For the past ten years, Kevin Smith has been best known as Silent Bob, the "hetero life partner" of a stoner named Jay. Smith wrote, directed and appeared as Silent Bob in five movies, starting with the 1994 independent release Clerks and ending with 2001's Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. This Friday, Smith will be hoping to change the way people think of his movies with a mature, autobiographical comedy-drama called Jersey Girl.
One of the bigger problems hounding Jersey Girl, a perfectly entertaining little movie, is the built-in fan base for movies in the oddly dubbed View Askewniverse (named by Smith because of his production company, View Askew). He said, "I figured I was going to lose some of the hard-core 13- and 14-year olds who are big Jay and Silent Bob fans, but the fan base is wide and diverse enough. Some of the fans have grown up with this stuff."
Jersey Girl is about a widowed advertising executive who lives with his dad, taking care of his adorable seven-year old. It came from Smith's experiences taking care of his daughter, Harley. As he puts it, "I just kind of crib from my own life. Each movie acts as a snapshot of what's going through my head at the time." Smith says he wanted to talk about the trials and tribulations of fatherhood, even though his own wife is very much alive, unlike the Jennifer Lopez character in the movie, who dies about 15 minutes into the story.
Aside from the post-Gigli breakup of Lopez and star Ben Affleck (he plays the widower), more buzz has erupted from the fact that Jay and Silent Bob aren't in Jersey Girl, nor does either Jason Mewes or Smith have a cameo (though two other familiar faces pop up). "I wanted to see if I could make a movie that stood on its own. I hadn't done it since Clerks. I wanted to see if I could work without a net," says Smith. He also attributes it to the fact that Mewes was getting addicted to various illegal drugs after the release of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.
He's probably one of the better recent filmmakers to look as an inspiration, since he was still a student when making Clerks. "Most people just turn to digital video now. Back when I made Clerks, we were 16-millimeter people. Don't try to figure out what's marketable, what's commercial. Just make the movie you want to make," says the director, who made Clerks to make his friends laugh. He didn't expect to have a large audience for the film.
"It feels like digital video is the most cost-effective way to make a film right now," says Smith, who never had the technological luxury of cutting-edge digital video 10 years ago. "The people that are passionate and committed to doing it will always find a way to tell their story."
For Smith, making Jersey Girl was different for many reasons, most of which boil down to one of the co-stars, seven-year-old newcomer Raquel Castro. "I certainly couldn't smoke as much on the set, or swear as much around Raquel. You rein it in a little bit there." He also mentioned that working with a seven-year-old girl brought up new problems: in one scene, Castro was supposed to hug and kiss Affleck, playing her father; she didn't want to kiss him, simply because he was a "boy." He credits the cinematographer of Jersey Girl, award-winner Vilmos Zsigmond, for showing him more about lighting and being able to move the camera around. Still, he says the best film shoot he's been on was for Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.
Since his most controversial film, 1999's Dogma, deals with religion, and one of the hot film topics, thanks to Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, has become the theological arts, could Smith go back to this big-ticket item? He said that Dogma tapped his religious works out, but "I just wish I had thought of the bloody Christ instead of the Buddy Christ," in reference to a satirical image of the Lord in Dogma.
The much more and important and pretty big news for Smith right now is that his next directing job will be with the comic-book adaptation of The Green Hornet. Is he intimidated? "Absolutely, you bet. It's bigger than anything I've done." He admits that although his other movies are not known for their technical wizardry and camerawork, The Green Hornet will be different, because "it depends on the material." No matter the material, so far it seems like Kevin Smith is unstoppable, whether it's infantile humor or heartfelt sentimentality.
Josh Spiegel is an entertainment reporter for the Web Devil. Reach him at Joshua.Spiegel@asu.edu
