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Here’s part two of my epic Kevin Smith interview.

What’s fascinating to me about the path that you’re taking right now is, to a certain extent – clearly not calculated – you inadvertently wind up creating a shit storm.
Yeah, yeah. I tell ya, it’s an irritating quality that I carry with me. Unfortunately I cannot shake it. What’s weird is I’m Catholic, so all I want is peace. But unfortunately I like to talk about stuff or get involved with stuff that somehow winds up catching attention or people get mad. And when people get mad, I go out and defend myself. Or I get mad at somebody and I go at them, because I was raised that way. My parents are like, “If somebody fucks with you and you don’t want to get fucked with, you start screamin’, ‘cause that’s rape.” And so, you know, when a corporation fuckin’ fucks with you, genetics tells me to go lash out. Like, don’t be quiet. Don’t take this sitting down. So yeah, unfortunately that gets me into so much trouble.

There was this divide after Sundance, where on one side you have industry journos saying you’re nailing your own coffin shut, and on the other, fans saying you’re reinventing the wheel. How did it feel to be in the middle of those two polar opposites?
Once again, as with all things, the truth lies somewhere in between. We’re certainly not reinventing the wheel. I’ve been touring for years, the only difference is that this time I’ve brought the movie with me. The real difference, of course, is that later on in October we’re gonna release the movie ourselves. And I don’t see how that’s nailing a coffin shut. That’s what I didn’t get about the Sundance reaction by some of the blogger press. It felt like it was what it was — journalism written at 50,000 feet with no oxygen. Because so many people were just like, “He’s gone rogue! He’s trying to burn down the studios!” Someone said I imploded? I relistened to everything that I said, and I’m like, yeah, there’s a bit of showmanship in there, but essentially the message is , “I don’t believe that my movie can warrant $20 million in marketing costs, so I’m just gonna take it out myself. And that doesn’t sound — and still doesn’t sound — to me as arrogant. That, to me, is the opposite of arrogant where I’m like, “I don’t have enough confidence in my movie, so trust me. We don’t want that extra money, I’m just going to try and do it with spit and glue and elbow grease.” But some people wanted to turn it into, “He’s trying to take on the studio system.”

Meanwhile, everyone at Sundance, like journalists and people coming to see movies, yeah, this was the first time they’d heard about all this, but you don’t make a plan like this without talking to smart people. I spoke to people I still know at Miramax, people I know at the Weinstein Company, even some cats that I wasn’t all that familiar with, but knew a little bit at Paramount. And I said, “Hey man, if you were me and you were going to take a movie out, drop four wall and self distribution, would you do it to Red State?” And they all said, “No, I’d do it with Clerks 3 — that’s a no-brainer.” I said, “But I don’t own Clerks 3.” And they said, “Okay, well, what’s the upshot?” And I said, “The upshot is this movie is gonna cost nothing, maybe about $4 million bucks, and it’s kind of a horror movie.” And they said, “Oh, a horror movie? That means you could appeal to your audience and potentially cross over to appeal to fans of horror movies that don’t even give a shit about you.”

So that’s what makes me laugh when some journalist who doesn’t talk to people, isn’t in touch with people and proves so by making such a ludicrous statement like, “He’s nailing his coffin shut!” This business does not care what I do one way or another because I understand that I’m not in the movie business. I’m not even in the indie business. Unfortunately, or for better or worse, there’s a very small business that I’m in and it’s called the Kevin Smith business. You can’t judge it against something. Maybe Trekkies, to some degree. Maybe the Joss Whedon crowd to some degree. You know, it’s the same kind of thing. We carry our own audience. I’m the guy that can go to Sydney Opera House and sell it out twice. Joss can go to Sydney Opera House and sell it out as well. And most people would be like, “What? That guy?” But we carry our own audience. It’s like you’re carrying a small army on your back. And those cats are the ones that employ you. They’re the ones that buy the tickets, they’re the ones that come see you whether you’re making a movie or not — if you’re just on stage talking, or they buy your comic books, stuff like that. For me, I’d rather just go appeal directly to them. All that marketing money is spent to reach them, but now I can communicate directly with them via podcast, Twitter, online, on a stage, wherever. On the radio, even on TV. So why am I going to spend that money? Who am I reaching if the only people I’m reaching are already interested in this?

So this whole thing about arrogance? I just sat back and watched those people cut their throats with those articles and I was like, “Oh my God. When the dust settles, you’re just going to see that this is not threatening. This is not revolutionary. This is actually quite sane and financially, fiscally responsible,” which is all the things that those people, those bloggers — like the Nikki Finkes of this world — usually cry for. That’s what blew my mind about the reaction. They spend so much time beating the shit out of studios for unoriginality and overspending, and I stepped out with a movie that… look, call it what you want, but it’s not unoriginal. That movie is about as original as it gets. But I step out with this movie and I say, “Hey, I’m not gonna waste money,” and what do they do? They attack me for it. In that moment I learned a very important lesson — as much as some of the movie bloggers hate movie studios, they hate me more and I don’t know why. And that Sundance moment made those cats choose in a weird way — you know, the studio or this guy? And all of them have spent so much time going, “Studio sucks!” instead we’re just like, “Forget it. I’d rather hate on Kevin Smith than disagree with a studio.” Like, I’d rather reign in hell than serve in heaven. I thought it was so strange and so Shakespearian.

And then, like I say, it was about two weeks later, man. The dust settled and people were like, “What happened up there?” And I was able to kind of talk to people and be like, “Nothing, here. Look at the facts.” I was able to sit down on KCRW and did a bunch of radio press, and once people hear you sounding reasonable and rational, and not the way you’ve been painted by someone who — in many cases — wasn’t even in the room… you know what I’m saying? So much of the coverage was based on other people’s coverage. So luckily I had truth on my side.  And then later on you get math on your side. It’s so weird. I mean, if you’re a writer — and I am a writer — if I were going to write a story about this, I would so wait to cut my own throat. I’d wait a little while for a little more data, a little more detail before I’d be like, “It’s never gonna work! He’s an idiot! He’s gone insane!” Because that just makes you look like ridiculous. They’ve lost legitimacy. Not just in my eyes, but in a lot of people’s eyes.

Like the dude over at that Nikki Finke site — it wasn’t her, but the dude who wrote about it. I think his name was Mike Flemming, from the Deadline site in New York? He’s the one who said I imploded. So many people, so many journalists got e-mails to me, called me or fucking pulled me over at Sundance and asked, “What did you do to Nikki Finke’s grandfather? Why is he so mad at you?” And I was like, “I don’t know, man! Did I cancel Matlock?” ‘Cause this dude lashed out like I stepped on his neighbor’s lawn. Not even his lawn. The way he reacted, it was like, “You get off my neighbor Hollywood’s lawn! ‘Cause they’re not home and I’m looking out for their lawn!” And I felt bad for that dude because I’ve spoken to him when he was at Variety, and he seemed like an okay cat, but he went out of his way to bury me. I was like, “Dude, I’ve got video of me standing and talking. They’re going to be able to see and hear what I said. It doesn’t matter how you paint me.” And sure enough, man. All the tweets from all the people that mattered and bought tickets, like the college kids, they were so inspiring. “You make me wanna do this,” blah, blah, blah. And then the Mike Flemmings of the world just sit there and, like, “Well, you shouldn’t have gone on Hollywood’s lawn!” It kills me. It’s just not smart. I’m a writer. I swim in the same pool as him, so to speak, and a smart writer would never do what he did. So it just makes me think he’s a dumb writer. And if he’s a dumb writer, why is he writing at all?

In that instance, anybody could do that job. Like, my mother could now do Mike Flemming’s job because he showed himself to be an idiot. Even my mother understood the simple concept of, “We’re not going to spend money on marketing to sell the movie – no commercials and billboards and stuff like that. We’re just gonna do Twitter.” And she was like, “Oh, that makes sense. You’re saving money.” So the other guy, the one who quote unquote writes about the industry and is like, “This is it! All of Hollywood is upset!” Meanwhile, one of the biggest studio heads on the planet sends me an e-mail when I got off the stage saying, “Congratulations, that was awesome.” So I don’t know what Mike’s talking about. I don’t wish him ill, but it’s kind of like, that’s what you get, dude. Wasted on your own petard. You’re petarded.

(Part one is here.)