Kevin Smith always said he cast himself as Silent Bob because he couldn’t remember lines. In his own films, he got to mug in front of the camera and say one profound sentence at the end. Now he’s taking a break from writing and directing to do some acting gigs, including the upcoming Live Free or Die Hard and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
But first, in Catch and Release, Smith plays Sam, a friend of Gray Wheeler (Jennifer Garner)’s deceased fiance. He mostly keeps things light as Gray settles her fiance’s affairs, but he gets to break down once too. Writer/director Susannah Grant, as well as all his co-stars, claim Smith just threw out the script and riffed. After all, speaking off the cuff is what he does best.
Hollywood.com: Do you guys ever hang out as couples?
Kevin Smith: Not really. I hang out with Ben every once in a blue f*ckin’ moon. I mean, I rarely see Jen. I saw her of course when we were making the movie. After the flick, I ran into her at a few different functions but no. It’s never like lunch. Although they did, to be fair, she threw a dinner for Ben because he hit the one year mark of not smoking and we were supposed to go over and at the last minute I pulled out because I wasn’t feeling well.
HW: You’re smoking right now. Wouldn’t you be a terrible influence on Ben?
KS: You know, you can be one person around your boys and then you’re completely different around your wife. That’s equally true for Ben so he tends to be on very good behavior around Jen.
HW: If you did hang out, both of your wives are Jennifer. Who would be Jen 1 and Jen 2?
KS: Well, wouldn’t Garner have to be Jen 1? The most well-known Jen, unfortunately. But in my heart, my Jen will always be Jen 1.
HW: You eat waffles and cookies in this movie. Did you totally fall off Atkins for this role?
KS: No, any time I ate a waffle, like at one point I’m eating a waffle with chicken in it, if you notice, the chicken’s sticking out further than the waffle. So right before we’d roll, I’d take a bite of the waffle and spit it out and then just put the chicken in there. So I was trying to maintain Atkins when I was doing it. Atkins is such a losing battle. I’m still not convinced it’s good for you. It’s way too much cholesterol. You’re eating so much meat and cheese and sh*t. But yeah, I didn’t imbibe nearly as much as it seemed like I did, but when we wrapped… It’s weird, I don’t eat a lot on the set but in my downtime, how I f*ckin’ recreate is to crash in front of the TV with food. There was a food store right across the street from the hotel and they made this awesome chocolate chip cookie so I’d get a gallon of milk and two things of these cookies and that’s how I’d spend my evening. Good memories though.
HW: You’ve complained about the film’s T-shirts, but you also sport some sharp suits. How did you like those?
KS: That was interesting. I haven’t worn a suit in a long time. I think maybe I wore one to my dad’s funeral. That was about it. So I haven’t been in a suit since then and I just look terrible in suits. Some guys, they make them look dapper. Me, I just look bad. So I look at the opening scene in the movie and I’m like there’s a dude that’s just not meant for suits. The other one though, later on, towards the end of the movie, I’m wearing a suit jacket, that I can get little more because it’s like that with either jeans or shorts which is like a little more cas. But the suit, when you see me in a suit, I just look terrible. I just have a terrible body for suits. And for most clothes.
HW: What occasions would you dress up for?
KS: I’ll probably be wearing this at the Catch and Release premiere. At my wedding, which was decidedly small, I wore shorts and at that point I was wearing hoodies. I don’t know, it precludes us from going to things. My wife gets real up tight about it. She’s like, “If you’d put on a suit we can go places.” But any time we get invited somewhere, I’m like, “What’s it say? Does it say casual or dress?” And she’s like, “Dress.” I’m like, “Well, we’re not going.” So very little at this point in my life. Even I regretted wearing a suit to my father’s funeral because I think my father would have appreciated more if I had just gone the way I always go, comfortable. So nothing, I don’t think I’d dress up for anything. Even if like one day they were like, “Look, you can go to the Oscars,” I’d be hard pressed to wear a f*cking tux. In Cannes, I wore shorts with a tux jacket.
HW: You joke that you’re just playing yourself, but how do you feel about this idea of Kevin Smith as a character in films?
KS: I feel good about it because I can do that. I always feel good about the things that I can accomplish with very little effort.
HW: But having yourself as this fictional thing?
KS: A fictional version of me, yeah, it is kind of strange. I don’t know, but I kind of dig it because it’s easy but every once in a while, if I say to my Jen, “Well, I’m just playing me,” she’s like, “That’s not even you. I know who you are and that’s not you.” But it’s as close to the public me as I guess there is, in her comprehension but to me it’s all the same thing.
HW: Did you ever go so blue with an improv that they couldn’t use it?
KS: No. That was the thing. You knew going in that it was PG-13 and you knew you wouldn’t get away with cursing so I kind of had to tailor it to not be that guy, the guy I get to be in my movies. The good thing I had going for me is I knew in a few months I could f*ckin’ make a really dirty movie so I cleaned up for Catch and Release and got dirty again with Clerks II. But to be fair, it’s her script. I know they’re like, “Oh, he made up all his dialogue.” Basically, I just took what was there and coloquialized it. That’s it. Just kind of made it seem a little more natural coming from me so that it fit the character a little bit more.
HW: For your emotional scene, did you get any crying lessons from Affleck?
KS: No, not like him sitting me down and dropping a clinic on me but I’ve been on enough sets where Affleck cried, whether intentionally or unintentionally, that I did walk away with something. But Affleck’s good at it. Affleck will get there emotionally. He’ll go to some dark place and find a memory and it’ll make him cry. Me, I was like, “Um, make sure they got one of those menthol blowers on the set. Just blow menthol in my eyes and that’ll make me tear up and it’ll be good.” So I can’t be in the middle of a take uncut and just cry on cue. They have to cut, somebody blows shit in my eyes and I’m like, oh, uh.
HW: So you say you’re doing a horror movie next. You’ve never talked about horror movies, made references to them or anything before. Where did this come form? Are you a genre fan?
KS: I am. It’s just it never came up. Nobody ever asked. It’s not one of those things that people ask you point blank if you’re a fan of the genre very often, but those are the movies I grew up watching. When we first got cable in our area, that’s what we all wanted to watch. We all wanted to watch Friday the 13th. We all wanted to watch The Hearse. We all wanted to watch those movies because they would play on cable late at night on Friday and Saturday. So I’ve always been a fan of the genre but it’s just I never really had anything to add to the genre. Recently, I felt like I’ve got an idea that I’ve not seen anywhere. I think I might like to try it and it would also be a nice test to see if I could even pull it off.
HW: Would it be totally straight or have some humor in it too?
KS: I mean , there’d be like a touch of levity but not like, Shaun of the Dead to me is a brilliant horror comedy and I wouldn’t want to do that. I couldn’t do it number one and two, I wouldn’t want to try that. But I think even in every horror movie, even in something like The Shining, I don’t know if I’d consider it a flat out horror movie, but there are horrific elements to it. It’s so unsettling in some places that it’s funny. His performance is f*ckin’ so bravado and so twisted and you’re in the safe confines of the theater knowing it’s a fictional story that it’s okay to laugh when this dude is f*ckin’ trying to kill his own wife. So there are moments like that that come from discomfort and levity and moments of levity that come from discomfort or fear of danger but I think that’s as far as I would go in the one that I want to make.
HW: Would it have lots of nudity?
KS: I don’t know, man. I still can’t get my head around the notion of tits for the sake of tits, so I don’t know if I would go that way. But it is kind of a key element to the genre so I don’t know. That’s a hurdle I think I’m going to face sooner or later.
HW: If you do a comedy instead, what would the comedy be?
KS: Just something more along the lines of stuff I always do, relationship picture of some sort. It’s kind of right in keeping with everything that I’ve done. It’s not set in the View Askewniverse but it’s funny and naughty.
HW: You still have stuff to say about that?
KS: Yeah, I’ll always have something to say about relationships because that’s what makes up my life mostly is my relationships so that’s kind of what I tend to write about.
HW: Would you still do that if you do the horror movie?
KS: Yeah, totally, absolutely. If I could be diligent enough or get enough discipline to actually sit down and write them, not side by side but one right after the other, it’d be nice to kind of produce them that way, going into one as soon as we’re done one, go right into the other.
HW: What is your character in TMNT?
KS: I play a short order cook who has a problem in his kitchen with some kind of alien and then one of the turtles, who is not known to be a turtle, shows up to save my diner. But I literally have five lines, most of which are panicky kind of “Don’t kill me, don’t kill me.” That kind of line.
HW: Is there any touch of Kevin Smith?
KS: Just in as much as it’s my voice. That’s it.
HW: So why did it have to be you?
KS: That’s a great question. I’m still trying to figure that out myself but when they called, I was like, “Yeah, I’ll do that in a heartbeat. Why not? The Turtles.”
HW: Have you been blown up or beat up in Die Hard yet?
KS: No, thankfully I’m not one of the dudes that gets shot, shot at, shoots or gets blown up. I’m one of the few actually nobody’s ever chasing me.
HW: When will you be on My Name is Earl?
KS: That’s a good f*ckin’ question. So far not yet but when I spoke to Jason about it, he was just like, “We should totally have you on.” And I’d do it in a heartbeat. But so far it hasn’t materialized.
