Kevin Smith
Kevin Smith
Kevin Patrick Smithis an American filmmaker, actor, comedian, public speaker, comic book writer, author, and podcaster. He came to prominence with the low-budget comedy Clerks, which he wrote, directed, co-produced, and acted in as the character Silent Bob of stoner duo "Jay & Silent Bob". Jay and Silent Bob have appeared in Smith's follow-up films Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma, and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back which were mostly all set in his home state of New Jersey. While not...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth2 August 1970
CityRed Bank, NJ
CountryUnited States of America
Keep your focus on what YOU want to do - not what anyone else wants or is doing. You lose time watching others succeed.
Why do my movies make people feel so dead inside?
I think it's better to have ideas. You can change an idea. Changing a belief is trickier. Life should malleable and progressive; working from idea to idea permits that. Beliefs anchor you to certain points and limit growth; new ideas can't generate. Life becomes stagnant.
One of the reasons I always looked up to [George] Carlin is he looked like your grandfather but, acted like your best friend. Most of the adults in my world were adults and acted like adults and had job-type jobs and bills and pressures and stopped playing a long time ago. And George Carlin was a guy that the more he aged the younger he seemed. It was odd because he was still sagely and wise. But he was such a role model for me.
Failure is success training.
It's not like someday my kid's gonna be standing over my grave, and somebody's gonna hang her a folded flag and say, 'You know what? This is 'cause he did 24 hours straight on Twitter.' But it's just one of those little personal victories, like, 'I wonder if I can do this.' And I did it. A stupid goal, but I accomplished it. Life's all about...for me, at least...having very stupid achievable goals. That way, you always feel like a winner.
One man's frankness is another man's vulgarity.
T-shirts and long pants make me easier to find in a crowd, but also easy to disappear in a crowd because if I am wearing this and suddenly I am not, it's like a Harry Potter invisibility cloak.
Indie film isn't dead, it just grew up.
I've always kind of ripped from real life to some degree or at least how I'm feeling in the moment. In fact, maybe that's really it. In anything I've ever written, all the characters sound like me, which I don't think is a bad thing.
We love dirty oral on the Down Low, but no going steady.
For years, my job was to make the movie inexpensively. And I could bring it in. What I can't control are the costs of marketing.
People tend to romanticize this job. So, it's fun to let the air out of it.
I'm always cribbing from real life. I'm not a very creative filmmaker.