Movie poster courtesy of The Weinstein Company

Kevin Smith (alter ego Silent Bob), the writer, director and occasionally an actor in cult classics like Clerks, Chasing Amy, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and Dogma among others, recently sat down for a press interview about his latest movie, Zack and Miri Make a Porno. Zack and Miri, which opens in Theaters this Friday, October 31, follows Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miriam (Elizabeth Banks) as hard times force two longtime friends into the porn industry to pay the bills.

Speaking (at least seemingly) spontaneously, Smith comes across as nonchalant and profane. Frequently, however, he strikes a peculiar balance of poop-jokes and eloquence that makes you question the spontaneity of his responses and reveals his talents as a writer.

Q: Were there any directors or films that influenced you growing up?

A: When I was kid, I didn’t think about filmmaking. It seemed like a Hollywood job and I didn’t live in Hollywood and didn’t know anyone who did. It wasn’t until my 21st birthday with Slacker that I got opened up to the world of film. Hal Hartley, early Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese–that’s what influenced me. Seeing Slacker for the first time. I loved the movies, I loved the John Hughes, John Landis. The whole Hughes catalog. Richard Linklater’s Slacker.

Q: Obviously you have always been a talented writer of dialogue, how has the directing and look of your movies changed?

A: I started putting some thought into it. I’m not a born filmmaker. I don’t live, breathe, and eat film like a Scorsese. I never thought about the film so much. I set up a camera and let a bunch of things happen in front of the camera without a lot of camera work. Even with a million bucks in ‘93 it still would’ve looked the exact same. Every review would say ‘well it looks like shit, but there characters are engaging!’ And I just thought, “as long as people laugh…”

It was only on Clerks 2 that I started trying to lift the visuals to match what was being said. Dave Klein, my director of photography [for the original Clerks], came back for Clerks 2. I’d been working the big name DPs but since Clerks [2] was so low budget and since it was the sequel to Clerks it made me feel like I could use Dave again. We both brought whatever we learned elsewhere, so it’s the first one I look at and think, “Ooooh. That’s got a interesting look.” And when we went into Zack and Miri we were like, “lets keep the camera moving,” so there’s a lot of dolly work, a lot of movement.

Q: How did growing up in New Jersey affect your film making?

A: The area certainly affected the dialogue I write. It’s peppered with a lot of vulgarity. That’s just my circle of friends. That’s how we all speak. I imagine growing up any place else wouldn’t be that different. I can’t say that the great state of New Jersey influenced that. But the people from New Jersey certainly did. Growing up in the shadow of New York, New Jersey is the butt of a lot of jokes. You have to prove yourself to people, that you’re worthy of viewing, applause. Growing up in Jersey is like growing up fat: you just try harder. You learn to eat pussy really well. Cinematically speaking, I’m trying to prove that I know how to eat pussy really well.

Q: Do you have any plans for filming anything in New Jersey?

A: Not on the horizon, no. Nothing in the works. I feel like Clerks 2 book-ended my work in Jersey - I felt like it was time to step out of Jersey and Redbank. But we still have an office and a comic book store, but there’s nothing in terms of shooting slated for Jersey in the future.

Q: Even though Zack and Miri Make a Porno doesn’t take place in Jersey, you still had it set in an off-the-beaten-path city, Pittsburgh - were you doing that on purpose?

A: It’s the only city I’ve ever been to in the US where you can be on the main drag and be absolutely by yourself. I wanted to set the story in one of the last places you’d ever imagine anyone shooting porn. That felt like Pittsburgh. Even shooting in the city itself was a bit too cosmopolitan. So we decided on Monroeville, the same place where Dawn of the Dead was shot. But I guess it just comes down to me being drawn to smaller towns; I don’t shoot the big city story.

Q: How much of Zack and Miri Make a Porno is autobiographical?

A: If you scrape away the porn and the overt trappings of the story in terms of a bunch of people getting together to make a porn, then it is kind of the story of how we made Clerks…to some degree. There just happens to be a lot of dicks and tits. The experience of Clerks definitely informed the movie. But have I ever made a homemade porn? No one needs to see me fucking. The closest I ever got was taking a dickshot with an iPhone and sending it to my wife when I was on the road. But me and porn? Not a good mix. I like to watch, not make or be involved.

Q: How do you think the romanticized idea of porn that you present in Zack and Miri is going to affect college kids?

A: I don’t think it will change people’s ideas of porn.

Q: How was working with the different styles of Seth Rogen, Elizabeth Banks, etc…

A: I think they really combined rather well. At the end of the day, they’re all consummate professionals. They all honor the script. They don’t get there and go, “we don’t need this anymore.”

And Seth is really good at producing improvised material that is organic to the film or set. The problem with most actors is that 9.5 times out of 10, none of that material is good for the story. It’s good for the deleted section on the DVD but it doesn’t work with the story. Seth is great at adding material that is absolutely usable. It sounds like it’s coming out the character’s mouth, not Seth’s mouth. In this film, it always sounded like it was coming out of Zack as opposed to Seth Rogen. The lines are germane to the discussion–what he says adds to the scene. He adds stuff that propels a story forwarding, not executing, elevating. He’s not like–look at me!–he’s actually thinking about the story and the other actors in the scene. I love a guy like that around.

Q: How was working with Craig Robinson?

A: Craig was fantastic. He underplayed that part with perfection. I was wondering why Craig doesn’t just go for it. But Craig’s brilliance emerged in the editing room; he totally stood out from everyone else. And he really did the script justice. He kind of steals the movie in many places.

Q: What was it like getting Jason Mewes to do full frontal nudity?

A: I thought Mewes would say yes immediately. He shows his cock quite readily to anyone. I’ve known him for 18 years and probably seen his dick more than my own. When I told him, “you come out of the room and you should be completely naked,” he balked. He was worried about his wife and all that, and then the weird thing is when he finally agrees to do it he comes out of the room and, I’m used to seeing his dick, but it looked like he was wearing Wahlberg’s prosthetic from boogie nights. Then when Affleck came and saw the film he said it looked like Mewes is one pump away from total liftoff, you know, looks engorged. Affleck said he’s seen others that were ‘all potato no meat’ but Mewes had kind of an impressive cock. Mewes responded, “you tell fucking Ben that’s me on the way up and him on the way down.”

Q: Where did you come up with the idea for the character of Bubbles?

A: Bubbles just seemed funny to me. The idea that someone could do that. I mean, I’ve heard of someone shooting ping-pong balls, but I’ve never seen anyone do the bubbles thing. At some point every woman I’ve ever dated is like, “I can blow air out of my vag” and I was like, “wow, classy.” So I tried to work that in there.

Traci Lords, who plays Bubbles, worked in porn from 16-18 years old or 15-17. Her whole life was defined by porn because she was underage and got outed in a big trial and whatnot. Going in, you think you get the hot steamy vixen she was as a kid. But now she’s 38 or 39, she’s got a kid.

When she got out of porn, she started studying acting. She actually became a real serious method actor. At first I was like, “OK, I know you’re serious about acting, but in this scene, you’re blowing bubbles out of your vagina.” I felt like I gave her very little to do.

She’s great, great at what she did. She’s a lot more serious about acting than this movie would lead you to believe. But for a 37-year-old man, it was real cool to be shooting with her. She had an issue with shooting a movie that had porn in the title. She was worried about being connected to anything. She was like, “even though people identify me with this, I’ve been running from this so maybe I should just do it” and I was like, “yeah, do it and do it in my film!”

Q: Zack and Miri was originally NC-17, wasn’t it?

A: Initially, the MPAA gave Zack and Miri a NC-17 rating and initially we did try to make the cuts to bring it to an R, but they kept kicking it back to NC-17. So at a certain point I just said, “look I’m not comfortable cutting into it anymore.” So I took it to an Appeal.

An appeal at the MPAA lets you have one last final bite of the apple, so to speak. We put everything we wanted in the movie. Then it gets taken away from MPAA and goes to an appeals board that’s made up of 50% MPAA people and 50% NATO people (National Alliance of Theater Owners). Then I get 15 minutes to make a case for why the film should be R and Joan Graves, who’s the head of the MPAA, gets 15 minutes to say why it should be NC-17. After 10 minutes rebuttals, which sounds dirty but isn’t, they either uphold NC-17 or turn it over to an R. I speak to Joan regularly. She believes in what she does, and I do in what I do. But this time I wasn’t feeling the flip; I thought we were going to get stuck with an NC-17. This was the first flick where they could point to visuals and be like, “dude’s face is getting shit on! You cannot include that in an R movie.” So I don’t think I’ve done it, I don’t think I’ve flipped it. And I’m getting ready to be like, “let’s cut a deal like Law & Order - I will cut out the thrusting for the shit shot.” Then a woman came out and said, “They overturned it. It’s an R.”

Bye Joan, see you next time.

On the DVD, they’re’ll be some deleted scenes. But it’s just the bad shit that wasn’t as good as everything else in the movie because we didn’t have to cut anything.

Q: You appeared in a documentary, This Film is Not Yet Rated. Do think you feel any backlash for that in terms of them doing the rating for this movie?

A: I don’t know. Kirby’s documentary was before the Clerks 2 rating. It received an R on the first submission. That’s why I thought it wouldn’t be as hard because of that whole donkey show sequence. I guess because porn appears in the title they looked closer than the last one. Even though we flipped it, even though we won that appeal, they messed with us for the next two, three, four, five months. For our series of trailers, they kept saying ‘cut this down.’ You can’t do anything without their approval. So they lost that little battle, but more than made up for it in terms of trailers and posters. One of the original posters is the poster in Canada. It’s Seth and Liz at the very bottom and the tops of their heads over respective crotches. Canada said, “We don’t have a film board, we don’t give a shit.” They rate things province by province, there. Apparently we need to go with the most innocuous image possible, here, if we want to get them to approve it. So we went with more words than pictures. I don’t know how well it will work. We only arrived there by virtue of the fact that they said no to everything else.

Q: What’s the big deal with the word porno?

A: I knew when we titled it “porno,” it was going to turn off some people. But the people who were going to get turned off by the title weren’t gonna go see it anyway once we got over the hurdle with the MPAA. But then in the last month, Philadelphia wouldn’t let a billboard have the word ‘porno’ on it. The Dodgers got a shitton of complaint calls for an ad. How come you can’t sell the word ‘porno’ but you’re allowed to say ‘erectile dysfunction,’ or beer ads, but porno is the end all and be all? I even picked the cutest word! It’s not Zack and Miri Make a Fuck Tape, or Zack and Miri Make a Stag Flick, or even Zack and Miri Make a Porn. It’s got that O on the end that makes it less offensive. When’s the last time you saw a porno with the word porno in the title? At the end of a TV spot it clearly says rated R so I don’t know what the big deal is. People are confusing.

Q: What are you going to do now?

A: Hopefully, I’m going to do a film called Red State, a kind of political horror movie. But most days I don’t feel like a filmmaker. I feel like a guy who just happens to direct the stuff that he writes. So I want to switch genres altogether, 180 degrees away from Zack and Miri and from every other movie. If I can pull it off, I’ll feel like a filmmaker if not, well, I’ll just be a dick and fart joke guy.

You can check out the Zack & Miri Make a Porno trailer.