Kevin Smith Talked A Lot, But in A Good Way

Kevin Smith is the director of movies like Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma, Jersey Girl, and most recently, Cop Out. His next film, Red State, is not out until October, so why the hell was he here in February talking about it with Imus, who couldn’t even remember agreeing to have Smith on this show in the first place?
 
“I’m bringing it to New York, down to Radio City Music Hall!” Smith said about Red State. Though he maintained a level of enthusiasm throughout this interview that would rival a chipmunk on methamphetamines, Smith insisted he was not on drugs this morning.
 
On March 5, he’ll kick off the Red State USA tour, which starts in New York at Radio City and ends in Los Angeles at The Wiltern. “In between there’s 13 other cities, Chicago, all the usual suspects, where we stop one night per tour stop, show the flick, then I Q&A afterwards,” Smith said of his plan to bring attention to the flick.
 
Red State is both a departure and a return for Smith, who eschews his status as an independent filmmaker. “I only made one indie film,” he said, talking about Clerks, his first. Smith thinks of himself as more of a “cult” filmmaker, in that he makes very low budget movies that are moderately successful and enjoyed by a very specific audience that has probably seen all of his previous movies. 
 
As he became more established in Hollywood, Smith started to feel he was straying from his roots. “I thought I was getting a little too complacent doing similar movies, over and over again,” he said. Having run out of what he called “passion stories from my youth,” Smith is beginning to feel the end of his filmmaking career might be near. “I want to go out strong, I want to go out the way I came in.”
 
But this was all way, way too much information for Imus, who simply wanted to know what the dang movie, which cost just $4 million to make, is about. “Red State is this dark…genre-less movie,” Smith said, finally. “It starts off like a little horror movie. Three boys decide to go out into the woods to find sex they find on the internet. They meet Melissa Leo, who drugs them and takes them to a church of extremely fundamentalist people.”
 
There, the boys meet a family, the Coopers, who are tired of the message of God not getting through to people. “So they decide to take it one step further,” Smith said. “They translate it to mean it’s okay to murder anybody that God doesn’t agree with.”
 
Rather than attack such fundamentalism, Smith looked at Red State as an opportunity to satirize it. The film debuted to mixed reviews two weeks ago at the Sundance Film Festival, where Smith noted that evaluations of its merits focused as much on his appearance as on the movie itself.
 
“They talked about, ‘Smith, dressed garishly…,’” he said, and pointed out that by losing weight (he’s down 65 lbs., with 35 more to go) he takes “one more quiver” out of the arrows of the press, which had a field day when Smith was kicked off a plane last year for being too big.
 
Working on Red State, with actors like the aforementioned Leo, who is nominated for an Oscar for her role in The Fighter, and John Goodman, about whom Smith waxed poetic for a few minutes, was a gift, Smith said. Unlike, say, working with Bruce Willis on Cop Out.
 
“I love Bruce Willis because Bruce Willis taught me one of the most important lessons I would ever learn in this life—that I personally should not work with movie stars,” Smith said. “I’d never worked with a major movie star before. Please don’t tell Ben Affleck I said that.”
 
Prior to Cop Out, Smith had really wanted to work with Willis, “an icon,” as he put it. “The actors I work with trust me, they know I’ll never make them look weird,” Smith said. “This dude, I’ve never worked with before as a director. So I’d be like, ‘Hey, let’s try this,’ and he’d just look at me like, ‘Are you out of your mind? I didn’t become Bruce Willis by doing dopey stuff like that.’”
 
Obviously pleased with Smith’s entertaining performance today, Imus invited him back on this program anytime. Which might have been a mistake.
 
“I’ll be back tomorrow,” Smith said. “Knocking on the door, going, ‘You said I could return, Imus!’”
 
-Julie Kanfer


Comments

[PatrickMcM]

Kevin was a great guest, wow actually downplaying a good guest hopefully surprised some people. Now I know why Cop Out sucked so much.