Next to Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith had the most fabled indie-film career path of the ’90s, going from convenience store clerk to writer/director of a no-budget indie hit about convenience store clerks (1994’s Clerks) to a Hollywood brand name dealing in raunchy, dialogue-driven comedies where geeks and drug dealers discuss their feelings about life and pop culture between rounds of fart jokes. Now that Judd Apatow has reinvented raunchy rom-coms for the mainstream, Smith delivers his own distinct take with Zack And Miri Make A Porno, starring Apatow staple Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks. Kevin Smith sat down with EYE WEEKLY during the Toronto Film Festival to discuss his love for filmmaking, erotic and otherwise.
You’ve made a comedy about porno. Are you a fan of the genre?
I am absolutely a fan of the genre. I like naked people. I’ve been interested since the age of 12 and that has never stopped. But now it’s more out of a social scientist’s curiosity to see how far porn will go. Sometimes it gets into real weird and dark places and I find myself gravitating to simple, DIY homemade porn. That’s the kind of stuff that touches me cause I’m like, “I could know these people.” They don’t look impossibly beautiful and they’re not well lit. They don’t have massive fake jugs or insanely huge cocks or anything like that.
That’s the kind of porn that I like and that’s what informed this movie. The notion of people who are free enough to just put it out there on camera and do that most intimate act in front of an audience. I was always kind of fascinated by watching porn actors fuck and wondered what happens when it’s done — ’cause you’re watching people doing intimate things to each other, but when the director says “Cut,” they’re just like, “Bye, see ya later.”
How did Seth Rogen get involved?
I wrote it for Seth. I saw him in The 40-Year-Old Virgin and I fell in love with him instantly. Carell was fine, but this dude was a fucking star. He sounded like one of my characters. I thought, “I’m going to write a leading role for this guy, because if I do and it takes off he’ll love me forever. He’ll be like Ben Affleck: Version 2.”
So, I finished writing the script and handed it off to him about two months before Knocked Up came out. Then I started seeing him on billboards everywhere and realized that, apparently, he already is a big star. Mercifully he liked the script enough to jump on board. He didn’t have to. He can generate his own material or just wait around to do every Apatow movie ever made. He was a fan of Clerks and our earlier stuff and he was kindly enough to do it. The dude I wrote the movie for wound up being a huge movie star. I didn’t write it for a movie star, but I wasn’t bitching when he became one.
Did he fit into your group well?
Oh, so insanely well. We share a very naughty sensibility — for lack of a better word. He’s the one actor I’ve ever worked with aside from Jason Mewes who’d say things like, “I think I could get a few more ‘fucks’ into this sentence.” And not only is he a very funny guy, but he’s always thinking about the movie. He’s never just thinking about his role. He’s always thinking about how the story is going to unfold and how to propel it forward. So he’s not just working on his one job, and that went all the way up to the marketing of the movie. He was the first dude to kick back some of the poster concepts and trailers saying “these are lame.” After looking at one of the first trailers we cut together Seth said, “Look, my girlfriend loved it. That’s bad news. We need my friends to love it so let’s keep working.”
[Regular Smith player] Jeff Anderson experiences a show-stopping poo-related mishap in the film. Where did that come from?
That came from a story that I heard working on a commercial shoot from a producer who knew Barry Sonnenfeld. Apparently, before Barry was the Coen Brothers’ DP and a director in his own right, he worked in porn. One of his first jobs was in porn and a very similar situation happened to him. He was shooting an anal sequence and he got some mess on him and he freaked and quit the porno business. I was like, “What a great fucking story!” and wrote it in. I can’t wait for the moment when I hear back from Barry Sonnenfeld saying, “Motherfucker you stole my story!”
If your career in the legitimate film industry hadn’t worked out, would you have considered working in porn?
Never on-camera, because nobody wants to see my fat ass in a movie. Not even the fat ass, but the swinging gut as I’m hovering over a woman who has that terrified “please don’t fall on me” expression on her face. But behind the scenes? I don’t know. I guess if I hadn’t done Clerks or had a film career maybe by this point I might have said, “Fuck it, let’s just shoot a porno and see what happens.” I’ve seen enough of them and know the basic mechanics. It’s funny, when we were shooting that first porno scene with Mewes and Katie [Morgan, a crossover performer from the porn industry], I swear to god it literally felt one penetration shy of being an actual porno. We were all sitting around watching these two mime having sex and he was banging away and she was banging right back. They were naked, and it just felt like porn to some degree — but funnier.