Until now the name of writer/director Kevin Smith has meant little beyond the tight circle of fans of Smith's brash-but-provocative US youth-humour films: Clerks, Mallrats and Chasing Amy. However with his fourth, Dogma, Smith enters mainstream movie consciousness, with a film that through the hilarious treatment of its subject matter - God, faith and Catholicism - has provoked righteous outrage across the US. When Dogma was screened at the New York Film Festival, having been lauded at Cannes, 500 people turned up to protest.
Dogma, described as a comedy parable, turns the usual winged-good-guys cinematic approach to angels on its head in an inventive tour-de-force. Smith regulars Ben Affleck and Matt Damon (Smith produced Good Will Hunting) star as fallen angels Bartleby and Loki, banished from heaven aeons ago to Minnesota, and anxious to return home when they discover a loophole in Catholic dogma that promises to pardon all sins if they pass through a New Jersey church door celebrating its centenary.
As this would challenge God's infallibility, and thus existence itself, they must be prevented. With the help of Metatron (the Voice of God), played by Alan Rickman at his wackiest, and US comic Chris Rock as a black apostle irritated at being left out of the Gospel, pressure is put upon Bethany, a woman in the throes of a faith crisis, to help out the forces of good, aided (and thwarted) by a variety of celestial beings. The film begins with a disclaimer, along the lines of - hey guys, this isn't for real, only God can sit in judgment and, anyway, even he has a sense of humour. It was added, explains Smith, just before Dogma was shown at Cannes at the request of US distributors Harvey and Bob Weinstein of Miramax.
Smith wasn't keen to do it - as far as he was concerned if the audience didn't understand that it was all a big joke from the start, they would by the time "the rubber poopmonster" arrived on screen.
"But Harvey was receiving so much hate mail," he explains. "People would write and say this movie was a Jewish conspiracy against Christianity and that Harvey and Bob were these evil, money-hungry Jews that would do anything to make Catholics look stupid. Some of it had light anti-Semitism in it, but then you'd get letters that were flat out `you Jews better take that money that you stole from us and start investing in flak jackets because we're coming in with shot guns'. It was a very shaming period. It blows my mind because these people claim to represent a faith that is based on the teachings of a guy who is `tolerance everybody. Love one another as I love you. Do unto others as you would they do unto you'."
Kevin Smith ignores the sofas and assorted chairs on offer in the Dorchester Hotel where we meet, and sprawls his fairly vast body over the floor, his dark-bearded head barely visible above the coffee table. If you've ever seen a Kevin Smith movie, you will know him. Hitchcock might have made an ironic appearance in his films; Smith, as the taciturn half of the duo Jay and Silent Bob, is right in the front line. Jay and Silent Bob he describes as "constants" in his movies. "Sometimes you have characters that actually grow and learn things, but these characters aren't meant to ever grow or learn anything, because they represent a large cross-section of the population who don't grow . . . They're just creatures of the id. They just say what they want. There's no moral barometer."
As is clear from even the briefest conversation, Kevin Smith himself is an exceptionally moral, if unconventionally moral, young man. Dogma is a project that he has nurtured for a long time, certainly preClerks, and the research is based on years, he says, of being "a theological nut". There is little angel lore in the Bible, he explains. Most of it comes from other Judaic writings, accepted by the Christian church, but is "not part of its core dogma", he says. Smith feels he has done his best to understand those who attack him, to the extent of joining protesters on one occasion in his home town of Redbank, New Jersey, where he'd been told that a crowd of 500 was expected. "Five hundred in New York is one thing, but in suburban New Jersey?" He decided to go along.
"I wanted to be there to see what makes people come out in 40-degree weather to protest about the movie." But he was not interested in confrontation and went along incognito, complete with placards, reading "Dogma is dog shit," and "To hell with Dogma".
"A woman from the local paper came over, looked at me, and said, `Are you him?' And I said, `No, no.' `Are you sure?' `Yea, I get that all the time.' And I told her how upset I was at the movie. She said, `Your sign's a little extreme' and I said, "The movie's a little extreme and I won't be seeing it.' " He came away realising that "these were not bad people, just people with a totally different value system. They hadn't seen the film and were reacting solely to what they had been told. They were told about a different movie than the one that exists. Granted, the median age of the crowd was 55 to 60, so these people probably wouldn't get past the profanity; the fact that we say f**k in the movie and it's a movie about God immediately makes it blasphemy. But if you could remove all the cursing I don't think they would have had as much of a problem. Blasphemy is when you mock God and the movie doesn't mock God, it actually puts God on a very high pedestal."
When Dogma was screened at the New York Film Festival, Smith asked his parish priest along, but he didn't come in the end as he thought the clerical collar would make him an easy target. "I suggested he wear a sweater but he said no. But he said bring me a tape and I'll watch it." Since then the priest has been under pressure from a variety of "Catholic leagues", Smith says, to denounce the film from the pulpit but has refused. He has been told of other local parishes that have succumbed to pressure and instructed their congregations to sign petitions "to stop Disney from making further nonsense".
The involvement of Disney has been a major factor in the whole controversy, Kevin Smith believes, although Disney is no longer on board. "The truth was that Disney were not really comfortable with it. They never said drop it, but we said, look it doesn't look like being with them is doing us much good. Being with them is what's attracting all this negative attention to the movie. It's not the fact that it's this movie, it's the fact that Disney has made this movie. So if we get away from them and they get away from us, no harm, no foul, it's probably the best for all concerned. And having Disney being weak-kneed and iffy about the whole thing wasn't going to help."
AS for Smith's relationship with the Almighty and his own congregation, things are pretty much OK. His daughter was baptised a month ago and he hopes to "raise her Catholic - my kind of Catholic, which might not be the kind of Catholic the Catholic church would want. It's always been something that's been dear to me. But I don't really need the church to celebrate. What is important is my faith. But it's nice, it's like a club house, we all get together and we all believe in the same things, ostensibly at least, when it comes to the issue of faith. I'm just a guy sitting in a pew," says Smith. "I quietly go to church every Sunday and quietly leave. Nobody screams `Satan's here, Satan's here' and the ceiling doesn't collapse."
Dogma opens at selected cinemas on December 26th