Kevin Smith came to El Paso, Texas for the first time Thursday to kick off the El Paso Film Festival by sharing his filmmaking experience and advice. But first he shared a tenuous but entertaining connection with El Paso.
Recalling a scene in Clerks where Jeff Anderson’s character, Randal, moves a tortilla chip through a jar of salsa while singing the Jaws theme, the New Jersey-born filmmaker explained:
“If you look at that jar of salsa, there’s a little piece of gaffer tape that covers the name of the product. Because we were nascent filmmakers, and we were worried we would get sued if we were focusing on the name of the product. So rather than create a fake label, which we didn’t have the means to do, we just took a little piece of gaffer tape and just covered the logo.
He revealed: “That logo was old El Paso. It took me 31 f—ing years to get here, man.”
From there a dove into a 90-minute flurry of anecdotes about what it’s like to be Kevin Smith, for an audience that included many people dressed up like his enduring Clerks character, Silent Bob. Speaking solo on the vast stage of the city’s gorgeous, 95-year-old Plaza Theater, he told tales of his heart attack eight years ago, crazy fan interactions at a White Castle and Target, and buying his friend Ben Affleck’s house.
Kevin Smith on Lessons From Tusk
But he turned to the art and craft of filmmaking when a fan asked him about his horror film Tusk. Smith warned that his Q&As tend to be “a little bit of Q and a whole lotta A,” and that was definitely the case with his Tusk answer.
Tusk, released in 2014, is the story of a cocky podcaster (Justin Long) who travels to Canada for an interview, and ends up meeting a retired sailor (Michael Parks) obsessed with a walrus named Mr. Tusk. He soon turns the podcaster… into a walrus.
Tusk was a box office failure, but has gained a passionate following since because of Smith’s willingness to push limits and go there. Smith says it’s one of the film’s he’s asked about most.
It was born from conversations on his former podcast, the SModcast, and Smith decided to do it after asking fans to voice support, or not, by tweeting the hashtags #walrusyes or #walrusno. He came up with a script no one in Hollywood was excited about until he met a financier who told him he wanted to meet about the film.
“I was like, ‘Did you like it?’ He goes, “I don’t know,'” Smith recalled.
But he said the executive, Demarest Films’ Sam Englebardt, told him: “I just want to see if you can do it. … This is one of the stupidest screenplays, but it really holds together, man. I think you might be able to pull it off.”
The film was a departure from Smith’s dialogue-driven comedies, mostly about young people figuring out life and love. Tusk was the kind of big creative swing that “would have made more sense at the beginning of my career,” not 20 years into it, Smith explained.
He made the film for $3 million that it failed to recoup, and then sat through the mixed reviews and some internet derision. But he said he’s learned, through both successes and failures, that such feedback is temporary, and the film lives on.
“I’ve been through the experience a few times, once with Mall Rats, once with Jersey Girl, and then later on, Tusk and Yoga Hosers, when a thing fails and blows up. In that moment, people are celebrating its demise, and they’re saying ‘Ha, ha, you did a thing and it didn’t work. F— you.'”
But he added: “They get that moment. But for the rest of my life, I get to dine out on that f—ing movie, man.”
Smith told aspiring filmmakers in the audience not to make new versions of old movies, but rather to seek out stories only they can tell. He said he wasn’t just speaking to young people, but also those in their 50s, 60s and 70s who have the advantage of life experience.
“If you’re lucky enough to enter this world, and lucky enough to have people give a f— about the statement that you’re making, the art that you’re producing, just know that for the rest of your life you’re going to chase relevancy, and it’s never-ending,” he said.
“When I walk into a movie studio, they’re not happy to see me. They’re not like, ‘Here comes the future of film.’ ‘They’re like, ‘here comes Clerks 9,’ he joked.
“You know who they dream about? You, you, you, you,” he added, pointing to people in the audience. “I swear to you, they have no interest in me anymore. They’re interested in you. You know why? They haven’t heard your f—ing story yet, kids.
“Your voice is your currency in this life. That’s all you have in this life, is how you see the world and how you spit it out to the world. It’s your perspective.
“There are a lot of people who would like to make a film. People fall in love with movies and be like, ‘I want to do it.’ And people want to hedge their bets, and they’ll try to do something similar to something that’s been done before, that maybe was successful, and stuff like that.
“And you could do that, and that could work, but I always feel like, ‘Why not die on the cross of saying something that’s never been said before? And only you can do that.'”
The El Paso Film Festival, one of MovieMaker‘s 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee and 25 Coolest Film Festvivals, continues through Saturday.
