Kevin Smith made his mark in the film community with a series of films full of vulgar dialogue about sex and other bodily functions. Despite a couple of slight excursions, the critically acclaimed Chasing Amy and the critically ridiculed Jersey Girl, Smith’s movies have been pretty similar in tone and content from his ultra-low budget debut Clerks to 2008′s Zack and Miri Make a Porno. But now, partially due the disappointing response to Zack and Miri, Smith is doing things a little different. His new film, Cop Out, is his first studio film (since Mallrats in 1995), and it’s also his first time directing a script written by someone else.
I recently had a chance to talk to Smith in a roundtable setting, and he proved to be just as outspoken and candid as his reputation would suggest. “What do you want to talk about?” he asked almost immediately, “We can talk about the making of [the movie]. We can talk about the theoretical. We can talk about me selling out.” Smith is referring to his switch to Warner Bros. for Cop Out after making every previous film with Weinstein Brothers (with the exception of 1995′s Universal comedy Mallrats), either at the now defunct Miramax or The Weinstein Company. “I had a huge emotional breakdown when Zack and Miri came out, because I was expecting Zack and Miri to do closer to Forgetting Sarah Marshal business… We didn’t do Sarah Marshall business, we wound up doing Kevin Smith business.” The response to Zack and Miri appears to have had a huge effect on the future course of Smith’s career. His point of view immediately following its release was “I’m spinning my wheels here. I’m telling the same stories, apparently. Nobody cares anymore … and I went and shut myself up in the library and started smoking lots of weed.”