking erect, it could very well be considered hard…
What about the scrotum shot?
That too.
Are those really his balls?
Those are his balls.
Wow.
But it’s backlit so you can’t see anything else. You don’t see a ring piece or anything. But I felt like that was the moment we could have gotten in trouble for. Because the rule is any erect penis will get you an NC 17. And I look at his **** in that shot, and I’m like I have had sex with a dick that engorged. Not all the way hard but almost there.
[laughs] Right.
If you’re going for a second or third round or something like that and you’re like, “I ain’t got much left, but I’ll try to work with this.” So to me, that’s classified as an erection, but they didn’t see it that way.
I’m not saying the should rethink it by any stretch of the imagination, but if I was a member of the MPAA, those are the two things I would have went after. And I think if I was a member of the MPAA, I would have won the shit shot argument. Because when I stood up to defend the shit shot, I referenced other movies that had shit moments, like Trainspotting, where they ripped the sheet. Or American Pie 3, where Stiffler eats dogshit. And then I referenced Jackass with the fart helmet, where…
Oh, yeah, that’s real shit.
It’s real shit in that funnel! You can see it. And I said, “If they have real shit and the get an R, how come fake shit gets an NC 17?” But if I was Joan Graves I would have turned around and been like, “None of those shots you mentioned is in the midst of a sex act.”
And that’s kind of what like sets our shot apart, but they just didn’t, for some reason, zero in on why it was questionable. Because it’s not just that it’s a simple shit shot. It’s coming from somewhere and it’s a sex act. So I think I could have won that one if I was on their side.
We talked to Peter Sollett, who directed Nick and Norah in Toronto, and there’s a scene in his movie… have you seen his movie?
Not yet.
This actress is drunk, she drops her gum in the toilet.
I heard about it.
He said that was a pain in the ass dealing with the MPAA on that.
Really, they brought that up?
Yeah. They wanted to scale back and not see it, and just see her hand go out of frame. He said that whole process was a pain.
They don’t tell you what to do, but they will make suggestions to work around things.
That’s interesting.
And on the shit shot they were like, “Look, just cut the shot, and be on somebody’s face and hear the sound. And then when you’re outside and you see him caked I shit, the audience will know what happened.” But I’m like, “It’s 14 frames, man.” 14 frames and it works like crazy. I don’t want to lose it.
I know you’ve been busy with this movie, but have you had any time to see any of the summer films this summer, or see anything? I’m sure you saw Dark Knight.
Yeah. I’ve seen mostly all the summer films. There are only two that I want to see that I didn’t get to see yet, and that was Wanted and Hancock. But I saw pretty much everything else. It was a good summer, man.
It was bookended by wonderful comic book movies. Iron Man was great and then Dark Knight was great.
Although it was weird, did you see that quote from Robert Downey, Jr. when he was talking about Dark Knight?
Yeah. I mean, I’m certainly nobody’s career counselor, but I couldn’t believe that that dude said that. Because it’s like he came back in a big way with Iron Man, and everyone remembered how much they love Robert Downey, Jr. He knocked that role out of the park. He was sublime.
Dark Knight comes out a couple of months later and it is universally beloved. Everyone takes it very personally, everyone defends that movie, everybody loves it, it did killer business, it may be one of the perfect Hollywood movies. One of the most perfect Hollywood movies ever made.
It appeals to a bunch of different people on a bunch of different levels without being saccharine or sophomoric. It’s dark; it’s a bleak fucking picture. I never in a million years, even if I hated Dark Knight, I would not be the guy going online being like––or in any interview setting––being like, “I don’t like Dark Knight. **** Dark Knight.”
Because, man, they would all turn on me so fucking quickly. So when I saw him make that quote I was just like, oh my god, dude. You’ve got to be very, very ballsy to say that.
He was.
It’s was a weird thing for him to say, but it doesn’t seem to have affected him.
You mentioned Red State would have been your next film if this had not been. Are you on to that already now, or is that going to be next?
We’re trying. The script’s done, and it’s been done for a year or more. Finding money for it has been fucking difficult. Bob and Harvey didn’t want to do it, so that kind of opened us to go out and raise financing. But it’s been tough.
I get it. It’s not a very commercial film. It’s very bleak. It makes Dark Knight look like Strawberry Shortcake. There’s nobody to root for. Everyone dies. It just a series of bad choices made based on questionable morality throughout the film. No character for an audience member to latch onto.
Right.
So I get it. If it does any business at all it would be because it played well at festivals. It’s a total festival film. But if it had a little water cooler buzz coming out of the festival, maybe it does.
I get why people aren’t racing to flip open their checkbooks. And I figure sooner or later the money will come. For some reason, the lack of confidence… financial confidence from anybody has just served to make me feel like I’m on the right track.
Because these are cats that are like, hey, if I wanted to make a comedy, everyone would pony up but I get it. I’m working outside my comfort zone. I’m working in a genre that I’m certainly not proven in by any stretch of the imagination.
With material that doesn’t lend itself to a Saw type opening or anything like that. So I can completely understand why people would be hesitant to cough up and for some reason it only makes me more confident that it’s the right thing to do next.
It must make you want to do it more, to be out of the comfort zone. You’re pretty safe with the films you’ve been doing, then you try something totally different to stretch your legs.
Most days I’ve never felt like a filmmaker. I just feel like a guy who writes movies and happens to direct what he writes. If I could make that movie and pull it off, like I would feel like maybe I am a filmmaker.
But if it doesn’t work I’m just as content to go, “OK, I’m the dick and fart joke guy, and I’ll go back to doing that. But it’s worth a shot, you know?
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