Highlands to Hollywood, Kevin Smith’s Journey as the Hero Slacker

By: Cathy Padilla | January 29, 2021 |  , Entertainment |  Atlantic Highlands

FEATURED PHOTO: Kevin Smith |  CREDIT: Courtesy of smodcast.com

A fluffy cloud with an iron core. That’s how Kevin Smith has been described on set and how he characterizes his 50-year-old self.

The kid who grew up in Highlands, sitting in the cheap seats of a matinee movie with his old man, didn’t know he had what it takes to make movies or become part of the Hollywood elite. Until he turned 21, his dream was to marry a local girl and hopefully not work at the post office. But his father’s silent encouragement enabled his love for movies to turn into what Kevin describes as the ability to get paid for making pretend for a living.

Last month was a hectic one for the director, actor, and screenwriter as he announced the completion of the first draft of his screenplay for Clerks 3, a much-anticipated sequel in the series that started with the 1994 cult classic that launched his career. Filmed in black and white in a convenience store in Monmouth County, the movie began Kevin’s reign as the king of slackers and endeared him in the hearts of locals as a cross between every-man and hero. He also relocated his Red Bank comic book store, Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash, to a new larger location. In true Silent Bob fashion, Kevin had planned a parade carrying the famed Jesus statue for his movie Dogma from the old location to the new location. Unfortunately, due to the current pandemic, he was unable to fulfill what would have been a visually unique experience on the streets of Red Bank.

Having spent some time in Red Bank and Holmdel in September 2020 promoting his pop-up restaurant Mooby’s, Kevin is immediately at home and still considers himself a Jersey guy despite living in California. Penning the newest episode in the saga of Clerks has him contemplating his adventures, and his connection to home and his family are evident in what he shares. Emotional while speaking of his father, Kevin sees his life as a continuous stream that began in his childhood home and has shaped his entire career. Whether you know him as Bluntman, Silent Bob, or just the guy who always wears that purple jacket, here is our interview with the incredibly open, touchingly sentimental, and one-of-a-kind Kevin Smith.

PHOTO: Mooby’s made its official move to Red Bank for one week only (September 18 – September 25, 2020). Taking over Gianni’s Pizza (15 Wikoff Place, Red Bank), the socially distanced pop-up gave fans the opportunity to safely immerse themselves into the world first created by Smith in the 1999 film, Dogma. | CREDIT: Cathy Padilla
 

CM: Can you describe who Kevin Smith has become?
Kevin: I’ve certainly not learned to respect other people’s time, unfortunately. That is a flaw that has existed since childhood and still exists to this day as a 50-year-old man. I don’t put a lot of negativity in the world. I’m a pretty easy guy to get along with, I’m very engaging, and I’m all about hey, you want to make some art? Let’s do it and stuff. I’ve been described on set as a fluffy cloud with an iron core. I was told by this one guy, ‘you’re all gushy and soft, not edgy. Easy to be around, you just glide around like a little cloud. But at the center, you know exactly what you want. You know the story you’re going to tell, and if people say let’s do this, you’re like no, this is it. Everything is a specific way and it’s what makes you a director.’

CM: Where does “knowing exactly what you want” come from?
Kevin: That goes back to childhood. If you’re playing Star Wars and somebody does something different, you’re like, well you can’t do that. You’ve got to do it this way. Even as a kid I remember being, I wouldn’t call it bossy so to speak, I remember as a seven-year-old playing on the playground of our Lady of Perpetual Help where I went to school from first grade to eighth grade before I went up to Henry Hudson Regional where I went to high school, I remember being very specifically the guy who organized, saying this is what you’re going to do, you’re Luke, you’re Han, I’m Darth Vader, this is Princess Leah, this is going to be the Death Star…and go! I didn’t know that that was a job until years later. I didn’t know what a director did. I knew who a director was, Steven Spielberg, he made Jaws, and I love Jaws. George Lucas was a director, he made Star Wars, I loved it. I knew there was such a thing as a director, but I thought you had to be born in Hollywood to do that sort of thing, I didn’t know just a normal person could do it. And I didn’t know it comes from this weird mindset of, no, I know exactly how everything should be. That is the directorial mindset.

CM: How does the “directorial mindset” play out in your movies?
Kevin: I’m writing Clerks 3; I finished my first draft and gave it to my producers to read. Jordan Monsanto, that’s Jason Mewes’ wife, and Liz Destro, I’ve been working with them for years. So, Liz says, ‘this one scene in the third act is fantastic, but it just happens too late. Move it up to here and that will inspire the character and stuff.’ My first instinct was, no you can’t do that. It has to happen where it happens. And that’s not true. There’s no truth to that, it’s just my preference. And it’s taken me 50 years to conceptualize that, to understand that there is no one way. What makes it the one way is your choice, and that’s what makes you an artist. That’s what gives you your voice. (Jordan was right, by the way, and I moved the scene.)

CM: When did you know that movies were your art?
Kevin: My father, who I loved deeply, worked at the United State Post Office. It was the bane of my father’s existence. He didn’t want to work, least of all work for the post office. My father was never like, what’s my career, what’s my dream, what do I want to do in life? I asked him about that, I said Dad, I dreamed about being a film maker, what did you dream about when you were a kid, what did you want to do? And he was a little stunned, like what do you mean? Do you think I failed or something? I guess I phrased it in a way that it could have been taken in a number of ways, but my father said, ‘my dream was to get married and have my own family.’ And I was like, wow, your dream came true at age 28 and you’re living your dream ever since. His dream had nothing to do with wanting people to look at what he would do and have people say good job and give him a thumbs up. My father’s idea of working at the post office was, well, I guess this will pay for things. This will pay for the life I want, which is I want to hang out with my wife, I want to hang out with my kids, I want to go see the country.

CM: Can you relate to your father’s dream?
Kevin: For my father it was all about his family. I love my family. I’m married, I have a kid. My kid is doing well in life, I think I’ve done okay as a parent. But that was not my dream, I mean in high school it was, to get married, but for me the dream was never like my father’s.

CM: How was your dream different?
Kevin: When I was a kid all I wanted to do was marry Kim Walker, even all through high school, but on my 21st birthday I saw Slacker. I had always been a movie fan, but that was the movie that made me say, maybe I want to make a film? If this counts as a film, I can make a film.

PHOTO: Kevin featured Calico, the Food Circus Clown, in the first few minutes of his 2006 film Clerks II. Originally built by and for Food Circus Grocery Store, it is still outside Circus Wines, Beer & Spirits. | CREDIT: With permission from Kevin Smith’s Instagram

CM: Did your parents support your dream?
Kevin: They took us everywhere, even though we were a single income family, lower, lower, lower middle class, still my father was engaged with the world, he wanted to see places. He took his family to almost every state in the United States when we were kids. We would fly, on Eastern Airlines, ‘cause my mom really knew how to stretch a buck, or we would drive, or we took a train trip once on Amtrak across the country in 1979. That was when we came out to California because I liked movies. We were three kids; I’ve got a brother and sister who are older than me. Virginia, and Donald, who is four years older than me to the day. He’s had to share his birthday with me almost his entire life. And when that younger brother, the little cute one, goes on to become a movie maker, ugh. I love my brother, thank God he loves me, because he would have every justification to hate me. But he seems to really dig me, and I certainly dig him.

CM: Were your siblings movie buffs?
Kevin: My brother and sister were older than me and the way my old man bonded with me was he would take me to the movies. He’d pull me out of school at noon for a matinee, and that was how we spent time together. The language of cinema, he didn’t even speak it. We just watched movies together and talked about them on the way home. That was it. That was my training, that was how I became a filmmaker. My father didn’t know what he was doing, but he was training me, forging me in the fires of cinema. He never once said to me, you should do this. Ya know, you could do this. People didn’t say those things to kids back then. Nobody fed you pipe dreams or told you, you can do anything. But he never dissuaded me. It just never occurred to him to be like, you should try this. Because we didn’t come from that world where anything was possible.

CM: Sounds as though your dad showed you encouragement by supporting what you liked.
Kevin: That was my father, and he was a mystery to me because I was a kid, and that’s how I figured out who he was. He wasn’t me. I’ll tell ya everything about my life, but my father wasn’t that guy. I was young, so he wasn’t like oh I’ll have all these deep conversations with the kid. But that’s how I learned who he was, by watching what entertained him. What he would take me to see. What he would share with me through art.

CM: Do any of those movie experiences stick out in your mind?
Kevin: Taking me to see Raiders of the Lost Ark before anybody heard about it, day one, when it first came out, before all the buzz. My father was so happy because he said it was like the kind of movie he would go see when he was my age. The same way I love and embrace the Marvel movies because they remind me of my happy childhood spent in a movie theater. And I’m sure people say, isn’t a happy childhood spent outdoors? I’m like, no, not mine. So that’s what we had, me and the old man. He knew I liked Hollywood and movies, that I knew directors’ names, I knew producers’ names even though I wasn’t quite sure what the job entailed. I just knew that they were in charge. I recognized screenwriting names, and we would sit through the credits. So, in 1979 we came out to California on an Amtrak ‘cause the old man thought, let’s take him to see Hollywood. We didn’t have a sleeping car or anything like that. We were lower, lower, lower middle class. Actually, the older I get the easier it is to say, we were poor. That train trip, I’ll never forget it.

CM: Sounds like that trip had a huge impact on you.
Kevin: When we got out to California, it was 1979, so the characters from Star Wars had just put their footprints in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. So, you had R2D2, C3PO, Darth Vader’s footprints and those are still there today. So that was what I was interested in seeing. I’m a big Star Wars fan. And there’s a picture on my Instagram of me and my brother leaning in front of the footprints of the Star Wars characters. As we were leaving, my old man said to me, ‘Maybe you’ll be here one day.’ Not like I had ever said I was going to make films; I was nine years old. And 40 years later me and Jay got to put our footprints and handprints in the Chinese Theatre court. We’re there now. And that’s not for everybody. If you’re in this business you’ve got a real good chance of getting your star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, because there’s lots of sidewalk. But the forecourt of the Chinese Theatre is where movie legends are. Currently it’s the Avengers. Spielberg, Lucas. The Harry Potter Kids. And then there are Jay and Silent Bob, Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes. So that’s the kind of life I’ve had, and it’s never been separated from the kind of life I was raised in.

CM: Can you tell us about Clerks 3?
Kevin: The plot is that Randall has a heart attack and almost dies. He realizes he’s done nothing with his life and there’s no one left behind to even tell his story if he dies. And he says, ‘F#$% all that, I’m tired of watching movies, I’m going to make a movie.’ So, Dante and Randall essentially make Clerks. There is a lot of reflection in the movie. There is also a lot of humor, seeing scenes from the original Clerks being played out in the movie, today, with the same actors who are like 25 years older. But for me it’s like all this s^%& happened yesterday.

PHOTO: Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes at Bell Works in September, 2020. | CREDIT: CATHY PADILLA

CM: As though no time has passed?
Kevin: When it happens to you, when it’s yours, you know I made it with a bunch of people and they were involved, but I was the driving force. It didn’t happen way back when, it happened yesterday. I know these movies backwards and forwards. They’re the story of my life. For me, none of this stuff ever ended.

CM: Are you older and wiser now?
Kevin: I’m older and wiser, but it’s still me. Because that was the endeavor. Why go through all of this, why create a rocket ship and try to go to the moon, unless you’re avoiding some other job. And that’s what this has all been. All of this has been avoidance of real work, I just never wanted to do what my father did. He hated his job. He worked nights and used to have my mother call and tell them he was sick. He would never call out himself. Then one time my mother said no that he had to do it himself. And he was terrified to do it. So, he told me to call. I was like 15, and was like ‘I’m going to do it?’ These phone calls were legendary in my house. The only time I ever saw my parents bicker was because of these phone calls. So anyway, I’m now doing this call, and he gives me all this prep of what I can say and not say. And I finally get to make this call that has defined my father’s life, and this is how it went:

Post Office: Dispatch.

Kevin: Yes, Don Smith won’t be in tonight, he’s sick.

Post Office: Okay.

Click. That was it. My father gave up so much time, so much stress, and he wasn’t a healthy guy, he was a diabetic. He died at age 67. He dreaded this phone call. And when I heard that phone call I was like, this is what ruled his life? I never want this. Jobs suck. I don’t ever want to work for anybody. Because in my world that’s all anybody had, a job, they didn’t have a career.

CM: So, you wanted a different life?
Kevin: So the whole point was to keep life from becoming grown up. Don’t get me wrong, I love my parents, I don’t want you to have the impression I didn’t want to be them. I just didn’t want to work like my dad. I’ve tried to be like my parents as a married man and as a father, my whole life they were my role models and taught me to be me. But then unintentionally taught me to be me by feeding me a steady diet of movies. I discovered who I was not in a church or school, but in the temple of the cinema.

CM: Movies shaped your world?
Kevin: My dad didn’t shy away from showing me movies that weren’t age appropriate. I’ll never forget, I was 12, and my dad took me to see the World According to Garp. There’s some grown-up stuff in there. But it was more the human drama of an entire life that was too mature for a 12-year-old. My old man trusted me with that. He was like, ‘this kid’s not an idiot. He’ll understand this.’ And because of that, he bred a very sentimental, nostalgic soul in a young kid. Even at age nine and ten I would look back on things as, oh what have we lost. If there was a well in Highlands, you would have found me sitting on it, leaning there, and thinking thoughts. He bred a thinker.

CM: The kid from Highlands, the slacker, found a way to have the life he wanted. Is he still in there or are you all grown up?
Kevin: The kid in me is still there, and that’s a good thing. The personal journey so far, I’ve absolutely loved it. I do feel like I’ve grown as a human being, I’ve grown as an artist, and I’ve retained just the right amount of childishness, the forever 16 nature of my work, I mean look, I dress like a 12-year-old still. I’ve been able to keep that alive while still developing as a human being as you should in order to relate to people in the world. If I were some raging man-child I would not be married for more than 20 years at this point. So clearly, I’ve been able to mature as needed and stay completely immature for the work, as necessary.

Listen to the uncut, unedited, and unfiltered audio.
 

“Stuff” Kevin Has Done

With 39 Producer credits, 66 Acting credits, 38 Writing credits, 30 Director credits and the list goes on, there is too much “stuff” to list!

Here are the highlights!

Awards: Kevin Smith Directors Award given out by the Monmouth Film Festival; 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award from Atlantic City Cinefest; 1994 Cannes Film Festival for Clerks: winner, Foreign Film Award of the Youth and Mercedes-Benz Award; Edinburgh International Film Festival for Clerks 2: winner, Audience Award; Empire Awards: Winner 2005 Independent Spirit Award; MTV Movie + TV Awards for Clerks 2: winner, Dirtiest Mouth Moment…and the list goes on and on with many more.

1994: Clerks (Writer, Director, Producer, and Silent Bob)
1995: Mallrats (Writer, Director, Silent Bob)
1997: Chasing Amy (Writer, Director, Silent Bob)
1997: Good Will Hunting (Co-Executive Producer)
1999: Dogma (Writer, Director, Silent Bob)
2000: Vulgar (Executive Producer)
2004: Jersey Girl (Writer, Director)
2005–2009: Degrassi: The Next Generation (TV Series)
2006: Clerks 2 (Writer, Director, Executive Producer, and Silent Bob)
2012–2018: Comic Book Men (TV Series; Executive Producer)
2013: Jay and Silent Bob’s Super Groovy Cartoon Movie
2016: Yoga Hosers (Writer, Director, The Bratzis)
2017–2018: Supergirl (TV Series; Director 4 episodes)
2019: Jay and Silent Bob Reboot (Writer, Director, Silent Bob)
2020: The Simpsons (TV Series; Kevin Smith character)
2020: (Pre-production) Masters of the Universe: Revelation (TV Mini-Series; Executive Producer)
2020: (Announced) Sam and Twitch (TV Series; Writer, Director, Executive Producer)
2021: (Announced) Clerks 3 (Writer, Director, Producer, and Silent Bob)