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Interview: Kevin Smith

Clearly, Red State is made with much more passion than Cop Out. Not because I didn’t like Cop Out, or I wasn’t involved with Cop Out. You don’t have to fire up the passion reserves when somebody’s like, ‘Yeah, we’ve got that taken care of. You’re good.’ You know, when you’re trying to make Red State, that was easily a 20 million dollar movie that we made for four million bucks. We had a 12 million dollar crew infrastructure in that movie. We got lucky. We were shooting out here in Los Angeles, and nobody here is working in this town, so we got a lot of great crew people we’d never get because they’d be on expensive shows. We got them cheaper, too, ‘cause they were working for cut rates ‘cause they dug the project. That’s passion, man. When you’ve got crew working for next to nothing, you know something cool’s going to happen. You have to match that passion. I didn’t get paid on Red State. I had no salary. I just did it because it was time to do it. I’d been waiting four years.

I can’t really envision what a Kevin Smith horror movie looks like.
You don’t have to. You’ll see it so soon. It’s wild. I try to undersell these things, but it’s fucking different. It’s wacky. There’s some gallows humor in it, but there are no jokes. It’s not a comedy. I found out while I was making it that if you can make people laugh, and I’ve been able to do that over the years, you can work the same set of emotions and make them uneasy. It’s not like a blood and gore flick. It’s definitely more of an unnerving flick. From the get go, it just kind of grabs you and won’t let you go. It’s kind of relentless in that way. So it will be interesting. I couldn’t imagine what a horror movie by Kevin Smith would look like, and now I know. It’s kind of neat. At first, I was going to say, ‘It’s not a horror movie, it’s an action thriller.’ But I think it is a horror movie, because the subject matter is truly horrific. Then again, I’ve got experience making horror movies. I made Jersey Girl, dah-dah-dah-dat-dat-da.

I actually rewatched that yesterday to get myself prepared for this thing.
And you’re like, ‘It still sucks!’