Kevin Smith On Comic Book Films, His Podcast Empire, And Brodie’s Role In ‘Mallrats 2’

Unlike the character he’s the most famous for playing, Kevin Smith does not come close to being  silent. Ask the filmmaker a ten-word question and he’ll give you a ten-paragraph answer.

In the last few years, the creator of Clerks has become as well-known for his podcast empire — SModcast Internet Radio — as he is for his movies, lending his voice to more weekly podcasts than you probably even keep up with.

He’s taken a break from his exhausting podcast duties for a week, travelling across Australia with his old friend Jason Mewes to host Q&A sessions with Australian audiences, and record live episodes of Jay and Silent Bob Get Old. On Monday he’s in Sydney for the GRAPHIC Festival, for a discussion at the Opera House called Kevin Smith’s Superhero Multiverse.

I tried to squeeze a few questions amongst his answers on the phone this week.

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JUNKEE: Your two main jobs in 2015 seem to be making moves about whatever the fuck you want, and travelling around the world talking about whatever the fuck you want. Which of these jobs do you prefer?

Kevin Smith: They’re both kind of sweet. I still kinda look at everyone else’s job like, ‘Oh man I wish I was that cat’ or, ‘Oh man I wish I had that’, and every once in a while I realise that this is all I ever wanted. The lazy guy in me loves the idea of being paid to be yourself and do whatever you want. There’s no standard, so that’s kinda cool; they don’t judge you against anyone else, they just judge you against your previous work — and the spectre of Clerks looms large, but not so large that I can’t accomplish other things and do what I want … I’m not the master of anything (except baiting); I’m jack-of-all trading it.

So I like both — but honestly, they’re co-dependent … I can’t go out and just talk about being me unless [I] have an igniter, a sexy conversation starter. I’m not so foolish as to think that I’m the interesting person; the job is interesting, the job gives you lots to talk about. I have to do the movies in order to go out and just talk about being me. They’re kinda one and the same at this point.

The main trait of your back-catalogue of movies is that they’re comedies – but more often than not I see you on panels about comic books. Did you ever think that it would make more sense for you to be on panels about comedy instead?

It’s weird; whenever someone invites me to a comedy fest, I shy away from it. I always held comedians in the highest regard, an artform in and of itself. I just go out and answer questions … So when they say, “Hey, come and talk about comics”, it feels more comfortable — even though technically I’m not a comic book person.

I love comic books and I’ve gotten a chance to write comic books but I can’t draw ‘em for shit, and it’s not like I know any history to the degree that a lot of other people might. But I was talking about them early on, from the jump. I think that’s what bought me credibility two decades in: from Mallrats forward I was the guy going, “Yeah! Comic books, comic books!”

… When I had my chance, after Clerks happened and I was working on Mallrats, I just put my name forward into the world of comic books and I wound up writing Daredevil. Then I got to write Green Arrow, and suddenly I had legitimacy, because the Brodie character in Mallrats [played by Jason Lee] talked about comic books a bunch. I was there going, “Yeah man, comics are a viable American artform” back when people were still like, “This is kids’ shit!” Now, it’s a multi-billion dollar industry.

It’s not like I’m an industry giant or something, but I get to stand shoulder–to-shoulder with Stan Lee some days, and that’s kinda sweet — to go from fan to commentator.

Your movies pioneered two things that are now considered the norm for a comic book movie: you were one of the first to have all your movies exist in a shared universe.

Well, John Hughes was the first one [who did that] that I really noticed. He would talk about Shermer, Illinois in a couple of those movies, and I was like, “Oh my god, they’re all set in the same place!”. John Landis had a touch of it every once in a while, too; you would see the two dudes from Trading Places pop up in a quick cameo in Coming to America. Shit like that always did it for me.

But I was influenced by the world of comic books mostly, where Batman can pop up in Superman’s title and Spider-Man can pop up in Thor’s title. When I had a chance to do the movies, it just made sense to link ‘em all …. just to be like, “Yeah, they all take place in the same world, and they know each other and stuff!” So years later I’m like, “Who knew that you could make billions of dollars if you do that correctly, with the right characters?”

Those Marvel movies, interconnected the way they are, I know some people are like, “It’s insidious! It’s a giant machine with commercials within the movies for the next movie!” — but I was raised on that shit. You couldn’t read a comic book without getting hyped for another comic book you were supposed to be reading in conjunction. It’s nice to see it working cinematically, I love it — it doesn’t call to me in terms of making [those films], but I just wanna watch it all.

It’s a great time to be a comic book fan, because they’re translating some of that bigger stuff over, stuff I grew up reading. I’m not even a big fan of Vision and the Scarlet Witch, but when I saw those two together in the recent Avengers I was like, “I have that mini-series! My entire childhood is coming to life!”.

The other comic book movie trope you pioneered is the Stan Lee cameo.

Go figure, man … I used to think Affleck was the biggest gun we’ve ever had, but now I think it’s Stan Lee. Pound for pound at the box office, Stan Lee has been in more successful movies — and if you look at his box office track record, way at the bottom of the graph would be Mallrats, the least-grossing Stan Lee movie of all time. But we were there first!

I’ll tell you, for twenty years my man has been going, like, “You gotta put me in another movie”. I was like, “Boy, Stan, what more can we do?”. Twenty years later, he’s probably the guy that’s getting Mallrats 2 financed for me! He’s been asking me for years to do something, so finally I was happy to tell him, “Stan, we’re doing something”, he goes “what is it?”. I was like, “Mallrats 2, you get to play yourself again”.

He goes, “It’s not a stretch, but I’ll do it.”

I grew up with your movies, but recently I hear your voice like two or three times a week because of what a podcast pope you’ve become. If that medium had existed in the early ‘90s, do you think you’d have headed towards that world without first making movies?

Absolutely. If podcasts had existed back then, I would’ve seen Richard Linklater’s Slacker and then gone home and recorded a thousand podcasts about it — but I never would’ve thought to make a movie. This is the medium that I gravitate towards the most. Number one: I’ve got a body made for radio, but number two: you know, words — that’s my first language. Speaking in pictures, I was never adept at.

Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Richard Linklater – these are cats that are born to tell you a story in pictures. For me, making a film, that’s just what was available to me at the time.

You even have a Frasier podcast now!

That one is kind of my fave at the moment. I go out there a lot and try to tell people to record their own podcasts, before someone figures out how to … regulate this medium so that only certain people can do it. I say go out and do it, man! It’s fun as heck.

I used to give the example of, like, you can do podcasts about anything — you can do a podcast about not even ALL of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, just Leonardo. You’ll get to 100 episodes before you have to say, like, ‘Donatello is a bitch’ (there, I said it). But now, I can point to the Frasier podcast – a podcast where we sit around and do unasked for commentary tracks for Frasier.

Me and Matt Mira are trying to get through every episode; so far we’re almost done with season one. But like, that’s a show that would never ever get made in any other medium — nobody on TV is like, “Let’s watch dudes watch old TV shows” — but on a podcast medium it’s perfect. We barely talk about Frasier; it’s more about the creative process and being funny. Frasier just grounds the thing.

With the Frasier podcast, I think that brings me up to six a week? There’s SMODcast, Hollywood Babble-on, Jay and Silent Bob Get Old, Fatman on Batman, Edumacation and Talk Salad and Scrambled Eggs.

Being a comic book fan, obviously Fatman on Batman is my favourite.

Doing Fatman on Batman enables me to talk about everything — comic books, comic book movies, comic book tv shows – [as if] it matters, almost in the way that Brodie from Mallrats used to talk about that shit. That podcast is probably me at my absolute Brodie-est.

The players involved don’t give a fuck about us, except to get our money when the movie’s done. But we talk about ‘em the way that sports enthusiasts have spoken about athletes and sports for years, where they’re so invested — as if they have anything at stake whatsoever, it’s a fuckin’ game. In the 21st century you can [watch] the movies and comics and media the same way that sportsfans have enjoyed sports and athletics for years. You can even gamble on this shit, it’s crazy … They used to be able to dismiss you as like, “Oh, there’s just a bunch of you in your parents’ basements” or whatever, but no, not at all. A lot of us run companies now, shit like that, and can still give a fuck about the adventures of characters that don’t exist.

Please tell me that when you make Mallrats 2, Brodie is going to have a podcast empire.

Of course. It’s in the script already, absolutely! He’s also self-published — Brodie would be a content fuckin’ generator. We’ve gotta remember, he did wind up hosting The Tonight Show for a brief time, so I have to imagine he’s got plenty of podcast material. And in Mallrats 2, quite like myself, he is just basically a global local celebrity. A dude who everybody kinda knows but not really what for anymore — and he’s got a kid who’s not really impressed by it all, she’s like, “You know dad, you’re not really a celebrity; you’re more kind of like a local curiosity, like the one-armed barista.”

I saw a blog recently where someone referred to me as an “unflushable turd” and at first I took insult to that, but then I was like, “Yeah, but at least it’s memorable.” Most people can’t say that in life.

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Kevin Smith’s Australian Tour

(with special guest Jason Mewes)

Sydney: Kevin Smith’s Superhero Multiverse @ The Sydney Opera House, on Monday September 28 — tickets here

Perth: An evening with Kevin Smith @ Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre, on Saturday September 26 — tickets here 

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Andrew Levins is a DJ, promoter, the director of Heaps Decent, and the author of a cookbook, Diner. Find him at his website or on Twitter — and subscribe to his podcast, Hey Fam, here.