Counter Culture

Slacker icon Kevin Smith has returned to the dingy minimum-wage milieu of his first, best movie, Clerks. The characters may be 10 years older, otherwise not a lot has changed. But, as non-fan Donald Clarke discovers, Smith likes it that way

HE first time I ever wrote about Kevin Smith in these pages I was informed that my comments about the New Jerseyan's writing, acting and directing abilities were potentially libellous. Two further drafts were required before the copy was deemed insufficiently horrid to trouble m'learned friends. Keeping in mind that the film in question was Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and that, to succeed in a libel case, a litigant must prove the relevant comments to be not just defamatory, but untrue, you can probably imagine quite how unkind I had been.

But consider the evidence. In 1995 Smith sold his comic book collection and maxed-out every credit card within reach to finance the pleasantly diverting entertainment that was Clerks. Filmed in the very convenience store where the young director worked, the black-and-white comedy, which followed two shop assistants through a very lazy day, was rough and ready, but suggested that its writer-director might have the potential to become the next Richard Linklater.

Sadly, the slew of hopeless films that followed over the next decade roundly dashed such hopes. Mallrats was a mess. Chasing Amy, in which a lesbian is won over to the other side by the charms of, ahem, Ben Affleck, was borderline offensive. Dogma, which saw Smith treat Christianity as if it were the creation of DC Comics, could only have been more tedious if it had been enacted through the medium of mime.

Frustratingly, it has always appeared that Smith is the most loyal and decent of fellows. The night before we met, I saw him potter before the crowd after an Edinburgh screening of the belated sequel to Clerks and answer questions amiably for a good half hour.

Admirably devoted to his fans, Smith, who spends much of his year performing question-and-answer sessions at universities, left the grand celebratory party after only an hour to return to the cinema and share some thoughts with the audience at the late-night screening.

"Oh, if I had flown halfway round the world this afternoon I would still do that," he tells me. "That is like speed. That is the exciting part."

Really? What about all those nutters waving their scripts at you? That must get pretty tedious.

"You rarely mind people waving scripts at you. Because they have their dream and see me as somebody who has accomplished his own dreams. That's good. It only bothers me when you meet these cats who have a sense of entitlement. 'I am where you were, Kevin.' I think: nobody helped me and I certainly didn't ask anyone for help in that aggressive way. They are trying to do what I did, but take the easiest route to get there."

More annoying again than Smith's apparent decency is the news that Clerks II is by some margin the best film he has made since his debut. Had we met up after 2004's Jersey Girl, a supposed mainstream comedy that got kicked to death by public and critics, then, while considering how to later ridicule the wretched thing in print, I could have had fun offering Kevin faint praise and couched euphemisms. But Clerks II really does deliver. As in the vast majority of Smith's work - the deranged, appalling Dogma is a notable exception - little else happens other than meandering conversations about science fiction, junk food and sex. But here those chats are surprisingly amusing.

Ten years after the non-events depicted in the first film, Dante and Randal (Brian O'Halloran and Jeff Anderson) have been forced to seek employment at a fast-food restaurant following a fire at the convenience store. Dante intends to get married and move to Florida, but, inertia being a key property of the Clerks Universe, we suspect he may end up back where he started.

When people write about Clerks, they tend to dwell as much on its minuscule budget and the guerrilla techniques used in its production as they do on the characters and dialogue. Smith must have feared that by upping the production values slightly he may have sabotaged a certain amount of the appeal. Remember the fiasco that was Blair Witch 2, anyone?

"When we were heading into production we were concerned about losing that charm," he agrees. "Should we intentionally make it look shitty? But that would be disingenuous. I don't think we could have manipulated it that way. Instead, we thought: let's put on display everything we have learned in the last 10 years. We will try to make it look as good as possible. A couple of people have groused that it is not the Clerks they know. But more have liked it. It was good to know there was more to Clerks than shitty camera work. There are real characters here."

As before, Smith, an actor of limited talent, turns up as one half of a duo of drug dealers who lurk outside the heroes' place of work. Jason Mewes, clean again after 10 years fighting heroin addiction, has aged significantly in the interim and his Jay now strikes a slightly sinister aspect. Kevin's appearance has, however, not changed much since he first donned the big coat and ceased speaking to play Silent Bob. Now 36, he looks a little more portly, but he was never thin. He still wears that messy beard. In short, he comes across like the blue-collar New Jersey bloke he was a little over a decade ago. I suspect that from time to time he wonders what might have become of him if he hadn't scraped together the $27,000 to produce Clerks.

"I would probably still be working in that store," he says. "I hope by this stage I would have moved out of my parents' house, though. But that was a really cool job. I was paid five bucks an hour under the table, which would have been, like, seven or eight with tax. I wasn't good at many things, but I was good at working that deli counter. I reckon that I might eventually have gotten round to buying the store like the guys in the film do."

Smith, an icon of the slacker anti-movement, maintains that, though he is of course delighted to be a movie director, he might have been happy to continue under-achieving. One of the estimable messages of Clerks II is that, contrary to what your mum and dad may tell you, it is possible to find contentment doing a crappy job (so long as it allows you the time to talk about Star Wars all day).

"Yeah. Look, not everyone wants to do something with their life," he says. "My old man worked at the post office from the time he was 29 until he was 60. It was not a very prestigious position - it was one step from jockeying the register at a convenience store. But he didn't give a fuck about work. It was just a means to an end. His real ambition was raising kids and having a family. The world is full of people like that. Somebody has to flip a burger."

Well, maybe. I am not quite sure Kevin would have been all that happy perpetually stacking cat food and reordering Asian Babes. It takes a certain degree of drive and energy to force your way into the film business.

It also requires an ability to sense fluxes in the zeitgeist. Clerks was not particularly original in its sensibility - duologues about popular culture had appeared in Reservoir Dogs; Linklater's Slacker had already gone amongst happy under-achievers - but it successfully pressed together a lot of current moods and concerns. Still, for such a little film to succeed at the Sundance Film Festival and to then achieve distribution from Harvey Weinstein's Miramax was remarkable.

"It was like a multi-tiered moment," he says, still sounding slightly astonished. "By the time we went to Sundance every distributor had passed, including Miramax. The best thing we could imagine was just getting to Sundance at all. Then Harvey swooped in at the last screening on Friday night. The biggest thing for me was I was going to be able to pay off the flick. Then we had this shocking success at this big festival in New York. We got into Cannes and won a few awards there. They showed it at that second Woodstock Festival and it became a hit.

"Every step of the way I kept thinking: have I pulled off this Angel Heart deal with Satan where part of the deal was I didn't know I had made it?"

Hollywood is full of directors who have had staplers and other units of office equipment removed from their foreheads following disagreements with Harvey Weinstein. It is therefore no small achievement that Kevin has managed to remain on such good terms with the fearsome producer. This may, perhaps, have something to do with the director's admirable lack of ego.

"What it ultimately comes down to is that he doesn't quite get what we do, but he knows there is an audience for it," Smith explains. "Everything we have done together up to and including Jersey Girl and now Clerks II has turned a tidy little profit. If you can turn somebody a profit you will work forever."

I had read that Harvey is always trying to get Smith to expand his directorial horizons. For some time, the producer urged his protege - who spent years writing a doomed Superman sequel - to helm a big-screen version of the ancient radio series The Green Hornet. It is said that Smith, echoing comments once excised from this writer's copy, retorted that he was "just not that talented".

"I meant that in the sense that pulling off that sort of thing takes a certain kind of film-maker. Brian Singer and Tim Burton are wired the right way. I am not wired the right way. So, yeah, I told them I am not that talented. Where does it say that making The Green Hornet helps you grow as a film-maker? I just like to do what I do."

We are coming full circle here. He is beginning to sound like Dante and Randal, happy to remain in their safe, unchallenging world, content to avoid taking on any great challenges.

"There is some truth in that," he laughs. "There is nothing wrong with knowing your limitations. There is nothing wrong with knowing your station in life. It is amazing that I am where I am today, that I have some sort of reputation in the history of indie cinema. That's enough."

Smith has certainly travelled some distance since those days in the convenience store. His films may not be to everyone's taste, but the director has managed to amass a fanatical band of followers - several in the Edinburgh crowd were wearing the ice hockey shirts preferred by their favourite director - and he has never had any trouble raising the (admittedly modest) budgets for his films. In 1999 he married Jennifer Schwalbach, a journalist who had come to interview him for USA Today, and the couple now have a daughter. Both Jennifer and young Harley have roles in Clerks II.

"Personally, in terms of the romantic side of life, I am very settled. I don't have a roving eye. I don't try and fuck everything that moves. Hey, I don't try and fuck anything that moves. I love the kid. It's wonderful. At the same time I find it hard to cope with the fact that this seven-year-old is now the irresponsible one, not me. But, you know, I still feel like that guy working the cash register. It's like my mind is stuck in that corridor you are in from 16 to 21 where life is all about possibilities."

Grrr! What a nice, reasonable man. If Rob Schneider turns out to be similarly well-balanced, I may just have to cast away my laptop and retire to the Hebrides.