Coming Soon “caught up”* with Kevin Smith and talked to him about some of his upcoming projects, most of which will hopefully keep him in front of the camera and not behind it. The biggest thing he had to talk about was his five days of work on Live Free or Die Hard; the Jersey boy talked about just what it is that he does in the movie.
“I play a character that has a lot of depository** dialogue; I’m the only person in ‘Die Hard’ who talks, and doesn’t shoot somebody," Smith said. "When I got there, I was like, ‘[director] Len [Wiseman], can I get a gun?’ He’s like, ‘No.’ But it’s fun; it’s that role in the action movie where you provide a bunch of information for them to head into act 3. And my character gets talked about throughout – and it could all change. But the time they get in the editing room, they might be like, ‘You suck, yank him out.’ But as it stands now, in the script, and as I shot it, they talk about me a lot and then they meet me; and I provide a lot of information about the villain."
Smith also said that he wrote some of his own dialogue, including a page long speech. “So I don’t give a funny speech, I wind up giving a very paranoid, Joe Pesci in JFK type speech, which was fun.”
Smith also talked about a number of his other projects, including the Showtime series Manchild, his upcoming horror film, Preacher, Fanboys, laminating reviews, and TMNT, where he does a voice.
*This is standard junket write-up doublespeak (which Coming Soon did not use in this article), which makes it sound less like you were sitting at a roundtable with 14 other people and never asked a question. It gives the impression that you were having a cappuccino at the Coffee Bean on Santa Monica and then you thought, ‘Hey, I’m just sitting here enjoying a fine caffeinated drink, let me call up my buddy Kevin Smith and see what’s up with him these days.’
** I have spent some time thinking about this, and I am pretty sure that he is not saying he has dialogue about something in which you deposit items or money. I believe the correct word here would be ‘expository,’ or perhaps ‘suppository,’ if Smith were going for the doo-doo joke laugh, which he just might be. But it’s stuff like this – non-homophonic substitutions of words – that makes me do my own transcripts from junkets. Some people trade them back and forth, and most of the other journalists don’t seem interested in transcribing the words of the speaker all that accurately, or even intelligently. And don’t get me started on people who transcribe names and movie titles in some kind of mildly retarded way – I once had a fellow journalist give me a transcript where someone talked about Peter O’Toole in ‘Lawrence the Rapier.’ At least they gave the word an I.