by Matt Sernaker, Managing Editor
During SDCC 2013, ComicsOnline was invited to join in a special round table interview with Kevin Smith (Clerks) and newcomer Matt Johnson. Johnson’s film The Dirties will be released as part of the new Kevin Smith Video Club film series, in conjunction with Phase 4 Films. The duo discussed the theatrical release of this project, the process of getting an Independent Film noticed in today’s society, and how distribution and technology have changed the cinematic landscape.
Editors Note: This article is uncensored (we are interviewing Kevin Smith after all). Please be advised.
ComicsOnline: For those of us who haven’t seen The Dirties yet, could you give us a brief summary of the film and discuss the process for marketing a story like this?
Kevin Smith: This is going to be the best movie that you see all year. Very tall order for a summary. For people that champion the Weinstein Company bully documentary, this is the narrative version of that. It kind of takes you to a place that movies tend to not go, as it humanizes the person that we are all supposed to villainize in the flick. I was incredibly moved. I was impressed that they found a way to take the found footage genre and do something with it that I hadn’t seen before. It wasn’t like ‘I found this footage, and there’s fucking ghosts!’ It’s a movie within a movie that makes absolute sense. Hands down the best first feature I have ever seen. In terms of a first feature it is so insanely accomplished. It makes your heart jump for joy that indie film is alive and well in the hands of people like Matt (Johnson) here, who can say something important and do it entertainingly. It’s not a medicine movie. It doesn’t make you say ‘I get it, bullies are fucking bad.’ It is insanely well done entertainment that happens to be backed up by something real. They will be entertained on the movie level, but they will be educated by the end of the day. There is a lot of substance to it… Way more than most movies we see today that’s for damn sure.
Matt Johnson: A movie like this- we are right out of film school. We were making this movie to be a joke amongst our friends. I think it is the same way that Kevin made Clerks. If my buddies laugh then it’s a success. As far as the poster, we were trying to do something that wasn’t ostentatious or violent, but still had darkness and a mystery to it. It tells a story of a guy who is kind of funny, and has something going on.
KS: That’s the thing, if you love something you aren’t ‘let me put my stink all over it.’ It stands there by itself. I wasn’t drawn to it thinking ‘how could I repair this in some way.’ It was perfect.
MJ: We are completely obsessed with design. The end of the movie is rip-offs of famous movie designs. We actually had a Clerks one there for a long time but we thought you’d sue us…but then you bought the film.
KS: I was a little hurt when I watched the movie that there wasn’t a Clerks one.
When you watch the credits you will see it done in a Back to the Future style, or a Pulp Fiction style. There’s such an eye to detail in terms of graphics that it is interesting to me that you didn’t have a poster. This isn’t a movie that you can easily market. It’s a Faberge egg of sorts. If somebody tries to give it a one liner – ‘this is a movie that takes a bully and shows a different side of him and why he did it’…nobody wants to see that.
MJ: That was the biggest problem with the movie. We felt like this is a film for people who know us. Me and my friends are good guys and we aren’t trying to make a film that is trading on the issue of school violence, so we thought anybody who read about this movie would be like ‘we will never watch it we will never review it’ and as soon as Kevin and Phase 4 were like, ‘no this is actually good,’ it gave us a bridge to audiences who would never tolerate this as an actual idea. This isn’t exploitative.
KS: You could easily put somebody off by trying to describe the plot. It doesn’t do it justice. You want to sit them down in a forum and say ‘give it a watch.’ That’s my job. It’s not to be like, ‘let me show you how shit’s done.’ I’m sure if I did that you would be like, ‘you made Cop Out, go sit over there.’ I can say these are the pitfalls. These are the things that might help broaden your audience. The most important thing I can do is advocate on social media. At the Hall H panel I am going to show the trailer. It isn’t necessarily a Comic-Con audience movie, but at the same time it so is. It’s like holding up a mirror to some degree.
MJ: One of the things that is interesting about our characters is that they don’t really fit in. They have been pushed to the margins of their high school and they are trying to gain power. That’s all they want. What is amazing about Comic-Con is that everyone here is dressed like superheroes. They have so much power. People are photographing them as they walk down the street. I think it is the kind of thing that people can relate to. I know what it’s like to feel this way.
No one is going to lose their mind here and feel like ‘nobody is listening to me’ at Comic-Con.
KS: It is pretty gripping. If you have followed the news over the last couple of years, it gets people’s dander up. What the boys were trying to do is capture a side of the story that you will never see. You have to understand where it comes from. No real bully is going to watch a PBS special and be like ‘you know what? I am horrible.’
MJ: And no real victim is going to watch that and feel like this is helping me. Ever.
KS: What I love about the movie is that it is fucking dangerous. I always find myself thinking that this is going to play for everybody. It has balls to it. I haven’t had balls with anything I’ve done cinematically. To stand next to somebody who can say ‘Fuck it, if somebody punches me in the face for this…so be it.’ That is inspiring. It is why I got in the game in the first place. It is nice to be around that. I am going to tackle this subject matter, but I am going to do it in a way that goes a little bit further. Not in terms of tastelessness, but more so bravery. It is so fucking realistic. The only thing that stops you from going ‘fuck, this is happening right now’ is that it takes place in Canada…where it would probably never happen (laughs). That’s what makes it science fiction (joking)!
CO: Kevin, where do you see yourself in all this? Do you see this as a chance to say ‘here are the pitfalls, don’t fall into these traps?’
KS: Absolutely. There is a Kevin Spacey-ish Pay It Forward element. I got real fucking lucky and won the lottery with Clerks. People can do this. Anybody can fucking do this. It is nice to get to a point where there are enough people who follow what I do that I can say ‘watch this!’ Advocate through somebody else’s art. All I do is get instant credibility by aligning myself with a movie this bold, this strong, this fresh, this original. I would be stupid to say, nah you guys figure it out yourselves. It is mutually beneficial for me as well.
I notice this stuff on twitter. There are people who swore off of me after Red State, who said ‘fuck him, ill never touch his shit again.’ Now these people have spoken about this movie and begrudgingly are like, ‘oh Kevin Smith’s involved.’ But they are talking about this movie in a positive way.
CO: Matt you wrote this, directed it, and edited it. You wore so many hats. How long did this take you to complete? Did you go completely insane with everything you did?
MJ: I am not sure if it was like this on Clerks, but on a movie like this when we were shooting in a lot of these schools, nobody knew that I was in charge of the movie at all. I would be hiding in scenes with wireless mics and talking and the cameras would just be trying to follow us. We would do hours and hours of stuff. The hard work was getting into these places and making this world real. We would just put ourselves in it and play for days at a time. It wasn’t hard work in the same way that you (Kevin) would be sitting behind the camera figuring out how you would cover this. I just needed to be there for this documentary. And no, I didn’t go crazy. It was just a lot of fun. Technology is so cheap and we shot it on one camera. I could edit at my house over the span of months in my spare time.
I think the secret to film making and making art in general, is to put yourself into an environment where things come easy to you.
KS: WHY DIDN’T ANYONE TELL ME THAT?
MJ: You can tell anyone with a voice, you should be doing something that comes natural to you. You shouldn’t have to dig deep. You don’t want to spend all your effort trying to find ways to get something good. You want to get a world where everything is kind of good, even the mistakes you make. You aren’t killing yourselves to make it.
CO: Technology has changed so much in the last 20 years. How do you think it would affect Clerks if you were to have made it today? Easier or harder?
KS: It would be way easier. We probably could have made the whole movie for less than Five Grand. But it would be lost in the shuffle. Back when we started and said ‘hey, we’re gonna make an indie film’ people would be like ‘what are you talking about?’ ‘We’re gonna make a movie!’ That’s kind of gone now. It wasn’t commonplace. Now its like, ‘oh you’re making a movie? Well you should pay me for this land that you are shooting on.’ The expense has come down with the tech but the field is massive. We were able to pop in 1994 because there wasn’t a shit ton going on. Now you don’t even compete with what’s at the multiplex, you compete with iTunes or Netflix or Hulu. There is an ocean of films starring actors you’ve never heard of. I pay attention to a lot of them. I do a weekly entertainment show, and pay attention to what’s being made. To see those movies popping up there, you just realize it is a way different world. People don’t even try to get to the theater anymore, and are happy taking it to the digital stage. We wouldn’t have popped in today’s environment whatsoever. Thank God I did it back then when I did it. If we did it now, I probably wouldn’t try to find a theatrical release for it.
As much as I love Clerks, at the same time I feel bad because it is the ship that launched 10,000 other ships that didn’t reach a fucking port. Some people saw the journey that I made and said ‘fuck, that looks easy. I’m going to make that fucking journey too.’ Some guys didn’t get that far. The only reason I made it was because there was no competition like there is now.
Even the audience for stuff like this is so massive and there are so many places they can go without them having to go to the theater. That’s why it’s easy for me to step out of making film, because it is so much work to get someone to leave the comfort of their own home and go to a movie theater. They can just wait two minutes and watch it on Bit-torrent, or whatever the hip version of Bit-torrent is that we aren’t supposed to talk about.
MJ: Piratebay.
KS: Thank you (laughs). So I would have been lost in the shuffle. That’s why it is so easy for me to pay it forward because I know I was lucky. My whole life I knew I got lucky. So I want to help others get to that dream. We don’t want to just talk about what might have been and want to get as many people as possible to see it. It is throwing your message out in the void, and trying to see if anybody else out there thought like me, felt like me. Now there is the internet, and thank God that didn’t exist when I made Clerks. I was searching and trying to communicate this is what I was thinking and hoping. That’s what drove me to do it. I think it is what drives a lot of people.
MJ: To market films it just costs so many millions of dollars. There is no more instant success.
KS: It is too expensive! The expense isn’t in making the art; it is in communicating it to a potential audience. We have this movie, Jay and Silent Bob’s Super Groovy Cartoon Movie, that we’ve been touring around the country. We are taking it from place to place instead of carpet-bombing the market. That movie cost $69,000 to make, so the moment we started selling tickets we were in the black. So if I were to take that movie into even one thousand theaters, I would have to spend a MINIMUM of two million dollars to let people know that we were going to open on those screens. So I would end up spending a ridiculous amount of money to reach an audience to tell them that we made a $69k cartoon and that you should come and see it. That’s why in big business right now to make these found footage movies is like the old Miramax method. You make the movie very inexpensively and you hope it pans out. You think you have something that you can sell to an audience. Back in the day with Miramax it was class. We are selling you a fucking classy movie that you don’t normally see.
MJ: That’s how you got in! On their ‘class’ scheme.KS: Wasn’t first class!
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Check out the trailer for The Dirties below:
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