No, the problem child was and always will be Dogma. Nothing can be more problematic than that. In this movie, we had to deal with some of the Ben-and-Jen shit; on that movie we had actual death threats. So I'll take the Ben-and-Jen shit over some guy going, 'We're coming in there to kill you Jews with shot guns' any day of the week. I'm like, 'I'm not even Jewish.'
After the screening, a kid asked about why you used Fleetwood Mac music in the film and you said, 'When you get a little older, you get a little softer.' Do you feel like getting married has had an effect on your humor?
It gives me something to do with the money. It goes on to the wife and the kid. No, really, it hasn't affected me as a storyteller or filmmaker or whatever. Somebody else having a kid affected this movie more than me having a kid. I can curse around my kid, because we're raising our kid to be a little foul mouth because it makes sense. You just don't want the kid growing up believing there's such a thing as bad words, you know? There's bad intentions, bad people, but not bad words, and actually if you get your language down to a science, you can make a pretty healthy living off of it. So I'm not the guy who feels real precious around the kid in terms of language. But with other people's kids, definitely. So by virtue of the fact that I was making a movie about a seven-year-old girl who was not going to be portrayed by my child -- you can't be writing a script where everyone's going to be throwing the term 'cocksmoker' around.
You have a very devoted younger audience. What reaction is Jersey Girl getting from the kids?
I knew the moment I hit the first key on the script for Jersey Girl that I was going to lose the 13 and 14-year-old Jay and Silent Bob fans .... I knew we were going to lose them, but not all of them, because they're not all running around malls with their hands down their pants. Some of them are actually kind of bright kids, but there was definitely going to be a percentage that would go away, and that's just something you kind of accept. The fan base is such that they're a wide and varied group. There are some people who are hardcore Chasing Amy people, and that's how they found the rest of our movies. Same thing with Dogma. There are Jay and Silent Bob fanatics, old and young, and then there are people who think Mallrats is the gateway movie. They came out in droves and saw it on video -- they didn't come out to see it in fucking theaters, which would have been nice, but they certainly found it on video. And then there are some people who are like, 'Clerks is your best movie, and you've made nothing but dogshit since.' So the fan base is all over the place. So we may lose some fans, but it goes up and down.
How has your fan reaction been to putting Jay and Silent Bob to bed, and are they going to stay out of your films forever?
There have been some people who have been like, 'Don't!' And there are some who are like, 'It's about fucking time.' So you can't answer to one master right? That's why you don't answer to any of them. You have to answer to yourself, and you hope they go along with what you're doing. Are they put to bed forever? Nah; I mean I told [Jason] Mewes that if he could ever get and stay clean, I would think about doing more with Jay and Silent Bob. Quite frankly, that was the most fun we had ever had making a movie. It would be worth it to do it again, just because it was that fun.
