EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Kevin Smith “Zack and Miri Make a Porno”

To vocal critics and ardent fans, Kevin Smith is a virtuoso of filth. His work is loathed and loved for that reason, but it’s hard not to admire his sacking of Sundance with a low-budget, black-and-white Trojan Horse. Note the simplicity of the title: Clerks. Just the art-house anorexia of it. To the unhappy ticket buyers, it must be maddening to know he’s still working. But for lovers of filth in the best sense of the word, it was a scintillating debut, a triumphant middle finger from the Jersey gutters.

Somewhere between teasing necrophiliacs, redefining the phrase ‘chinese fingertrap,’ coining the Buddy Christ, and ruining chocolate pretzels for everybody, Smith revealed some greater ambitions beyond a more highly cultivated gross-out. Unfortunately at this stage of his career, he had to carry out most of his experiments in front of an audience.

Smith’s latest film Zack and Miri Make a Porno, starring Seth Rogen (read interview here) and Elizabeth Banks (read interview here) arrives in the midst of a curious moment for him, a collision of past (street fights with the MPAA, the PTA protesting his work, promising advance buzz) and present (love stories, new actors, the world beyond New Jersey…).

Kevin Smith smoked and chatted with Screencrave about what all the controversy means to him, and where he’s going next.

In what may be a piece of marketing kismet, the current economic downturn dovetails very nicely with the theme of Smith’s latest work: extreme solutions to extreme debt.

“Lemme tell ya, I was so excited when the economy went in the toilet! Everyone else is so despondent and I’m like, ‘this makes my movie plausible!” He cracks, menthol smoke jetting from the side of his mouth. Joking aside, he acknowledges the last thing he needs is more negativity from the MPAA, self-righteous watchdog groups, and Monday Night Football.

Monday Night Football?

“I knew they were pulling together an ad for it. They sent me a trailer last week that just said Zack and Miri because Monday Night Football won’t let it say ‘Make a Porno,’ Why would you ever want to say ‘porno’ during Monday Night Football when you could be saying ‘Viagra’ or ‘erectile dysfunction’ instead? Or beer ads or any number of things that are necessarily family friendly, but whatever.” Smith dryly observes. For the record, Zack and Miri has no cross-promotional deals with alcoholic beverages or any brand of male-enhancement products.

“I knew there was gonna be an ad that didn’t say ‘Zack and Miri Make a Porno’ based on wanting to have an ad on Monday Night Football. I wasn’t aware that it ran during Saturday Night Live. I can’t imagine that Saturday Night Live was like ‘you can’t say porno.’ I mean, they say schweddy balls on the show! They’ve said a lot of things, so I don’t know if that’s a mishap or whatever. But someone told me about [the SNL spot] today and I was like ‘you’re fucking kidding me!’ But I don’t think it’s NBC, and I can’t imagine it’s the Weinstein Company trying to hide the title because it’s fuckin’ out there at this point.” Smith has lived with this argument since the script was first being passed around. He’s well passed being angry, and now he’s just bewildered.

“It’s been strange. I knew going in there were a bunch of people who were going to be turned off by the title, but I was okay with it because those people were never going to go see this movie anyway, no matter what we called it. Even if it was like ‘A Room With a View’ they’re probably still not going once they hear what it’s about. So I felt like even though the title drove some people away it would definitely bring people in who had that sense of humor, who were inclined to find that type of thing funny.” Smith is being modest, and while he’s be the first to point out that his movies have never really set ticket sales on fire, his home video following his behemoth. But he’s more accustomed to the content of his movies being called objectionable, not the merest suggestion of content.

“The MPAA thing, I can’t say I was shocked, but I was a little surprised we had to jump through as many hoops as we did. My argument to them at the appeal screening was ‘you don’t make a movie with ‘porno’ in the title not expecting to come under extra-close scrutiny when it’s time to rate it. As such we made sure that everything we did fit safely within the confines of an R-rated movie, albeit a hard R.” The bar for extreme content has been set pretty high in light of recent releases, such as Seth Rogen’s own Pineapple Express.

“They gave us the NC-17, I tried to work with them, I tried to trim to get to the R, they kicked it back, I trimmed a little more, they kicked it back. At that point I was not comfortable taking it any further, I wanted to take it to the appeals process. At that point, I put everything in the movie that I wanted to have because that’s the last bite of the apple you’re gonna have, and that was the one we were able to flip.

“At that point I was like right on, we won, it looks like it’s gonna work out. I forgot that they then had to rate all our materials after the movie, including the marketing, especially the poster.” The ratings board tends to be tougher on print materials because there’s no way to control who sees them and when.

“Every poster we submitted got kicked back for being too salacious or too risqué. Finally we got to a point where the last poster we submitted, which is the one they’re using up in Canada, the one with actual faces. After that we were like, hands in the air, what to do? And then necessity became the mother of invention and we came up with the stick figures instead. We were like, nothing can be more innocuous than this. There is no way they can accuse us of being salacious with these stick figures.” The argument is that stick figures or not, it’s still a self-explanatory title for a comedy about two unmarried people making a sex tape. Whatever billboard goes up, people are quick to imagine a school bus pulling up next to it.

“If the movie had been called Zack and Miri Fuck Hard, I get it if someone doesn’t want to put that on a billboard. But porno? There’s an objection to a term that’s not even necessarily salacious in and of itself.” Anyone reading this is using the internet, and if you’re even remotely savvy about it you know just how popular porno is. Maybe the word isn’t so bad until you know what it means, what its purpose is, and how it gets made, all questions parents absolutely do not want to answer.

“Which I find ridiculous. I’m a parent, I gotta nine-year-old. And granted I’m a little biased because I’m way more liberal with my kid than maybe most people are. I don’t feel the need to govern my language around the kid. I don’t run up to her and scream ‘cocksucker!’ in her face but if I’m talking about something and ‘fuck’ comes out or ‘shit’ comes out or any other colorful descriptive that I’m known to use comes out, I don’t feel the need to govern that. Because it’s hypocritical. That’s how I make my living, so I’m not going to pretend not to curse in front of my kid. And it actually wound up having this weird adverse effect where the kid doesn’t curse. We’ve never gotten a call from school where it’s like, ‘your daughter said ‘cocksmoker.’ Any comments? Could you reign it in at home?” During his indictments against the uproar over the one little word, Smith has an excellent habit of using words that are even worse.

“[My daughter's] never even said the title of the movie until last week. I was talking to my wife about doing The Tonight Show to promote Zack and Miri. My kid was at the desk in the room, doing her homework right near us and I hear her pipe up with ‘…make a porno.’ And I was like ‘what’d you say?’ And she was like ‘that’s the whole movie right? That’s the title?’ I was like ‘yeah…do you know what porno is?’ and she was like ‘yes, that’s what you do for a living.’ God’s honest truth, that’s the story, and I was like ‘my kid’s clever and stupid at the same time.

“If my kid did come up to me and ask ‘what’s porno?’ in a way that she didn’t quite understand or wanted more description and what not I’d be like, look, a porno doesn’t have Hannah Montana or Zach and Cody in it so why do you give a shit? But she wouldn’t. My kid has no interest in anything but those programs. And we simply go ‘it’s a grown up movie.’ And if she wanted more information? ‘it’s a grown up movie in which grown ups take their clothes off and act real silly.’ She might be curious about that, but I don’t think she’d be heading for the internet like, let’s find some porn. She don’t care. Most kids don’t. I disagree with the argument. Some woman in Boston was saying the drawings were gonna catch a kid’s eye and make him ask about porno. What parent can’t handle that question? If you can’t handle that question I don’t think you’re a very good parent. I’m not a good parent but I can handle that question.” Comparing parenting skills may not be the easiest tack for Smith to take, but he does have a point. Mommy and Daddy can decide when they talk to their kid about porn, but they can’t put it off forever. They can’t pretend it doesn’t exist. A kid changes the ‘a’ in ‘flashlight’ to an ‘e’ typing it into google and suddenly all bets are off.

Before the firestorm Smith was just trying to get a cast together, a process that seems to only get more difficult the more successful he becomes.

“[Elizabeth] Banks came to us not late in the game but probably like second or third cast. Of course it started with Seth. Originally [I wrote Miri] for Rosario Dawson because we just worked with her in Clerks 2 and I loved her a lot. We were gonna start shooting in November and shoot until the holidays, but Seth had just gotten off the promotional tour with Superbad and Knocked Up. And he sent me an email saying I’ve always wanted to work with you, I don’t want to work with you under these conditions where I’m fucking exhausted. All I want to do is lie on my couch, play videogames, get high for three months. Can’t argue with that, sounds like a great life to me!

” Let’s move the shoot to January. So we decided to shoot from January to March. We lost Rosario because in the January corridor she was committed to Eagle Eye. So suddenly we were Miri-less. It left us at ground zero, so what we did was contact all the agencies to find out which actresses would be available from the January-to-March corridor and we got a list of names and whittled that list down to names of actresses who might not slap us when we handed them the script.” All of the shuffling came down to a very critical slip of paper put in front of the right person, star Seth Rogen.

“Elizabeth Banks, alphabetically, was at the top of that list. So I’m talking to Seth at my place about this that and the other thing regarding the movie and I’m like, ‘let’s deal with the Miri thing right now. Here’s a list of six names.’ Before I can even finish pushing it over or finish the sentence, Seth sees her name and says, ‘Elizabeth Banks, man. I love her. She was with us on The Forty Year Old Virgin, she’s really fun to work with. She got really far in the Knocked Up audition. She almost got the lead, I would love to have fake pretend sex with her in this movie.” Rogen’s instincts proved correct

“Best decision I made because, man, she’s a great actress. She’s hands-down the best actress I’ve ever worked with. She just gives so much. She completely feminized that role. In the hands of another actress it might have sounded like two dudes talking to each other. But she actually made Miri a living, breathing woman. And she helped us avoid what I always felt was a major pitfall. You make a movie called Zack Makes a Porno and everyone’s like ‘guys like sex so of course Zack wants to make a porno.’

“You throw Miri in there and suddenly there’s that weird double standard when it comes to sex in this country. And you got the potential for people to be like ‘she agreed to be in a porno? To fuck somebody for money? She’s a whore! She’s a slut!’ You don’t want people turning on your character in the movie and shit like that. Banks was able to completely disarm that. But even when she’s not talking and [camera’s on her] she gives you so much to cut to. She’s always giving you something to play with. I guess now everyone’s gonna be able to put a name to the face. Everyone’s gonna know who Elizabeth Banks is.”

Smith is convinced he nearly missed the boat on Rogen. At the time he started writing the vehicle that would become Zack and Miri, Rogen was a promising supporting player and a veteran of Judd Apatow’s cult-favorite tv shows Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared.

“I was like, I gotta get him in my stuff. I figured he’s playing a co-starring role [in The 40 Year Old Virgin] so if I write him a lead he can become super famous and he’ll owe me forever like Affleck Version Two.

“By the time I finish the script, I started seeing billboards all around town for Knocked Up and he’s front and center on the billboard. I’m like, ohhhh this motherfucker’s famous already. I’m never gonna get this guy now. I wrote him an email anyway saying ‘ look, you obviously need no help with your career, but I wrote you this script with you as the lead. Can you at least give it a read, see if you like it?’ He sent me an email within five minutes that said ‘no bullshit, when I first got to this business, an agent asked me what I wanted to do with my career and I said I wanted to be in a Kevin Smith movie, and that hasn’t changed. Please send me the script.’ So I was like, cha-ching!”

Elizabeth Banks (in our previous interview) said Rogen’s broad appeal, particularly with women, is owed to his low-key sense of humor. Women want to be with Seth Rogen and, according to Smith, men also want to be Seth Rogen.

“He reminded me of Bill Murray. When I saw Stripes I wanted to be John Winger. When I saw Ghostbusters I wanted to be Peter Venkman. When I saw The 40 Year Old Virgin, and even though I’m doing okay in life, I was like ‘I wanna be Cal,’ this dude is so convincing and so authentic it makes me want to be the character he plays.” Smith believes in Rogen enough to take his casting advice, notable for a director who often keeps to a rotation of friends. Rogen zeroed in on Banks, landed Craig Robinson an audition, and brought about the casting of Superman himself.

“We were left without a Bobby Long and we were trying to figure out who could fill that role.” The role in question being Miri’s handsome high school crush. A crush who turns out to be gay and in love with a gay porn star.

“Me and Seth were just sitting around talking about it. I was like, he should be salt of the earth, All-American, Superman type. He goes ‘Brandon Routh!’ and I’m like YES. Seth says ‘we should just ask Brandon Routh,’ because in Seth’s world you just ask people. The worst they can do is say no. Elizabeth is in the room, she’s like ‘you guys talking about Superman?’ Her agent represents him, so it happened that easily. We got him a script, he read it and liked it and came out.” The irony isn’t lost on Smith, who was hired to write a reboot of the Superman franchise. The assignment ultimately imploded thanks to a series of bizarre meetings with Hollywood producer Jon Peters. The story became the centerpiece of Smith’s first college speaking tour.

“[Brandon] did a great job because it’s a thankless role on the page. He’s literally the straight man, even though he’s not straight in the movie, just offering setups for everyone to knock out of the park. He came in and found a way to play it that is actually charming and funny. He plays it as this henpecked shy husband and I thought he did a great job. People were like ‘can he be funny?’ I think he can be funny.

“There was a point where I said to him ‘don’t you have some kind of a morals clause in your contract?’ He’s like ‘dude this ain’t 1941. As long as I don’t play another superhero Warner Brothers doesn’t give a shit.’ I’m like right on, then kiss that dude NOW.”

Smith is looking to finally shoot Red State (“Hopefully we can start it March-April, if we can find the cash.”) and perhaps the sci-fi comedy he’s talked about for years, the one that the Hollywood Reporter recently inflamed to a full-on scoop.

“I was doing an interview with the Hollywood Reporter and I was asked what I was doing in the future. I’d talked about doing a space comedy for years, I just reiterated it. I was like ‘I’m gonna do Red State next and then afterwards, down the road I want to get to the space comedy. Suddenly it became ‘Kevin Smith announces…’ But I didn’t announce shit! I feel a little misleading because it’s not like we’re gearing up for it. It’s just something we’re heading towards.”

How soon either project makes it to the screen depends on Zack and Miri. A halloween weekend opening has proved rough so far, but the film is a crowd pleaser and word of mouth has yet to kick in. And after multiple screenings of High School Musical 3 there are legions of parents that probably need a dose of what Smith is dishing out come friday night.

Kirk Cameron’s recent Christian-targeted love story Fireproof benefited from a babysitting drive organized by the movie’s PR team. Perhaps Zack and Miri could benefit from the same?

“If this movie doesn’t work, I’m turning to porn, man. And nobody wants to see my fat ass on the screen. I hope this movie works.”

Zack and Miri Make a Porno is in theatres now.