Kevin Smith: ‘No one was asking for’ Jay and Silent Bob Reboot

It’s easy to tag this reboot as a cynical nostalgia play, and even its director admits no one was asking for it. But its poignancy may surprise you.

Kevin Smith may be better known as Silent Bob, but the real-life filmmaker is anything but. He’s loquacious and generous with his answers, and after 26 years in the public eye, there’s little he won’t share.

After breaking out with his indie black-and-white movie Clerks in 1994, Smith has been adored by a committed group of fans that have followed the New Jersey-born writer and director from Mallrats to Yoga Hosers, and via some great movies such as Dogma and some questionable artistic choices, including Cop Out.

Smith’s fans don’t just turn out for his movies, they also listen to his podcast, read his books (where he shares in intimate detail about his bowel movements) and pay to see him in person in his legendarily long Q&A sessions.

I was at one of those Q&A sessions in Sydney, 14 years ago, where he went two hours over the allotted time and only stopped when the State Theatre management insisted they had to send their staff home.

Between the screening for Clerks II and Smith’s tendency to talk, we sat there for five hours – and almost no one left.

“That was my first trip there, the whole family came, it was so lovely,” Smith said over the phone, with fondness. “It’s always easy to spend time with people who appreciate what you do, even if when they see the final thing, they don’t appreciate it. They gave it a shot, they were there.

Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes have been playing Jay and Silent Bob for 26 years

“For me, when people show up, I’m delighted and I can go until they boot me off, which is usually what happens, they send me off.”

He said that he was raised Catholic and even though he’s not anymore, he “carries” the guilt, obligation and gratitude around.

“I feel obligated to give them more than their money’s worth, and there’s guilt if I don’t do it right, if they show up and don’t have a good time. I carry that.”

It’s that connection and trust with his audience that gave Smith the confidence to make his latest offering, Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, a do-over-cum-sequel of his 2001 movie Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, a hero piece for his most famous creation – the duo of chatty doofus Jay (Jason Mewes) and the almost mute Silent Bob (Smith).

The 2001 movie featured the pair on a roadtrip from New Jersey to Hollywood when they discover their likeness would be used to make a Hollywood movie, Bluntman and Chronic, where their movie-within-the-movie characters would be played by Jason Biggs and James Van Der Beek (remember, this was 2001 so those guys were zeitgeisty).

There were hot women, a rescued orang-utan and some shenanigans on Hollywood studio lots.

It was a movie of its time, but it was also meant to be a bit of harmless fun, something for the fans to point out all the celebrity cameos, many of whom Smith had worked with previously, including Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Chris Rock, Jason Lee, Shannen Doherty, Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, George Carlin and Jon Stewart.

Jay and Silent Bob in 2001, younger but definitely not wiser

The 2020 Reboot traces similar steps, this time when Jay and Silent Bob, now ageing slackers, find out Hollywood is going to remake Bluntman and Chronic – so they set out to stop it again.

There are just as many familiar faces to be found, including Affleck, Damon, Lee, Joey Lauren Adams, Brian O’Halloran, Rosario Dawson, Val Kilmer, Chris Hemsworth, Shannon Elizabeth and more.

Even in this age of reboots, remakes and nostalgia-fuelled capitulation to recycling the same intellectual property again and again, Smith is honest about the genesis.

“Nobody was asking for this movie, except maybe me and Jay,” he said.

But he also knew that if he made it, there were fans that were going to turn out for it.

“Jay and I have been touring for 10 years around the world, including in Australia, and people have been paying 50 to 100 bucks to watch that. But imagine if we showed up with a new movie instead of talking about the old movies.

“We knew there was an audience waiting, and we knew that audience would get every joke, so we didn’t have to work broad, I didn’t have to explain everything to people. The Marvel movies made it very OK to reference other movies and stuff, instead of trying to make it user-friendly for new people.

“I made it for the audience that was going to show up, instead of making it for this imaginary audience. ‘What if we new people come?’ I’ve been hearing that sh*t for a quarter century and I know new people ain’t coming.

“I’m going to play to the people I know are going to be there and will appreciate the jokes and appreciate it if it’s a deep dive. It’s very liberating to have your own audience.”

Kevin Smith with wife Jennifer Schwalbach at the State Theatre in Sydney in 2006, premiering Clerks II

Smith’s movies often share the same world and reference each other, even though he has the same actors play different roles across properties. There was a View Askewniverse (named after Smith’s production company View Askew) well before there was a Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Smith has been touring with his new movie, and on the day we’re chatting in early February, he was in Canada, where he suffered through “40-below” the previous week in Calgary.

His fans may have been surprised at the character growth on display in Reboot, something that had not happened to Jay and Silent Bob over numerous films in the 90s.

That’s largely in part to changing circumstances in his life, and in friend Mewes’ life.

Smith had a severe heart attack in 2018 (which he credits with convincing his famous friends to get involved in this) and Mewes, after many years of substance abuse problems, seemed to finally find some stability after he became a father in 2015.

Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is something of a family affair – Smith’s daughter Harley Quinn Smith is in the film as one of the leads and Mewes’ young daughter appears in a scene with Affleck.

There’s an emotional maturity in Reboot you would never have associated with characters as lightweight as Jay and Silent Bob.

Joe Manganiello, Craig Robinson, Justin Long and Frankie Shaw cameo-ed in one scene

“The big difference between Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is in the first movie, a cartoonish character meets a woman and she makes him two-dimensional, and in Reboot, that same character meets another woman and she makes him three dimensional,” Smith said.

“When I was doing the first movie, they were carefree, Cheech and Chong-types. When we do the sequel, 18 years later, they’re just like us, they’ve got to have kids, because what else are we going to talk about? That’s what me and Mewes know the most in our lives.

“Our audience has grown up with us, most of them have kids now too. They go on the journey with us.”

The emotional touchpoint in Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is a scene in which the two leads come across Holden McNeil, a character played by Affleck in Chasing Amy.

Affleck had been in six of Smith’s movies, starting with Mallrats in 1995. But the pair had a falling out some years ago and only rekindled their friendship recently. So Smith found out late in the production process that Affleck would be available for a cameo.

In the film, Holden, now a dad, manages to tie the movie together with a few words, in an impassioned but quiet speech about how children changes someone’s life and legacy. With the phrase, “kids are our reboot”, the character turns the word “reboot” from a cynical commercial ploy into something poignant.

Smith also sneaks in a reference to Affleck’s controversial tenure as Batman – it wouldn’t be a Smith pop culture-fest if he didn’t.

“We didn’t have the Ben Affleck scene when we first started the movie. That came to us late in the game. I shot that on the last day of production, I wrote it in the last week,” Smith said.

“I was only able to write that scene because Ben said he would come back. If that scene didn’t exist, nobody says ‘kids are our reboot’ which is like the f**king theme of the entire movie. So I got to put that in his mouth.

“Holden is the closest character to me that I’ve ever written. I’m in all the movies, Silent Bob is in every scene, but I personally wasn’t in the movie until the Holden scene existed.

“Suddenly I could put my voice into the movie, he’s speaking for me at that point.

I told you Silent Bob was chatty.

Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is in select cinemas now

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