In the original ending of Clerks, Dante dies. What made you change your mind?

It was a guy named John Pierson, an indie film rep, and the guy who took our film to the majors. He’d sold Richard Linklater’s first film Slacker, Michael Moore’s first film, Spike Lee’s first film, She’s Gotta Have It, he eventually got with us.

And he said, “The one thing that hurts this movie terribly is you fall in love with these guys over the course of 90 minutes, and then you shoot one of them for no apparent reason apart from you don’t know how to end the movie.” And I was like, “You’re kind of right, man!”

History was made. Thank God, or I wouldn’t have been able to make Clerks 2. Or else Clerks 2 would’ve had to have begun with Randal reading the Necronomicon over Dante’s grave, and a hand coming up, and he helps his buddy up and they start talking about sex and Star Wars.

In Clerks 2, there’s a donkey sex show at the end. How do you go from not knowing how to end a movie, to making one of the weirdest movie endings ever?
I don’t know! When I saw The Bachelor Party as a kid I was captured by the notion of the donkey show, which I assumed was an urban legend! I wanted to do my own version of it, which would lead people down the road where they think it would be a chick fucking the donkey, when really it’s the a guy blowing and fucking a donkey, so spin it a little bit – askew that view – which is what we did back in the day.

And then it occurred to me that it should be the romantic culmination of the entire story happens while this is going on, because that’s as it occurred to me. I didn’t think, ‘I guess it’d be more appropriate for this to take second place to this’. Sometimes that moment in your life happens while someone’s blowing a donkey in the background… so I went for that.

Have you had a similar moment in your life?
Kind of, but not the exact same thing. It was the first time me and my wife fucked, but before we fucked we were fooling around… She was lying in my lap, face-up, and at this point I’m still like, ‘She’s probably just being nice, she doesn’t wanna kiss me.’ So it takes me another hour to work up the nerve to kiss her, ’cause the whole time, I was thinking, ‘If I bend down and kiss her, my gut’s going to push her head off my lap,’ so I’m sucking it in for an hour.

So she flips on top of me and we start dry-humping, I’m wearing jeans and a shirt, grinding for 45 minutes, just making out with my hands up her shirt, and down her backside, over her panties, up her panties, not at her thing yet but we’ll get there, it’s all slow and she ain’t doing the reach-up but that’s cool, and I’m probably going to get at least a hand job. And she gets up to go to the bathroom, and I realise I’ve been hurting for the last 20 minutes, so I open up my pants and my cock’s cut open right under the head. We’d been grinding so hard that inside my jeans, the metal part of the fly had essentially hacksawed right under my dick, so I had this big, open cut. And it fucking hurt.

Meanwhile, things are clearly pointing in a boudoir direction. At that point, I was like, ‘What do I do, man?’ I was in agony, but if I blow this shot I might never get this shot again. So I go in, and we start making out, and I think, ‘Maybe I can just eat her out and she’ll cum and we can save this for another time.

But it turns out she’s a fucker. And she’s like, “Fuck the foreplay, I like to fuck.” And I’m faced with this moment – I don’t even carry condoms, and she’s not pushing condoms – but I have an open wound on my dick, which at this point is a little bloody, and who knows who this chick is, everything they taught us in family life class is, ‘Don’t do this without a condom, don’t have sex with a stranger, particularly if you’re sporting an open wound.’ But I was like, “She’s too pretty, man.” And it was like sticking my dick into battery acid. It was less pleasurable and more painful than anything else, which was a great metaphor for the relationship somehow.

So we went at it and got to the moment of truth, but I was in absolute agony. I couldn’t see because I was up inside, and my gut’s too big anyway, but in my mind’s eye I’m just seeing my dick going inside and then breaking off because the head is hanging on by a tether. So that moment bound me to that woman for the rest of my life. It was the most amazing sex, she was the prettiest woman I’d ever known, I found her so fucking fascinating, and those fucking ears – come on. So I was in love, but I was in absolute fucking agony.

But then later on I’d get an anal fissure and that hurt way more. So I did have a moment where something beautiful was happening where something ugly was happening, particularly irresponsible! Fucking somebody without a condom with an open wound? But the story has a happy ending because we’ve been married for almost a decade, and we have a ten-year-old daughter, and neither of us had a disease. But if you just tell the first part it’s a teacher’s nightmare, particularly if you’re a health teacher!

Bringing you onto something more horrible – in Mallrats, Brodie gives Brandi’s dad a ‘stinkpalm’. Has a fan ever given you a stink palm?
If I did I don’t know about it. There have been some who’ve been like, “I stinkpalmed you!” And I’m like, “Thanks”. And they’re like, “I’m kidding”. But I always carry a little bottle of that hand sanitiser, you know, the stuff you rub on your hands and it kills 99 per cent of germs.

What about that one per cent?
I’m hoping that winds up in my mouth so I get sick. No, I don’t know what happens; hopefully it goes onto the hand of the next person I shake.

Does it gross you out to think you have 1 per cent of faecal matter on your hands?
I just expect it, I’ve usually got 15 per cent on my hands at all given times of my own, so I couldn’t pooh-pooh it, if you will.

For Dogma, you received a lot of hatemail…
I did, but not me personally, more so the whole movie, and definitely the Weinstein brothers, because they were an easy target since they’re Jewish. And most of these pro-Christian groups – they’re all Christian groups that attacked us, but not quite the Christians that I’m used to dealing with, the Christians that I believe Christ intended – saw any opportunity to say it’s a Jewish conspiracy.

Most of the 300,000 pieces of paper were directed at Harvey and Bob. The one that will stick with me until the end of time is one that said, “You Jews better take that money you’ve stolen from us and invest it in flak jackets, because we’re coming in with shotguns. Signed, your brothers in Christ…” I mean, wow!

I was encouraged to not engage with those people, which is weird, because if Dogma happened today, you know I’d be like Twittering it. I’d be like, “Look at this piece of hatemail!” They got the authorities involved, like they put metal detectors into the Palais for our screening. There was one scary moment where someone put a brick through a fucking window at our house.

Zack And Miri Make A Porno was almost refused an R rating. How did you react when you found out?
I don’t get outraged, I’m just like, “Again?” Because this has happened now 3 times. We got an NC17 on Clerks and then we had to fight that and flipped it to an R without making a cut. That’s the key. You can always cut to make a rating, but if you’ve got what you want then you don’t want to lose the cool shit, and the MPA rates the cool shit essentially – the shit that I feel is cool – that’s the naughty thing. And I’m like, “But yeah, that’s what makes it good.” And they’re like, “Yeah, but if we didn’t have this rating on it, everyone would do it.” And I’m like, “Everyone should do it!” And that’s where the argument is.

So, when I got the NC-17 on Clerks and then we reversed it without making any cuts, it set a nice precedent for us, where I was like, “This can be argued down. You just have to apply logic to it.”

Have you ever been tempted to make your own porno?
No… because, look at me!

In your new book, you said that if you’d been 18 and someone had come into your shop to ask you to star in one, you would’ve considered it!
Yes, but it all was predicated on, ‘How thin am I?’ At 18 I wasn’t as fat as I am now. I don’t even take my shirt off in the fucking shower, so the notion of making porn... I tell you, I’d have an easier time shooting my wife having sex with somebody than I would shooting myself having sex with my wife. Because then I’d watch it and be like, “This would be an excellent porno if it wasn’t for the fat, sweaty fucker in the middle!” I can appreciate her form, but my form not at all. It’d be a true turn-off.

Do you literally never take your shirt off?
Yeah...

But you do for having sex, obviously
No... I’m one of those guys, and every once in a while she’ll push my shirt up and be like, “I wanna feel your skin” and I’m like, “No! None of that.”

But you’ve been married for a while
I know, but I’m afraid she’s gonna find out I’m fat, I guess!

Does she mind?
About what, me being fat?

No, keeping your shirt on!
She does, it bugs her. She’s like, “I wish you would just take your shirt off.” It’s funny, because I watch movies and the sex scene always begins with the dude, two hands across him pulling the shirt off, and I’m like, “That’s so foreign to me; that’s like watching Martians fuck, like a bizarre mating ritual.” So she encourages me but I can’t do it.

Does she ever run up behind you and try to take it off?
No, I think I’d divorce her. I think I’d be like, “That’s it, that was the line.”

Zac and Miri don’t take their shirts off in the film
No! I mean, well look, Elizabeth, when we first sat down was like, “How much nudity do I have to do.” And I was said, “Look man, I ain’t about showing your fucking tits, that’s not why I’m hiring you. I think you could pull this part off so we’ll do as much or as little as you’re comfortable with. I don’t give a shit; I’m sure we’ll have plenty of nudity, I’m sure we don’t have to see your rack at all. Plus, it ain’t very big, what are we going to showcase?”

So I wrote into the dialogue that he would say, “No, you can keep your shirt on.” And that was more about him protecting her modesty. But then she says, “Are you going to take off your shirt?” And he goes, “No, I’m just going to open it like this.” And that’d be a move of mine – that’s why I wear layers! And she goes, “You aren’t going to take it off? Why?” And he goes, “My tits are bigger than yours!” And that’s my line, too. Seth’s tits aren’t bigger than Elizabeth’s, but mine are bigger than my wife’s.

There’s some Jay and Silent Bob slash fiction on the internet. Have you read any?
I read one piece of it once. We’re hanging out in front of the store, I went in and bought wraps, Dante said something sarcastic, Randal chased us away, we go behind the store and get high with apparently a strain of weed we’ve never had before, look longingly at one another and so on.

It sounds like you’ve recounted this story a lot!
I read it once about 10 years ago and I still remember it to this day, because I was like, ‘Why would anyone do this? Like why would anyone waste their time? Who wants to see these two characters fuck? Nobody, this is terrible!’ It was well-written but I was like, “Wow, what a colossal waste of time. And I was like, ‘If it was going to happen, they wouldn’t look longingly at each other, it’d be like, Silent Bob would say, you wanna do it?’ And that’d be that, it’d be very rote and mechanical, so when they did a very erotic version of it, it was a little far-fetched.

You’re currently promoting your book of Smodcasts. You speak a bit about meeting Scott Mosier at film school and not wanting to talk to him because he was too pretty!
I think it’s the yin-yang of us that work very well. We’re very, very different people, he’s such an outdoorsy type. Back in the day I was all fire and shit and he was never that guy. He was sober and laid-back, sober yin to my raging yang.
Where do your ideas come from for the Smodcast?

Basically we just start talking and go from there or periodically, if I see something online I’ll bookmark it. But we haven’t done a lot of that in the last half of the run. Everything from post-Zack And Miri, which I think would be from December, has been less about, “Hey, what’s in the news,” and more about us generating.

Now I’m fucking stoned all the time it’s easy to generate. As ridiculous as it was before, now I’m high all the time, and he’s getting the contact high because he’s in the room and he’s getting goofier. I remember when I first started smoking weed on Smodcast a bunch of cats said, “Whoa, this is the end of it, it’s not funny now, he’s just stoned now.” And I’m like, “You’re idiots! It’s funnier now! I’m a huge Smodcast fan and the high kid is much funnier than the not-high kid!”

If you both had to be characters in Harry Potter, what would you pick?
I’d be Ginny Weasley, because she eventually marries Harry Potter. Harry Potter would be an amazing fuck because he’s the boy who lived! You know what I’m saying? You know he’s going to fuck like the boy who lived, like a legend. Which is weird, because you’d imagine I’d want to be Harry Potter because I’d be the one fucking well, but I wanna cum well. That’s the way I rock, I’m not a top, I’m a bottom. I just want stuff done to me.

What would your name be?
Grimsbutt. It sounds, number one British, and number two Potterish. It’s Grimsbutt, and in the States they’d call him Grims.

You like butts!
I think if I was playing a character my ass would be so noticeable I’d have to include ‘butt’ in the name!

In your book, you said you’d give a hand job to a dying boy just so you’d have something to talk about on Smodcast.
Hahahahahaha! Was that the excuse I gave? Hahahahahaha! Somebody asked me a really telling question recently. They were like, “Is your life just a series of stories, then?” And I was like, “You know what, I don’t think everything in my life is a story, but because I’m a storyteller by nature, even the mundane things become a story.” Some things are more exciting than others, like an anal fissure or first-time sex, or working with Bruce Willis, but also the mundane things in life are cool too.

You mention incest in the book, and ask if Scott would commit incest with an imaginary sister. Have you ever been tempted into incest?
It was based on an Australian couple who did – I haven’t. My mum looked like me, I have my mother’s child-bearing hips, so I couldn’t be attracted to my mother because I’d be attracted to myself and I’m so not – I’m repulsed by myself! I have a sister who’s very attractive but I don’t want to fuck my sister. I’m sure she has a sexual identity because she has children, but I don’t see her that way.

Even women that you’re friends with and think, ‘I never wanna fuck them,’ one time or another, it’s been, ‘I wonder what you look like naked.’ But I’ve never had that with my sister. I’ve never understood those people that are like, “Oh, I used to look at my sister when I was getting changed.” I was like, who would wanna see their sister’s pussy? Ewwww. I got lines, apparently. Child fucking and incest – those are my lines. And animal fucking I’m not into either.

What’s the most depraved thing you’ve ever done?
A girl took a leak on me once, but it was more awkward. She was like, “I wanna do this.” And I was like, “Alright.” And she did it. In theory it always sounds like a good idea, but trying to do it... trying to piss on somebody is tough, especially in a position. Like normally, particularly women, are sitting down on the toilet and it’s easy to piss. But she was in a top-mount position and it was just, it sounded like a hotter idea than at the time, because the next five minutes was like, “Hold on, hold on, wait, oh no, it keeps going back up.”

And the raw, sexual, ‘Let’s abandon all our wits’ feeling is gone. And I’m like, “Are you sure you don’t want to go to the bathroom, or I’ll run the water for you, or dip your finger in cold water? Let’s get this going and get back to where we were.” So it was kind of depraved and then it again turns into a fucking story, sadly.

Was it pleasurable when it happened?
No, but it wasn’t unpleasurable either, it’d just become so mechanical at that point, it was about just let’s see the end already, it was like the end of The Sopranos.

Have you had any hatemail from Smodcast?
No, never, I get a lot of lovemail because of Smodcast! I get invited a lot of places, someone at Seaworld was like, “Come here and I’ll show you the fucking backstage,” and someone at Kelloggs was like, “If you wanna come do the tour, we can put you on the tour.” So it opens up weird doors. I can do all these weird things I’ve dreamed of doing or we’ve talked about on Smodcast. I guess we have to careful what we talk about because people can be like, “Hey, we’ll help you with that.”

Do people recognise you more as Kevin Smith or Silent Bob
Silent Bob, hands down. The ones who call you “Bob” throughout conversation, even when you’re like, “Hi, I’m Kevin.” They’re like, “Alright, so Bob, when you were in that movie Bob, you were so funny Bob, you know, Bob…” I don’t bother correcting them at that point; I’ll forever be Bob to them.

Are you still working on Red State, about the religious Phelps family?
Yes, trying. We haven’t had luck finding money; it’s an uncommercial venture at best so it’s been tough finding cash.

What fascinates you about Fred Phelps?
Um, he’s so paternal and yet so... I mean, look. I’m not going to say he’s evil, but he’s so outside the mainstream, so marginalised, you know what I’m saying? I mean, his views are beyond extreme, they’re ridiculously extreme. The whole country’s founded on, ‘Say what you want, you’re allowed to say whatever you want.’ So because we’re the United States you have to afford that dude a voice, and he’s the exception that proves the rule. It’s a strong reminder of the republic we live in, but then it’s like, ‘What kind of universe do we live in that this man would wanna put this bile into the world?’

So sure, it’s legitimate and legal, but it’s immoral, it’s absolutely immoral and the dude preaches on behalf of the immoral, and I’ve never seen an instance where someone so immoral maintained they were so moral.

Have you been to any of his parades? Will your movie be fictional?
No, it’s more fictional. The one thing you know about the Phelps family if you read anything about them is how litigious they are – they’re a family full of lawyers. So I’m not getting real close. I felt bad it was kind of based on Fred Phelps, but they can’t sue me for that. When you see what we do in our version of the story, they wouldn’t wanna be that’s us! Because they’d be admitting to some heinous things.

How are you getting on with your next film, A Couple Of Dicks?
It comes out in February. It’s all done, well, my first cut’s done – an hour and 44 minutes. We’ll show it to the studio and then we’ll go on to testing from there, or the studio will be like, “You fucked it up, go back to the drawing board.” I think it’ll be the former.

Do you have any funny stories about Bruce Willis?
I don’t think he’s seen anything that I’ve ever done, because if he did he’d see i’m not the director he’s used to working with. I’m not professional – I don’t make films so much as rip open the chest pull out chunky fatty bits of heart, put it on the platters and project it. He makes movies, like hardcore movies, traditional movies, so he’s used to dealing with pros.

I came up to him at one point during this car scene on a sound stage, because we couldn’t shoot it in the real world, we got blue screens around us, we’ve just done the master and we’re going into his close-up, and I was like, “Bruce, we’ll be coming in from one of these.” And he was like, “What lens?” And I was like, “Whatever lens does one of these.” And he was just like, “What do you mean?” And I said, “I don’t know my lenses.” And the dude was white.

He was shocked and appalled, and he goes, “You don’t know your lenses?” I come over and he goes, “Don’t ever tell anybody in this business that you, a director, doesn’t know your lenses man, people might not respect you for that!” And I said, “Dude nobody respects me now, i’m kind of a joke as a director, it’s a widely-agreed upon joke, and it’s an even funnier joke that 15 years in I don’t know my lenses. So it’s cool, everyone knows, they’re fine with he.”

He was not fine with it, he was appalled! The dude was just like, it was the moment like, ‘Is it too late to get out of this picture? This kid doesn’t know anything at all!’

Did you ask him to do anything he didn’t want to do?
I asked him to do a David Addison from Moonlighting, and I can’t say he didn’t want to but he gave me the slow head turn and wide smirk of, “Did you honestly just ask me to turn in a performance I turned in 25 years ago?” I said, “I just want this reaction you did in an episode of Moonlighting where Maddy’s dad was cheating on Maddy’s mum.” And he was like, “Do you think I remember that?” And he’s like, “Go back to the monitor Kevin, and let’s see what we can do.” And he fucking did it, turned it in, it was a Moonlighting performance and for that moment he was David Addison, and it was delicious, it was awesome. You could tell he didn’t want to do it but inside I think maybe he did wanna do it. At first he took the actor’s stance of, ‘Ugh’.

We’ve got a scene in the movie where they do a David and Maddy, he and Tracy Morgan are walking down the hallway talking over one another at the same time having the same conversation but not listening to each other like they did every week in Moonlighting. It was delightful, it was the greatest fucking shoot day of the movie, where I was like, “Oh my God, if I could go back in time and tell the 14-year-old me that i’m going to shoot a version of this with the guy, it just ain’t going to be a chick, it’d be a dude with another dude,” my head would explode.

I’d be like, “Who are you?” “I’m you in the future.” “Why do you get so fat?” “We don’t take care of ourselves, but you get to work with Bruce Willis.” “Well fuck you, you should take off some weight, or this future can never come to pass.” And I kill my future self. I’ve watched a little too much Terminator...

What are you doing next?
The one i’m gearing up to is Hit Somebody, the hockey movie. It’s based on a Warren Zevon song called ‘Hit Somebody (The Hockey Song)’ and it’s written by Mitch Albom, the guy that wrote Tuesdays With Morrie and those books, and it’s a story song. Some songs are just like, “I love youuuuu” over and over, but I like songs that tell a story, like The Brady Bunch theme song. This song is like that, a three-act structure tells a story of a character’s life and it washes over me like a flick and I feel I can bring something to it, because I identify with the subject matter in a big way.

So I got into it with Mitch, where I was like, “Dude I’d like to turn this into a movie.” So we kicked off a friendship and suddenly the movie’s moving closer and closer to fruition. December is when I have my first big break after A Couple Of Dicks and the press tour and the shows I’ve been doing all fall. In December I go home and start writing the script, and God willing next year we go into production.