A moment with ... Kevin Smith, film director

Thursday, March 25, 2004

By SEAN AXMAKER
SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER

Jersey boy Kevin Smith has come a long way from his $27,000 debut, the down-and-dirty 1994 slacker comedy "Clerks" that he financed by selling his comic book collection. Ten years and five features later, he's a small cottage industry unto himself, a husband and a father, and those experiences inspired his latest movie, "Jersey Girl."

When he sat down to talk about his film on a recent Seattle visit, he was relaxed, easygoing, and modest: still the Jersey kid made good at heart.


	Smith

The casting of Jennifer Lopez in a small role opposite Ben Affleck has become a publicity nightmare in the wake of "Gigli" and the subsequent breakup. I have the benefit of knowing what the movie is, that it's not a story of those two characters. The trouble is convincing the rest of the world that it's not that movie, that it isn't "Gigli 2." But in one way, "Gigli" wound up helping us, in as much as it clearly lowered the bar.

How autobiographical is the conflict that Ben Affleck's character has between career and fatherhood? It's not as much as it is in the movie, to say the least. I came around pretty quickly.

It was recently announced that your next film is a big budget action movie based on comic book hero the Green Hornet. It should be fun. I've been a longtime comic book reader and I've written for DC and Marvel Comics. This a chance to put one up on the big screen. To some degree, it's also a little scary because it's well out of my realm of experience.

You've had complete control over your previous films. What kind of compromises do you face making such a high profile project? I'm going in knowing that I'm making a mainstream film. Clearly I wasn't hired because I'm a fantastic visual stylist. I was hired to flesh it out, make it interesting dialogue-wise and character-wise. So that's what I bring to the table. I just want to make a really good comic book movie.

Having courted your own controversy on religion and "Dogma," what's your take on the controversy over "The Passion of the Christ"? To me it's not really controversial. Controversy is when you're receiving 300,000 pieces of hate mail or three separate death threats, like we did on "Dogma." I saw the cover story on Entertainment Weekly which said "Can Mel Gibson survive 'The Passion'?" Yeah, if he can get out of the way of that mountain of money that may crush him. Now that he's made $200 million in 18 days, I think he'll survive just fine.

Sean Axmaker is a movie reviewer and free-lance film writer based in Seattle. He can be reached via e-mail at seanax@hotmail.com.