INTERVIEW: KEVIN SMITH (ZACK & MIRI MAKE A PORNO)

This is my first time ever sitting down with Kevin Smith, believe it or not. Even though Smith once wrote a (very positive) Episode I review for CHUD, I’ve never been able to interview him. In fact, I’ve been even denied access to roundtables with Smith in the past. I don’t know if that came from the man himself, an avowed reader of his negative press (to which I have contributed over the years), but I’ve never otherwise been denied access to a roundtable.

The good news is that I didn’t feel the need to give Smith a hard time at this roundtable – his new film, Zack & Miri Make a Porno, is pretty good. It’s certainly something like seven thousand times better than the truly atrocious Clerks II, and it might be his second or third best movie to date.

Smith, who is looking especially big these days, came in to the room at the Four Seasons and immediately lit up a cigarette. He then began doing what I think he is best at, and what he should resort to doing for a living rather than making a Clerks III – being a raconteur.

Q: You set the film in Monroeville, which is a great wink for the nerds in the audience.

Smith: Well, I wanted to set the movie in a place that seemed like the last place in the world that anyone would think about making porn. Initially in the first draft it was Minnesota and then [Scott] Mosier went over the draft and was like, ‘It’s going to be a lot cheaper for us to shoot in Pittsburgh.’ I was like, ‘We shot Dogma there ten years ago and I had a great time and had a great crew base. I’ll set it in Pittsburgh.’ But then I felt that Pittsburgh itself, being that it is a major city, was too cosmopolitan and I just wanted to move outside into the suburbs and that’s where Monroeville came in. I was like, ‘Fucking Monroeville, man. That’s like from Dawn of the Dead.’ So I got to shoot in that mall and stuff like that. I was kind of going on the geeky side, like, ‘How could this benefit me personally while I’m doing a shoot?’

Q: Can we talk about the ratings issues you had?

Smith: Yeah, initially the MPAA ratings board gave us an NC-17 on the movie. So the first thing that we tried to do was work with them and make some trims. I trimmed about ten or twelve seconds out of it. Initially, the first thing that I did was test screen the movie in Kansas City and the movie was ten minutes longer at that point and so I’d seen it with in audience and had seen some of the weaker areas that had some air in it that I could let out. So I knew that I was going to make ten minutes of cut anyway. At that point I said, ‘Lets submit this cut because maybe there will be shit in it that we’re taking out anyway and we can resubmit it a week later and look like we did a shit ton of work.’ So we did that and they gave us an NC-17 on that first cut. I was doing the work anyway and I resubmitted the ten minute shorter cut and they were like, ‘You’re getting so close, but it’s still NC-17.’ That’s when I took out twelve more seconds and they were like, ‘You’re so close. It’s almost within reach –’ but at that point I’d kind of gone as far as I was comfortable going. I just felt like anything that I cut from that point forward I was going to feel like we’re losing good stuff. I said, ‘Look, at this point I’m going to go with the appeals process.’ I’ve done it twice before. We’ve gone through it on Clerks and on Jersey Girl which, mystifyingly, they gave us an R for. An R for maybe bad I could understand, or unwatchable, but R for the content? I didn’t quite get that. It’s like, ‘They say “shit” in the movie. That’s about it.’ So I argued that one down to a PG-13. Those two times I felt confident because it was all about language and all about what people were saying that they were objecting to. This time I was kind of like, ‘We might lose the appeal –’ because this time they could actually point to sequences and be like, ‘Hey, man, this dude gets his fucking face shit on. You can’t have this in an R rated movie.’ So I was like, ‘Oh, shit. We might lose this one.’ But I felt that it was my last bite at the apple, so we put everything in the movie back that we wanted in there and submitted it. The submission process, when you do the appeals screening, it’s taken out of the ratings board’s hands and placed into the hands of members of the MPAA who aren’t members of the ratings board and half of the audience is made up of members of NATO, the National Association of Theater Owners. I feel that’s what the ratings board should be made up of because the NATO members are the last line of defense for any movie. They’re the people who actually deal with people who get up out of their seats, go to the box office and complain. So if anyone knows what’s going on in the public consciousness or what people are objecting to it would be those cats. So thankfully they’re a part of that process.

So you go up in front of them and you screen the movie and then you stand up and get to do fifteen minutes on why you feel it should be an R. Joan Graves who heads up the ratings board stands up and she gets to do another fifteen minutes on why they feel it’s an NC-17. You get ten minutes to rebut and she gets ten minutes to rebut and then you leave the room and wait for the decision to be made. It’s a generous thing that the MPAA does in offering it because if I was in charge of the MPAA I would be like, ‘Fuck you. Our rating is the rating. So either you cut to get the rating you want or you accept this rating,’ but they do give you that one additional bite at the apple where you can totally flip it if you can win the audience over, if you can plead your case. After I pled my case I went outside and I’m standing there talking to Joan Graves. We don’t have an adversarial relationship at all. She’s a very lovely woman and she was really kind in the appeals hearing. She actually stood up and said, ‘No one is saying the movie isn’t funny. No one is saying that the movie isn’t sweet. We’re just saying that it’s an NC-17.’ So I’m standing out in the hallway talking to her and whatnot and I said, ‘Do you have ten more of these to do today?’ She said, ‘Kevin, we do ten a year, maybe and they’re normally with you.’ I was like, ‘Right on.’

But we were sitting there talking and I had this sinking feeling like I didn’t make the argument, that I wasn’t going to get it and so I’m this fucking close, no lie, to just going, ‘Alright, Joan, I’ll cut back on the thrusting if you let me keep the shit shots.’ Those are the two things that they definitely wanted out of the movie. They felt that there was too much thrusting in the first porno sequence and they were like, ‘This shit shot will never play in an R rated movie,’ even though it’s not even a full second of film. A full second of film is twenty four frames. That shot is fourteen frames and she was still like, ‘It’s not going to play.’ So I’m sitting there talking to her and I’m like, ‘I’m going to make my play for her, try to make a deal before it comes out that I lost.’ I’m thinking that I would offer to take out more thrusting if they gave me the shit shot and I’m just about to say it and the door opens, a woman comes out and she’s going, ‘They overturned it, ten to four.’ I was like, ‘Joan, it was fun seeing you. I’m going to get the fuck out of here. Hopefully I don’t see you on the next round.’ I don’t know if it was ten to four. We had fourteen people in the screening and we won by two thirds. You can’t win by one vote. You have to win by a majority. So we had to win by two thirds. I’m terrible at math, but whatever two thirds of fourteen was that’s what we won by.

Q: Your films aren’t known for their improv. Seth Rogen is known for all his improvisation.

Smith: Well, technically I’d say that he’s more well known for ad libbing than improv. Improv to me, and maybe this is just my personal definition, is that you set up a camera and you’re like, ‘I’ve got no script. I don’t know what to do. Why don’t you guys just do shit and we’ll hopefully write a scene.’ I don’t subscribe to that. I think that when you go in you should know where you’re going. You should know what the thrust of the scene is and that’s when the script is absolutely essential because it gives you the blueprint and the framework. What Seth is innately gifted at is ad libbing. He’s so good at buttoning a joke. That dude can easily give you like twenty-six buttons for one joke where you’re like, ‘Every one is good. Every one is golden.’ He’s also very good at finding alternative lines, but anyone can ad lib on a set and be funny on set. Anyone can say something that makes the crew crack up because if you’re on take eight or something and they’ve just heard the same shit seven takes in a row, you say one thing different and everyone laughs. But nine times out of ten it’s not usable. It doesn’t help the movie. It sounds like someone saying something funny outside of the confines of the scene or the story. Seth is very gifted at being able to ad lib and make it sound like it’s happening in the scene. He makes it sound like it came right from the script because it comes so quickly off the top of his head, but he’s a very generous performer because he’s not just an actor. The dude has spent most of his time as a writer before being an actor. This is a guy who really cares about cinematic storytelling, comedic storytelling specifically, and knows how to like work the whole movie and not just his sequence. He’s not a dude who’s like, ‘I’m doing my lines and that’s it.’ This is a guy who’s always thinking about where a movie is going and how it takes shape and whatnot. So when he ad libs he makes it absolutely usable. You don’t sit there and go, ‘That’s really funny. It’ll wind up in a blooper reel or something.’ He’s able to find a way to throw in a line where it not only sounds like Zack and not Seth, but it’s germane to the discussion of the scene and it’s actually propelling the movie forward. That’s a dude that you always want on set. I’ve met very few of those cats. Will Ferrell is very good at it. Chris Rock is very good at it and Seth Rogen is the absolute, hands down master at it. He’s so fucking good at it. That’s a dude that you want around because you don’t just execute the script. You elevate the script when your Seth Rogen. He makes funny shit even funnier and he’s funnier than me so I bow to that.

Q: What’s an example of Seth ad libbing on the set?

Smith: Yeah, right off the top of my head one of my favorite lines in the movie is where Justin [Long] says [the title of a porn movie he stars in], ‘Glenn and Gary Get Their Hairy Nuts in Ross’s Eager Mouth.‘ That was in the script. Then there’s a long beat and Seth goes, ‘Is that a sequel?’ It’s just pitch perfect timing on it too. He did another take where he goes, ‘Is Jack Lemon in that one too?’

Q: How much of Justin Long’s character was Justin and how much of it was what you wrote?

Smith: A lot of that shit was on the page, but Justin came to us with a nasty chest cold and so he couldn’t speak in his normal voice. He came to us so much so that we had to get him to a doctor immediately, but he had one day to shoot this sequence and he came to us and so we were like, ‘We have to make this happen in this one day.’ It was on the schedule and we had to move shit around and we were like, ‘We have to go for it.’ He was like, ‘Look, even though my voice sounds like this I borrowed a gay porn tape from a friend.’ I was like, ‘Sure you did. I’m sure it’s borrowed my friend.’ He goes, ‘In those scenes all those dudes talk down here like this. So I think it kind of works for me in this voice.’ I was like, ‘Dude, I love it. I don’t know if it’s going to work, but that makes me laugh.’ It totally fucking worked and it was sheer accident, by virtue of the fact that he had a chest bug going on at the time.

That being said that dude is like maybe second to Rogen in the movie in terms of being a dude who’s absolutely genius. Very funny. Knows how to make funny shit even funnier. I’ve seen a lot of Justin’s canon, the stuff that he’s done and whenever they cast him as a lead role in stuff like Accepted or even in like that Herbie remake they always force him into this leading man box and this dude is insanely gifted. This is the dude who should be playing Fletch because he can do multiple characters as one. He’s a really, really funny underrated talent who will hopefully pop more. I mean, he had tons of plaudits coming to him for Live Free Die Hard. He was able to kind of stand shoulder to shoulder with Bruce Willis as John McClane and not ruin the movie. I remember before the movie came out everyone was like, ‘Oh, the fucking Mac guy is in it and it’s going to suck.’ The movie came out and everyone was like, ‘The Mac guy is funny.’ He’s a really funny and gifted dude. We were lucky to get him for this movie.

Q: Have you talked to Seth about Green Hornet?

Smith: I did, but oddly enough for a movie that I wrote at one point and he’s now writing and starring in and producing we didn’t talk that much about it. My version had to be the version that was dictated by the estate of the Trendels, which was a very straightforward masked crime fighter movie. Seth’s version gets to be Seth’s version. I would’ve enjoyed that version a lot more because Green Hornet doesn’t come with a built in audience like Spider-Man or Batman. It has a built in audience, but they’re eighty years old because he was a very famous radio play character before anything else. So going into it that was one of the things that kept me from wanting to direct it. I was like, ‘I don’t want to do an $80 million movie for a character that doesn’t have a built in audience.’ If I’m going to spend that much money on a movie because I generally don’t work that high – I work very low budget – I would just want it to be something that I created so that way live or die it’s my fault. I can’t take the heat for no one knowing Green Hornet. What they’re doing with Green Hornet is such a great idea because it doesn’t matter if you don’t know the back story of the character or the history of that character because they’re reinventing it as a comedic action/adventure franchise. Hopefully a franchise.

Q: You use an outtake song from Live for the emotional epiphany scene. I understand that you wanted to use that for Mallrats. Where would that have fit into Mallrats, and how do you go about picking songs for your films?

Smith: In Mallrats there’s the wrap sequence in the movie where Ben [Affleck]’s character has been taken away by the police and the game show has been ruined and all the characters are coming together again. I think it was a Belly song that was in there now. That was where I initially wanted to use it and initially MCA gave us a bunch of tracks and I loved that track and we put it in the flick. It was in the first version that we tested. If you watch the Mallrats DVD, in the extended cut sequence scenes – the first DVD and not the tenth anniversary DVD – you hear that song in the background. I don’t know how they do that because I don’t know if they cleared it or not, but at that point Live was a very popular band and they were like, ‘We’re going to use this as a single on our next album,’ and they retracted it without having seen the movie. It wasn’t about me. It was about their career. Years later in 2001 when we were doing Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back I still remember that song and I was like, ‘Can I use it in this feature?’ and they still said no to it. At that point I was like, ‘I think it is me.’ Years later we now come to this point where initially where I had the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs song Maps in that spot instead and the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs were like, ‘That song is so overplayed. It’s on Rock Band.’ We don’t want to commercialize it anymore than it’s been commercialized –’ at which point I was like, ‘It’s got to be me.’ I know that they were like, ‘We don’t our song in your films because they fucking stink.’ So I was left with no song and then I remember that song and we reached out to Live and they finally said yes. It took three times and we finally got it thirteen years after the fact.

Q: This movie really resonates because of where America finds itself economically.

Smith: I know. No one was more happy about the economic collapse of this country than I was. Suddenly I was like, ‘My movie is plausible now. It could work.’ But yeah it is weird.

Q: Did it just work out that way?

Smith: It just worked out. I couldn’t have predicted that. I didn’t see this coming at all. One day someone was like, ‘The country is poor again.’ I was like, ‘Really? Wow. That works out for me.’ No, it certainly wasn’t planned.