Posted by lakerstan at ip68-224-104-244.lv.lv.cox.net on March 21, 2004 at 16:42:02:
Sorry if this has been posted before...
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/entertainment/8234210.htm
One from the heart
In 'Jersey Girl,' writer-director Kevin Smith drops the lewd and rude act to show off the sentimental guy inside
BY RENE RODRIGUEZ
rrodriguez@herald.com
Jersey Girl is going to surprise everyone who thought they had writer-director Kevin (Clerks, Chasing Amy, Dogma) Smith pegged. Gone are Smith's trademark puerile (and often hilarious) humor, crude pop culture riffs and the lovable stoner duo of Jay and Silent Bob. In their place is a sweet, tender and often very moving drama about a hotshot New York publicist (Ben Affleck) who moves in with his father (George Carlin) in New Jersey to raise his daughter after his wife (Jennifer Lopez) dies during childbirth.
Jersey Girl, Smith's sixth film, is his most mature work to date. It is also, without question, his best. After becoming a father in 1999, Smith began writing the script with Bill Murray in mind, then put it aside after 50 pages or so. Two years later, on the encouragement of his close friend and frequent leading man Affleck, Smith dusted off the script and rewrote it specifically for him.
''For me, Jersey Girl was about getting away from doing action movies with explosions, and for Kevin, it was about getting away from doing the Jay and Silent Bob thing,'' Affleck says. ``That kind of comedy is a crutch for him: He knows he's good at it and he knows there's a segment of the audience that likes it. So this was really a risk. I think he's grown as a filmmaker just in terms of his willingness to take that risk and embrace the fact that he's kind of a softie at heart. He's got a very romantic sensibility.''
Sitting down in a Manhattan hotel suite to discuss Jersey Girl, which opens Friday, Smith, 33, talks about being a parent, his late father, his favorite kinds of movies and the Bennifer-Gigli backlash.
Q: The most surprising thing about Jersey Girl is that it reveals what a softie you are. Who knew?
A: I'm a sap for movies like this. I didn't really grow up watching hardcore indie stuff. That came later in life. I grew up watching movies like this, because my Mom was into them. I'm a huge fan of Terms of Endearment.
Q: It's also a very straightforward and earnest movie. Even though it's often very funny, there's no cynicism or irony in it whatsoever.
A: It doesn't reinvent the wheel. It's chock-full of clichés, and it had the potential to become one big cliché. It's how you handle those conventions that makes all the difference. School of Rock is a great example. I don't know that I would have necessarily dug that movie in someone else's hands. But [director] Richard Linklater did something with it that I thought was real interesting and cool. It's nice to see a dude whose work I've always admired do something in a very familiar genre but bring his particular flavor to it.
Q: How can you tell, when you're writing a movie like this, that it's not going to turn out cloying and sentimental?
A: It helps going in knowing what you're going to do. It helps being honest. I've always said that I'm not a very creative person. I looked at The Matrix when it came out -- the first one, not the second two awful ones -- and was blown away. The Wachowski brothers did something that was amazing and new. I had never seen anything like it. I felt a little jealous and sad, knowing that I will never create something that is that insanely fresh and original.
But if I can't reinvent the wheel, I know I can add a good strong spoke to it. My job in Jersey Girl was not to reinvent storytelling. My job was to tell a good story. And you have to commit to it. You gotta do the Babe Ruth thing, where he points to left field and says 'That's what I'm shooting for,' and then actually following through on it. Don't try to spin it or undercut yourself with cynicism and irony. Own it. Just be the ball.
For me, what really helped with this movie was Chasing Amy. When I was writing that movie, I got to a place where I thought it had become touchy-feely, and I worried that all the people who liked Clerks were going to hate it. So I threw Jay and Silent Bob in for those people.
The scene works: It's a funny scene, it's cool and it bridges the second and third act well. But to me, it always felt like a real cop-out. I could have made that movie without relying on those guys. So with this movie, I decided to just tell the story and not go back into familiar territory or throw in a little inside baseball for the fans who I'm worried about losing.
LOOKS GOOD
Q: This is also by far your best-looking film. It's really beautifully shot. And in widescreen!
A: I know. But I can't take credit for it. It was Vilmos Zsigmond [the veteran Oscar-winning cinematographer of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The Deer Hunter, among others]. He was real particular about wanting to shoot in widescreen. He said, ''Trust me, we will be able to fill the frame even though it's quiet and dramatic in spots and comedic in others.'' And he was right. How do you argue with a dude with a career as storied as his?
Q: How did you get him to work with you?
A: We sent him the script. We always thought it was such a joke, because it's Vilmos Zsigmond, right? But he got back in touch with us within two days. He's an older dude, like in his late 70s. And he just responded to the material. He knew that he could marry his style to my style and make a good-looking movie about people talking to one another. It turns out he doesn't work as much as he could, because he doesn't want to shoot anything with guns or violence in it. He doesn't make a big deal of it, but he just wants to avoid it, because he says there's far too much of that in the world already, and he doesn't want to propagate it.
I leaned on him very heavily. I'd be stupid not to. I learned an insane amount under that dude's tutelage -- more than I learned in film school or in the previous eight or nine years of making movies. He of course really knows how to light actors, to say the least.
Q: Yeah, everyone in the movie looks really great.
A: Don't think they didn't know it, too. From the first day of dailies, Affleck pulled me aside and said ``Did you see how beautiful I look in your movie? This is the first time in one of your movies that I don't look like I was hit in the face with a f - - - - -g shovel.''
Q: Talk about the whole Bennifer mess. How do you feel about it now?
A: They started dating right around the same time we started shooting. Early on, people were saying ''Movies with real-life couples never work, because nobody wants to see a couple on-screen when they're seeing them in tabloids.'' None of that stuff bothered me, because I knew that it wasn't their movie. Jennifer kicks the movie into gear. She has to die in order for the movie to get going. I also felt that we were getting wonderful stuff from Ben because he was in love with her, so his performance was even better than it would have been. When I look back at this movie 20 years from now, I'll know it's a better piece of work because they were in love when we made it.
But the Gigli s - - t was kind of irritating. I've never had a movie open at No. 1, but I thought we had a good shot with this one, because I've got Ben Affleck and Liv Tyler and Jennifer Lopez, right? But when I saw the Friday night numbers on Gigli, I knew it would never happen, because from that point on, I knew it was going to be an uphill marketing battle.
I just hope that once the movie gets out there and people see that it's not Gigli II, that it's not a Bennifer movie and that it's really about him and the kid, the word of mouth will help keep it going. I'm used to making movies that limp along and eventually make enough money to cover their costs.
I remember when we started shooting, Ben and Jennifer spoke about Gigli in such glowing terms. ''Oh, that's an awards picture, man.'' It became the movie we had to live up to. You always felt like we were living in the shadow of that movie. That changed very quickly. Although we will forever be in the shadow of Gigli, no matter what. Now it's just a different kind of shadow.
Q: You've described Jersey Girl as your most personal film. But isn't comedy, by its very nature, extremely personal? The particular things we laugh at are very revealing of our personalities and who we are.
A: I'd agree with that. Some of the comedy that I've done -- and I'm certainly not disowning it by any stretch of the imagination -- is stuff that I find funny and can observe, but I'm not really a part of it. I'm not a stoner and have never been a stoner. I love sex and I love talking about it with my friends, but I'm not like obsessed with sex. The characters in my movies are, because it's much funnier to play that out on the page.
But if someone held a gun to my head and said I could only write one kind of script for the rest of my life, it would be more like this one, because this is closer to who I am and the stuff I really enjoy. I'm the dude who loves movies about grief and where people die. That stuff is actually easier for me to write than the comedy.
FAMILY LIFE
Q: Jersey Girl is unusual in that it's about the paternal aspect of family life. Most movies tend to focus on the maternal side.
A: Yeah. It's usually the maternal relationship that takes front and center. Even in real life, my kid [4-year-old Harley Quinn] is much closer to my wife [Jennifer Schwalbach] than she is to me. You can't surpass the mother-child bond, and I get jealous of that sometimes. I think that writing this script was a bit of wishful thinking for me. It would be nice if my daughter was all about me and I was her first love and I didn't have to compete with Jen on some level. But Jen will always be Harley's first love. At least I have the comfort of knowing that when she hits her teenage years, she will totally turn on her mother and run to me. Then I will be insanely permissive and be the big guy for a while. I'll get to have the fan club. [laughs]
That being said, I would never want to be in a situation where I had to raise the kid by myself. Thank God I have Jen, because it's a real cooperative marriage, and we both spend time doing what we do best with the kid. I think it would be very difficult for a man to raise a little girl and equip her with everything she's going to need to face the world. There's stuff my wife can equip my daughter with that I never could, by virtue of the fact she grew up as a woman. So she knows what she's talking about. For me, it's a lot of extrapolation.
DEDICATED TO DAD
Q: You dedicate the movie to your father, who passed away last year. Did he ever get to see it?
A: He did. He saw the first cut of the movie, a choppier cut, and definitely recognized himself in it and was real touched by it. Unfortunately, he never got to see the dedication card at the end, because quite frankly, I wouldn't have dedicated it to him if he hadn't died. There's no point, because the movie stands by itself as a testimony to fatherhood, and he got that when he saw it.
But once he died, I was filled with this remorse that I was never able to capture his image on film, because he was real camera shy. I got my Mom into Clerks back in 1994 when we were making it, and no matter what happens, I'll always have that snapshot of her from that particular time. But my old man would never get on camera. So I got to throw it in there at the end of this movie. And it's a perfect shot of my old man: a heavy-set dude in the pool, lying on a raft with a kid's fireman hat on his head. That's how I like to think of him.