Street: You had to appeal to the MPAA to overturn Zack and Miri’s original NC-17 rating. Did anything have to be edited out?
KS: No. We accepted the original NC-17 rating and took the original cut of the movie to the appeals board where it was finally overturned to an R rating. I got to keep everything I wanted to keep in the movie. On the DVD, there will be deleted scenes, but it’s not going to be anything we had to cut out by order of the MPAA. It’s just the bad shit that wasn’t as good as everything else.
Street: The title of the film has raised some controversy. What is so offensive about the word "porno"?
KS: I thought it was all over after the MPAA overturned our rating, but suddenly in the last month, issues have been popping up. There was a Dodgers game where we ran a spot and we got a shit-ton of complaint calls with people insisting it was real pornography. When was the last time you ever saw a porno with the word “porno” in the title? Who are these fuckers who think this movie is really pornography? We thought we used the cutest word possible to describe that industry. I mean, we didn’t go Zack and Miri Make a Fuck Tape or something like that. Not even Zack and Miri Make a Porn. It's got that “o” at the end, and that to me makes it cuddly and cute. Porno is just a cute word.
Street: Much talk has been made of Jason Mewes’s full frontal appearance in the film. What was his reaction when you asked him to do it?
Kevin Smith: I thought Mewes would say “yes” immediately because this is a dude who shows his cock quite readily to anybody he knows for maybe a little over five minutes. I’ve known the dude for 18 years now, and I’ve seen his dick more than I’ve seen my own, so I didn’t think it would be a big deal for him to whip it out. But he balked! For the first time in years, he got a fiancée and whatnot. But his lady said it was okay. The weird thing is, he came out looking like he was sporting [Mark] Wahlberg’s prosthetics from Boogie Nights, and I was flabbergasted, man. Mewes said, “that’s not me on the way up, that’s me on the way down, motherfucker.”
For more of Kevin Smith's arousing interview, go to 34st.com.
Street: Given that half of Penn’s population is from New Jersey, how did growing up in the Garden State affect you and your filmmaking?
KS: Well, when you grow up in New Jersey, you grow up in the shadow of New York and are the butt of many jokes because it’s New Jersey. Although the toxic waste jokes seemed to have calmed down over the years, there’s still that kind of necessity to prove yourself to people, to prove yourself worthy. So I think we tend to try harder. Growing up in Jersey is like growing up fat — you just try harder. So you learn to eat pussy really well, is what I’m getting at. Cinematically speaking, that’s all I’ve been trying to do for the last 15 years. Eat pussy.
Street: Traci Lords’s character, Bubbles, has a pretty unique talent. Where’d you come up with that?
KS: Well, we've all heard of some strippers who will shoot ping pong balls, but I’ve never seen anyone do the bubbles thing. But every woman I’ve ever known at some point in our relationship has always been like, “I can blow air out of my vagina!” Like wow, classy. So I figured we could work that in.
Street: A lot of your flicks have been buddy films, shot with guys. How did Elizabeth Banks spice things up?
KS: Generally, most of the stuff I do is about two dudes pining for each other who never fuck and they’re romantically involved with everything except kissing and consummating. So for me, it was a logical progression to get to the point where I would finally do a flick in which there was a guy and a girl as leading protagonists and there would be some kind of relationship. I was afraid on the page it might sound like two dudes talking to each other. Elizabeth Banks was so wonderful in feminizing Miri without changing a single word of the script. By virtue of the fact that she is a great actress and a wonderful comedienne, she was able to really flesh out that part and make her a really believable woman.
Street: Any advice for students hoping to create their own films or break into the business?
KS: I guess my best advice would be to make Clerks because it totally worked for me. Short of that, everybody should tell the exact story they want to tell — never mind people telling you how to change or make it more commercial or more marketable. At the end of the day, you gotta live with that movie for the rest of your life. It’s your flick, and if you start subverting what you set out to do or selling out to reach a larger audience, then it stops being yours.
