It's not easy to talk to Kevin Smith about his movies without touching on subjects not normally covered in a family newspaper. That's not so much because of anything you'll see on screen - Smith's films don't have any violent shoot-outs, and the sex scenes are relatively tame. His characters usually spend all their time sitting around, talking about sex, relationships and pop culture. But it's the frankness of the sex talk which sets them apart. The most memorable scene in his foul-mouthed, hilarious debut, Clerks, involved an accidental (and off screen) bout of necrophilia - not the kind of thing you're likely to see on Friends.
"That's the beauty of it, that's why I'm attracted to it," says the laid-back, goatee-ed, New Jersey-born director, who regularly crops up in his own films as the enigmatic Silent Bob. "To me the conversations I have in my flicks are conversations I have with my friends all the time. But you never see it on the screen, where people always talk euphemistically. Call it what it is, it's f***ing. Going down on broads is a fascinating topic, and that's the kind of thing I like to see people talking about on screen."
In his latest film, Chasing Amy, the third part of his "Jersey Trilogy", Smith portrays a slightly more adult romantic situation than the one in Clerks. Ben Affleck plays Holden, a successful comic-book artist who falls in love with fellow-artist Alyssa (Joey Lauren Adams), who happens to be a lesbian. Ignoring the warnings of his homophobic co-writer Banky (Jason Lee), Affleck sets out in pursuit of Adams, but the romantic triangle which ensues proves to be more complicated than he suspected.
Already a big indie hit in the US, Chasing Amy marks a return to critical and commercial favour for the director after his second movie, the bigger-budget slacker farce Mallrats, which never made it into cinemas on this side of the Atlantic. "Mallrats is a funny little flick - the only problem with it was that Clerks came first," says Smith. "People looked at it and said well this isn't Clerks, as if Clerks was Shakespeare or something."
Chasing Amy has given him the chance to reinstate some of the scenes that Universal, Mallrats' backers, deemed too risque for a mainstream audience. "What we call the Jaws scene in Chasing Amy, where they talk about going down on people and getting scars, was originally in Mallrats, but the studio were saying that people would be walking out of the theatres, and we had to take it out."
This time Smith has gone back to the low-low budget level of Clerks to hold on to complete control, shooting Chasing Amy for a meagre $250,000. "For me it works out better. My job is always the same, regardless of budget. Chasing Amy was an easy movie to make for that kind of money." He admits that it helps that he's not particularly interested in the visual aesthetics of film. "It may seem like a horrible thing to say, because film's supposed to be a visual medium, but I'm more interested in what's being said and in the characters than in getting the tricky shot."
There's a common thread running through Smith's male characters that it seems must be rooted in autobiography. Just as in Clerks, the central male character in Chasing Amy is unhealthily obsessed by his lover's past, and particularly by her adolescent exploits at high school. It's a rather bleak portrait of the psyche of the young American male.
"This is probably the closest character to myself that I've created," he agrees. "I never fell in love with a lesbian, but I was the guy who really had a problem dealing with someone's past. The movie was therapeutic in a way in getting past that. There's nothing worse than looking into someone's eyes and seeing their hurt, anger and pain as you're asking them to disavow their past.
"Also, it's a fear of comparison, of how to compete with someone's memories. I grew up in a fairly small suburban community, where pretty much everyone went to the same school, and you ended up dating people who other friends had dated. So you'd have guys walking up to you and saying `I had your lady'. It's only later in life that you realise it doesn't matter, and that somebody's past should be celebrated, because it's what brought them here to you."
There has been some criticism from lesbians of the depiction of Amy's sexuality, he admits. "I asked Guinevere Turner (writer/director of the lesbian comedy Go Fish), who's a friend of mine, and she said some people liked it, and thought I was on the money most of the time. The more academic lesbians thought I was the antichrist, because I was maintaining that the lesbian lifestyle was throwaway, that all it takes is one good guy . . . To me that was ridiculous. We have the buffoon in the film saying that line about what she needs is one good guy.
"One of the things that irritated me first of all when the film was released, was that it seemed that straight women were picking up the flag for gay women and finding the movie offensive. One straight woman said to me that she thought the reason Alyssa has a tear in her eye at one point is because she's crying for her last shot at heterosexuality. Of all the messages that I didn't want in the film, that's right at the top!"
It seems, I suggest, that lesbianism has been incorporated into mass popular culture in the 1990s as a hip and harmless lifestyle choice in a way that male homosexuality has not. "That was one of the things that fascinated me and caused me to write the flick. Women can be friends and cross a line and sleep with their best friend, and the next day there's no fallout. They'll tell their friends, and it becomes an anecdote: `What were we thinking of?'
"That would never happen with guy-guy friends. If you're hanging out with a guy, and one night you accidentally wind up sleeping with each other, the next day the fallout is tremendous. Who invented that rule? It's bizarre. It's not like I'm fighting for the right to be able to sleep with a man if I want, but it's interesting that it's OK for a woman. I think in the end it really comes down to a penetration issue."
Smith laughs at the notion that two hit movies in three years, both of them made for peanuts, must have made him a considerable profit. "I wish they had. Miramax (the financiers), God love 'em, really know how to handle the books. If you look at the on-paper figures for Clerks, we probably still owe them money. I love Miramax to death, and I wouldn't want to make movies anywhere else, but business is f***ing business, and sooner or later an audit is in order here. I go around the world and find out that so many people have seen Clerks, and I've gotta ask `Where's the money gone?' That's why you take those writing gigs, man, because that's where the money is. You sit there and write a script and that's half a million dollars."
He has written drafts for a blockbuster version of the Six Million Dollar Man, and is credited as one of the writers on the forthcoming Superman Lives!, directed by Tim Burton. "It's nice, because the money's pretty wonderful, and in the case of Superman it was, wow, we're finally going to get a big comic book movie, but now Tim Burton has screwed that up. It's great, though, to give movies like that some good dialogue, rather than the crappy one-liners they have most of the time."
While he's happy to accept the writing jobs, Smith isn't interested in directing a big budget studio picture. "I was offered an Eddie Murphy movie to direct, and that would have been two million dollars, which gives one pause for thought, but I don't think I could direct someone else's script. You do think, though - two million bucks, and all I have to do is sit there and go `Cut! Beautiful, Eddie! Let's move on'. But I couldn't do that. When you're writing and directing, you're trying to bring your own vision to it. Studios have a way of mucking about, making film by committee, and that really dilutes what you're trying to do."
Chasing Amy opens at the IFC next Friday.