'Shootin' The S--t With Kevin Smith': An EXCLUSIVE Excerpt

Kevin Smith is a funny guy. He'd probably use a more... "colorful" word than "guy," one starting with 'mother' and ending with a term I won't repeat here (it starts with 'f'), but that's all part of his charm. He's a talented filmmaker to be sure -- just look at modern classics like "Clerks" and "Dogma" -- but he's also a fantastically well-spoken and engaging individual.

That's why you should be excited about Titan Books' "Shootin' the S--t With Kevin Smith: The Best of SModcast," which hits store shelves on September 22. As in tomorrow. It's filled transcribed conversations between Smith and his View Askew partner and longtime collaborator Scott Mosier. Hit the jump for a brief excerpt of the hilarity. And stay tuned for MTV.com next week, as Smith will be here in the office to answer some questions!

From SModcast 11: A Fistful of Shame
Sundance and Cannes

Kevin Smith: Do you still like going to film festivals?
Scott Mosier: Not really.
KS: Why?
SM: Usually it’s not that much fun. There are a few festivals that are fun, because you can go and actually get into movies, actually watch some movies. And then once you leave the movie it’s like the festival doesn’t take over the town. Toronto was kinda fun. But I don’t know, it was really fun when we were doing it before, on "Clerks" and stuff like that, that was really fun. I always remember that.
KS: That, and you remember when we went back to Cannes with "Clerks 2"?
SM: Yeah.
KS: That sucked ass for the majority of the week that we were there and then when we finally screened, then it rocked. Getting that standing ovation, b--ch.
SM: "Clerks 2" was great, but it’s still work, I’m there to find out the fate of the film, not to go see movies.
KS: Well some people like going to parties and s--t.
SM: Yeah, that’s the other side of it.
KS: You remember when we went to Sundance? That might be the last time I spent any amount of time getting drunk. We went to Sundance and we went for the whole thing.
SM: ’94.
KS: So our movie didn’t screen until a few days into it.
SM: Yeah.
KS: Probably like the halfway mark or something like that. So for the first few days that we were there, I remember that all we did was drink.
SM: We’d go and drink.
KS: We’d go and see movies and drink. I remember going to see "Backbeat" and getting drunk. And then going to see "Go Fish" and then getting drunk. Just doing a lot of drinking.
SM: We were drinking, probably anxiety.
KS: Yeah. And also we just didn’t know how to carry ourselves, didn’t know what we were supposed to be doing and whatnot. And also we didn’t expect to get picked up but we were like, “This is awesome to be here.” And we spent that whole first year with "Clerks" going around from festival to festival. We went to so many f---ing festivals, we went to at least twenty to thirty. Went to Cannes of course, we went to any number of places, tonnes of festivals. But Toronto I think wrapped it up, it might have been the last one before the movie came out. But do you remember we went to Germany at one point? We were supposed to go to London and we got to Newark airport, we were about a half hour/forty-five minutes before the flight was supposed to take off, and they were like, “We’re not going to let you on.”
SM: “You’ve got to be here an hour before.” It was like the international terminal was closed at that point.
KS: Yeah, nobody was there. And then the plane sat on the tarmac for another hour and a half or something like that.
SM: Yeah.
KS: We didn’t get to go to London that time. But we took Bryan with us.
SM: To Munich.
KS: We were going to take him to London.
SM: Yeah.
KS: And then we couldn’t go so we said, “F--k it, we’ll take him to Munich.” And based on the festivals that we had gone to, you and I, they would offer us separate rooms, some places, because I was like, “Well, Scott’s got to go” ... and I guess they didn’t normally, back in the day Miramax didn’t do that and they were just, “Well, just the director goes because the festival pays for it.” But I was like, “Well, Scott’s got to go.” So I’d bring you and you’d stay in my room essentially, but it was our room. But all the places we went, like remember when we went to Japan, Tokyo? We went to the Tokyo Sundance and the room was f---ing massive.
SM: It was huge.
KS: It had those no-fog mirrors in the bathroom and the toilet did s--t to your ass and we were like, “What a world of wonders this is!” But every place was huge, so when we were going to Munich we were like, “Let’s bring Bry.” And they were like, “Um, you guys want more than one room?” And we didn’t want to be pushy — we’d got our foot in the door and we didn’t want to get thrown out of the business — so we were like, “No, we can all fit in one room.” And that was the first time we got into a room that was so f---ing small.
SM: It was super-small.
KS: The German idea of air-conditioning hopefully has gotten better, but back then it was basically a fan with an ice-cube in front of it. And three bodies in a tiny room in August with lame-ass air conditioning, it was f---ing terrible. And the mini-bar, the soda was warm.
SM: None of it was cold.
KS: The Coke didn’t even taste like Coke, it tasted like water with a black crayon in it, hot water with a black crayon in it. And it was just so cramped and horrible. It was the only festival that I remember that "Pulp Fiction" played at after Cannes, because Harvey decided, based on the Cannes win, to pull it out of every festival that they had scheduled it for. But Quentin really wanted to go to the Munich Film Festival, because I guess he’d been there with "Reservoir Dogs," so he wanted to go with this one. This was the only one he went to post-Cannes with Pulp Fiction. So he was there, and we hung out with him, but he was in a different f---ing world altogether. I remember we were bored and searching for s--t to do and Mosier hooked up with the jungfrau, what was the chick’s name? You don’t even remember, that’s sad. I remember the name of every person that ever looked at me naked and you’re just like, “Nah.”
SM: I’m not indifferent about it, I’m trying to remember.
KS: We called her jungfrau, which meant—
SM: For years you guys always called her jungfrau so when I think of her, I just think of jungfrau.
KS: Didn’t it mean virgin or young lady or something like that?
SM: Yeah.
KS: But she taught us a little German. Obdachlos.
SM: Homeless people.
KS: But she took a real shine to f---ing Mos, so Mos was hanging out with her a lot, getting f---ing busy with this Kraut broad, this fräulein.
SM: That’s how I wrote about her in my diary.
KS: “Dear Diary, plunged into the Kraut broad. It was awesome. With my Brat.” Me and Johnson, left to our own devices, like Johnson of course wanted to go to a death camp.
SM: Yeah.
KS: Dachau.
SM: But literally the hotel room was so small, it was that point where I was like, “Hey, you guys wanna not be in the room?”
KS: Totally, and we’re like, “Yeah, I guess we want to go to a death camp.” And this wasn’t even, I mean they’re all death camps, but Dachau was more prison camp, work camp. But there were ovens. But it was like German people don’t really like to talk about the Holocaust and [sarcastic] I’m sure that when Americans get there that’s all they want to talk about.
SM: I remember that when you go to a festival usually you have a handler, you have somebody—
KS: Like, “What do you want to do? You want to go to some places? We can hook you up.” And we were like, “Yeah, we want to go to Dachau.” And they were like, “Hmm, no. You don’t. You really don’t.”
SM: I remember her specifically saying, “You don’t want to go there right before a Q&A, you’ll be all depressed.”
KS: We had to come back and intro the film and do a Q&A and whatnot and she was just like, “You know, when you come back from there you’re not going to feel very funny, and it’d probably be best to go another day.” And I was like, “Well, this is the only day we can go really.” Which was kinda not true, but we really wanted to go. They wouldn’t hook us up with a ride, so we took a cab out there. And I remember the taxi driver walked around with us and his English was poor but our German was worse, so he wound up hanging out with me and Johnson, because you can’t always catch a cab out of Dachau.
SM: Exactly, it’s not like the airport.
KS: Exactly! They don’t have them all lined up and s--t. And it’s a very sobering affair as you’d imagine. That’s the one with “Arbeit macht frei,” “Work will make you free,” above the gates. We were walking around with this cab driver in a pretty solemn place, I mean even as much of a joker as Bryan is, you couldn’t have a sense of humor in that place.
SM: Yeah.
KS: We were walking around with this dude going like, “So, did you have relatives who…?” And he said, “I think. I think.” And we asked, “Did they ever tell you about it?” “In school they teach and we’d learn but no talk. They teach.” He was basically trying to communicate that — you imagine that in Germany they must sit around and go like, “God, we feel like such assholes” — but they put the past in the past, and try to move on. And every time an American arrives over there we’re like, “Let’s dredge up your horror.”
SM: “You guys are f---ed up! Why did you do that? God damn you’re f---ed up!”
KS: It was pretty sobering. Then we went back and did the Q&A and I was still able to be witty and whatnot. I just didn’t really address like, “Hey, I just got back from Dachau and boy am I f---ing tired!” The other thing we did in Munich was that Johnson had a camera, and apparently in Europe people just like to lay out naked.
SM: Yeah. There’s a river that went through Munich and so it’s hot and it was summer so there’s lots of… I do remember, that like three f---ing thirteen- year-olds, we f---ing scrambled up the rocks of the beach—
KS: To look at naked fräuleins, and took pictures too.
SM: Which ultimately means you’re looking at boobs and you’re looking at f---ing d--ks. Because inevitably you see a lot of skin and you just look over and sometimes it’s a girl and sometimes it was a dude.
KS: Most times it was a dude. There was one chick who looked like she was a burn victim or something and that was kinda a turn-off, we were trying to see some naked boobs and be like, “I don’t want to see those naked boobs.” That was sobering, that was solemn as well. Kinda like going to Dachau. But it was just a horrible f---ing trip to be crammed into that tiny hotel room. F---ing three of us, I remember we were so bored one night that me and Johnson started throwing glasses out the window.
SM: I remember that.
KS: We were on the sixth floor and just started whipping glasses out of the window.
SM: I’d been out and I think I came back and you guys are giggling.
KS: You’re like, “What have you guys been doing?” “We’ve been whipping glasses out into the back alley and they’ve been breaking.” And you’re like, “Yeah, I’ve just f---ed some German broad.” And we’re like, “Oh well, not all of us are that lucky.” That was a weird era, that whole ’94-’95. It’s going back over a decade now. I was living at the Universal Hilton [in L.A.], both of us were. First we were staying at Jim Jacks’ when we were doing the post-production, then he finally got tired of us and moved us up to the Universal Hilton.
SM: Yeah.
KS: The one that looks like a lot of glass. I started going out with Joey [Lauren Adams] at that point and so I was living there and dating her until we were done with the movie, and then I would go back home. Such a weird… really a lifetime ago. Since then I’ve got married, had a child, I never go back there, unless there’s some kinda speaking gig. I stayed there once in 2001 when we came out to do "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back," before I moved into the rental house, we stayed there one night. But doesn’t it seem like such a long time ago now at this point?
SM: It does seem like a long time ago.
KS: Is there s--t that will bring you right back to it? Like whenever I hear ‘Kissed by a Rose’, the Seal song, which was in "Batman Forever" which was out that summer, that immediately takes me back to that place. Not in a sentimental, I miss it, kinda of way, but it’ll just take me back to that time and place, that headspace where I was then. Because you’ve got to remember it’s a period before "Mallrats" came out and the studio was like, “This movie is going to make a lot of money, this movie—”
SM: “This is going to be huge.”
KS: “We’re going to be f---ing rich, we’re going to be famous, we’re gonna be…” And then the movie comes out and then f---ing nothing.
SM: “We’re not rich, we’re not famous.”
KS: We weren’t rich or famous.
SM: I remember that was the year that Braveheart came out.
KS: Was it? ’95?
SM: I just remember Dave and I, you were with Joey, and Dave and I were for some reason at the hotel and we walked up to City Walk and saw "Braveheart."
KS: Was a lot of City Walk-ing in those days.
SM: Yeah, ’cause it was very close by.
KS: Do you ever miss that period? Because now you’re an old man, you’ve been doing film for like thirteen years at this point.
SM: I am.
KS: Do you ever miss the days of wide-eyed wonder: “I can’t believe this is what we get to do for a living!” Because now we acclimate so quickly that it’s, “Now this is what I do.” And after you’ve been doing it for ten years, in our case thirteen, it’s just like, “This is what I do for a living.” And you still appreciate it but you’re not like, “I can’t believe this is happening to me!”
SM: Yeah.
KS: Because it’s like, “Well, you better believe it, because it’s been going on for a while.” Do you ever miss that?
SM: Not really. Nah. The bridge between being that way and then where I feel I’ve arrived at now — not that it’s not exciting — but that I like feeling acclimated to it, I like feeling that this is what I do, and I feel more comfortable with what I do, and more confident with what I do, so I don’t know, I don’t really—
KS: You don’t live in the past?
SM: No. Not at all.
KS: You’re a real today guy. Not even a forward-looker, just—
SM: I’m really bad about anything from the past, any box of s--t, you’re like, “Hey, it’s a box of s--t from ten years ago!” I’m just like, “Uh.”
KS: Oh, to me it’s treasure. “What would be in this box? Holy s--t, look at this!” I still have all my notes from high school and s--t.
SM: I think my mom has a box of s--t at her house that she’s always like, “What do you want to do with it?” And I’m like, “Ah, nothing.”
KS: You’re not even remotely interested in delving into it and finding the young Scott Mosier contained therein?
SM: Mostly it’s sports trophies, and she has my Varsity Letterman jacket and I’m always like…
KS: Wear it b--ch! That’d be hot if you walked around in your Varsity Letter jacket. People would be like, [enthusiastic] “What’s that all about?”
SM: And I’d be like, “Meh, I went to high school.”