Kevin Smith got his start as a writer and director by funding his first film Clerks by selling his beloved comic book collection and for what may be his final film he may be self-financing again.

Speaking with USA Today, Smith offered an update on the status of Clerks 3 and reiterated how, if he can’t get the money from his usual patron Harvey Weinstein he will gladly pay for the film himself rather than turn to crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter.

What’s the latest on Clerks 3?

Last week I finished the third draft, 120 pages. We’ve put together three different budgets for places to shoot, and we submit our cast list, our shooting schedule, the budgets and the script to Bob Weinstein tomorrow. I like Bob, but if he doesn’t like it and passes, then I get to go someplace else and try to finance it myself. Put my house up or something … not Kickstarter.

Oh, really? Why not?

I understand why Zach Braff and Rob Thomas wanted to do it, but I think I missed the boat on that. I had my moment. I went through the traditional route of old, where Miramax picked up my flick and introduced me to another world. That’s my story. I can’t, like, have this second story where I’m like, “And then, years later I started asking other people for money!”

I’m all for it and understand crowd-sourced financing very well. The audience that’s going to buy this stuff anyway is just there at the origin point. But that being said, when I need the audience’s money is when (the movie) comes out in theaters. If you’re making a movie where it’s like, “Thor’s going to punch The Hulk!” people will line up to throw money at you. But if your movie’s like, “This guy’s gonna talk to this guy about Thor punching the Hulk!” you’re not going to get as many people lining up.

There’s a bunch of cats like me looking to make their first film. You jump in there and soak up all that money as the big fish in that small pond, that’s money that’s not going to go to somebody who really needs it.

When I started, that would’ve been the time (to use Kickstarter). But now I know people with money, I’ve got access to money. And worst-case scenario, I can just put up my house.

While I think that some of Smith’s creative stumbles over the last several years could possibly be attributed to his waning interest in filmmaking, his enthusiasm for Clerks 3, and its implied return to his roots, bodes well for the film. And if he does put up the money for it himself, there may be a return of the first Clerks film’s rough-around-the-edges look and charm. However, I don’t think that it will come to that. Weinstein has always done what he can for Smith and outside of some of the controversy surrounding Dogma has always had the filmmaker’s back. I really don’t see him not wanting to fund Clerks 3 for Smith.

Kevin Smith’s two Clerks films are his most personal works, expressions of his own feelings about the direction of his own life at the time he made them. It is only natural, I supppose, that as he is looking to give up directing feature films he is also looking at possible alternate means of continuing the story of counter jockeys Dante and Randall outside of feature films.

Previously, Smith had said that he was toying with the idea of presenting Clerks 3 as a limited-run Broadway play, but he now states that he has abandoned that idea for either a movel that would be be published online chapter-by-chapter to allow for changes based on reader feedback or possibly as some form of web series. Smith does admit that a feature film is still where the real moneyy is at even though that would also come with creative restrictions.

Smith talked about the future of the proposed Clerks threequel Friday night when appearing on the What’s Trending? online show, sponsored by NewTek, the software firm behind the high-end Lightwave 3D animation software.

Smith’s comments on the possible future of Clerks 3 starts around the eleven-minute mark. I’ve transcribed them out after the video.

Back when I was trying to figure out how to do Clerks 3 to make it interesting for me, because that’s the thing, it ain’t gonna be interesting for anybody else unless I’m like “Oh my god, this is the thing I’m most in love with right now,” I was trying to figure out ways to recreate it and make it interesting rather than just simply doing a movie and stuff.

At one point I was thinking of it doing it on Broadway. I was like “You can do it as a limited run, man, six months” and somebody was like “If you do a six month Broadway run you will never make money, In fact, you’ll lose people money.” I was like “I didn’t know that,” so that went away.

One of the things I talked about was doing it episodically online which would be kind of fun for me, it would be a way of getting away from doing it with a studio. And then I thought about doing it that way but marrying it with something else… I want to do Clerks 3 as a book first. I want to do episodic chapters so that as I release it people can read the whole thing, see what would it look like. I get to go inside the character’s heads, I get to tell ‘Year One’ origin stories. The first chapter is Dante and Randall meeting in kindergarten and stuff like that. All the stuff that I can’t do in a movie.

I’m a stoner so I want to investigate the inner life of every character and I can’t do that in ninety minutes where people are like “You make some fucking Star Wars jokes, some dick jokes and then move the fuck on.” So in a book I can get in there and really be artistic with it and have fun with it and stuff.

And if I’m doing it in pieces, man, as opposed to just writing one big fat book, I’ll be honest with you, the audience is gonna influence it… I know a lot of people will be like “That’s ridiculous, it should be your artistic statement” but my whole thing, my leitmotif, my entire career has been about audience interactivity. Without the audience none of the Clerks stuff that leads to me sitting here with you ever happens.

So for me to kind of write it episodically and to let people read it chapter by chapter and then pipe in and say “Oh man, I can’t believe it’s this” it could actually allow me to change direction.

I know there’s a lot of people saying “Why would you want to, you’re an artist”, well now I’m a new media artist and a new media artist involves the audience. And that’s something that I’ve built for nearly 20 years at this point anyway.

It feels like I’m going to work on something that’s not a film, a film would be the ultimate expression of what Clerks 3 is meant to be, but if I’m working on this kind of book version of it, the inner life of the mind of the characters and what not, I think it will be fun to be influenced by the audience every step of the way.

First I thought about doing it as YouTube, then I thought about doing it as a book… the money will always be in doing it as a feature. If I want to get real creative, yeah, I’ll break it down and do it online, and yeah, I think it would catch on.

If I was doing it with myself and puppets it’d be one thing but I’ve got to do it with Brian O’Halloran, Jeff Anderson, Jason Mewes… so everyone gets a say and a lot of them, I’m sure would be like “Let’s do it where the money is, man” which would be doing it as a movie.

As he has been doing the interview rounds for his new book Tough Sh*t: Life Advice from a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good, Kevin Smith has been talking about his plans to retire from filmmaking once he completes in his planned hockey picture Hit Somebody. And for long time fans of the director that pronouncement has left them wondering about the Smith’s previously announced possibility of doing a third Clerks movie. Thanks to an enterprising fan who asked him exactly that question at a book signing, and then forwarded the video to Slash Film, we know what his intentions are – a stage play.

Smith launched his career in 1994 with the low-budget indie Clerks, in which two convenience store counter jockeys pass their workday dealing with surly customers and discussing pop culture. Part of the film’s success was Smith drawing on his own experiences working in the exact store that the film was shot. And while a majority of films were all set within the same “universe” as Clerks, he didn’t devote an another entire film to Dante and Randall until 2006′s Clerks 2. At the time and since then, he has stated that he always felt a kinship towards the characters and wanted to check in with them every so many years whenever he felt he had something personal to say about his own life.

Honestly, putting a third Clerks installment up on stage, as crazy as it sounds, does make a certain amount of sense. One of the criticisms Smith acknowledges that has been leveled at Clerks and to a lesser extent most of Smith’s films, is that the heavy amount of dialogue and little action made the film seem more stage-bound then cinematic. I’ve had discussions with friends who do regional theater about what it would take to mount a stage production of the first film. And it would make a rather interesting twist on the usual film-to-stage translations we have been seeing over the last several years.

Additionally, as Smith points out, Clerks star Brian O’Halloran has plied most of his acting career on the stage, so he would definitely be able to handle the differences between this and film work. Jeff Anderson and Jason Mewes might be more questionable as to how they would take to the repetition of a long stage run, and I imagine that their participation would be contingent to making this happen.