The “moment of awe and arrogance” that convinced Kevin Smith he could be a filmmaker
If you were going to compile a list of the most moronic films of all time, you’d have to put in quite a few from the early 2000s. It was the era of fratboy sex comedies, people having carnal relations with warm pastry goods and all kinds of other usually cannabis-driven japes and tomfoolery. And no movie encompassed this quite as much as 2001’s Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, directed by Kevin Smith.
Now, just because it’s moronic, does not mean that it is not also very, very funny indeed. Telling the road-trip story of Jay and Bob, the two slackers who loved nothing more than to stand outside the convenience store featured so heavily in Smith’s debut 1994 movie Clerks, it is absolutely packed full of cameos, featuring not just one but two Star Wars legends, plus almost every famous actor and comedian you could think of from that era, including Chris Rock, Paul Rudd, Will Ferrell, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, and many, many more.
Smith of course plays one half of the not-so dynamic duo as they haplessly cross America trying to get royalties from a film being made about the comic book characters they came up with, and he was able to pull in so many famous faces because for the previous five years he was responsible for some major independent comedy hits. Those included not just Clerks, but Mallrats, Dogma and Chasing Amy, several of which featured Affleck and Damon who were at that time the toast of Hollywood thanks to the huge success of Good Will Hunting.
Smith, it turns out, had been inspired by a young Richard Linklater, and specifically his 1990 movie Slacker, which was made on a budget of just $23,000 but pulled in more than a million dollars at the box office. Linklater wrote, produced, starred in and directed the comedy which followed a gang of misfits around during a day in his home city of Austin, Texas.
Smith recalls going to see the film and the effect it had on him in the book My First Movie, explaining: “It was the night of my twenty-first birthday, and we went in to catch a midnight show (of Slacker). And that was ‘the moment’ you know? The audience were just loving it… but part of me was thinking, ‘well, it’s good but it’s not that funny. If these people think this is funny, I think I can give them something really funny.’ It was a moment I’ve often referred to as a moment of awe and arrogance.”
Thanks to the success of Slacker and the following it gained from fans and fellow filmmakers, Linklater was able to secure funding for the 1993 hit Dazed and Confused, also starring Affleck together with several other actors who would go on to become major stars including the likes of Matthew McConaughey and Milla Jovovich. Nobody was quite as affected by Linklater’s second movie as Smith however, as he continued in the book, saying:
“I was awed by Slacker, that it existed. And Richard’s story was kind of compelling too. This guy from Austin, Texas—not from Hollywood, not from New York—had made a film that’s playing here in New York and look at all these people here to see it!… by the end of the film I was thinking, ‘I could definitely do this!’ And oddly enough it was the reaction that Clerks would have a few years later. Film students told me, ‘Your movie made me want to be a film-maker. Because I knew that if you can do it, I can do it.’”
