Give Kevin Smith a microphone and he will invariable turn to talking about some of his upcoming projects the filmmaker has in the pipeline. Last night at San Diego Comic Con was no exception, as the director updated the crowd at his spotlight panel on a couple of films he currently has in development.
At the start of his annual two-hour gab fest/Q&A which closes out Saturday’s programming day in the Con’s fabled Hall H, Smith made note of a couple of comics projects he had coming from both Marvel and DC Comics, as well as a Clerks II bluray steelbook to commemorate the film’s 20th anniversary.
Smith also mentioned that he will be getting back behind the camera before the end of the years.
“We’re making a movie in November but I can’t tell you what it is,” he said somewhat coyly, offering no further information or clues.
He was much more talkative about two other projects he has been developing for the last several years.
Dogma 2
A question about his in-development sequel to his 1999 religious satire Dogma led Smith to contemplate the issue he had in coming up with a story for the follow-up now that he feels that he is no longer the angry young man he was three decades ago when he wrote the first film.
Can you possibly write a sequel to Dogma if you’re not angry like that like you used to be? I don’t really have anything to be angry about anymore. Life worked out well for me. I get to make movies, not always very expensive ones, very cheap ones. But I still get to do the thing that I dreamed about doing and then other cool things, like writing comics. So really, no right to be angry. So for a long time I’ve been quiet about shit,
But I’ve finally found something I’m angry about, that meant the world to me, and it’s slipping away from me. As much as I cared about the faith of my father and the faith of my mother, all that time I spent as a believer, I was like what do I have that I feel that way about now? And I figured it out. And because of it, the screenplay is fire. It’s so angry, but not in a shitty way where you’re like “Oh my god, this ain’t going to be entertaining.” It’s funny as fuck, and the Jay and Silent Bob stuff really took a jump. They were always going to be funny but this week I saw something that made me go “That’s going into the fucking movie.”
I can’t wait to share with you all. I’m writing it now. We won’t even start working on it until the earliest 2027. But I promise you, if I’m going to step up to the plate with another Dogma, it has to matter as much as the other one. I’ve met people for almost the last thirty years who tell me what that movie meant to them, whether they were raised Catholic or not. It’s crazy, I get them from all sides. There are people who are like “That’s the movie that brought me closer to Christ” and I’m like “Seriously?” But then there are people who are like “That’s the movie that set me free from all that religious bullshit.”
So I know the movie has weight to it. I know of everything I’ve done, that movie has the most prestige to it and had the most on its mind. Probably the most inventive, creative thing I ever did. So the idea of “Alright, let’s do it again,” I don’t enter into lightly. And I’ve hit a place where I’m like “Oh, this is going to make it worth it.”
Everyone who was in the original one who wants to come back they can. I’ll write them into it. I love this subject too much to lay it on the shoulders of who came before it, because that’s a lot of pressure… I have something to say very important for the first time in a long time and I can’t wait to share it with you, but its going to take minute, but we’ll get there kids.
Moose Jaws
Smith also addressed the standing of another long gestating project, Moose Jaws, the final installment of his so called “True North” trilogy following Tusk and Yoga Hosers.
It’s a very low budget horror movie. It’s Jaws but with a moose instead of a shark. We almost had the money, we were so close, but then it went away. We’ll get there, I’m patient. It’s the only thing that’s been bugging me. I don’t have any regrets about my career, I love everything I’ve done. But now, I’m like “Man, I wish I had been a more commercial filmmaker. I wish I had put more thought into making money.”
Money was always the last thing. Money’s the easiest thing to drop if you’re trying to get the movie made. The most important thing was making the thing. So if it’s like “We need five million” and they’re like “You’ll never get it,” “OK, we can do it for one” and they’re like “Holy shit, here!” So doing that means you get the movie made but it also means I don’t have a stockpile of cash that I live on. I wish I did, because Moose Jaws would be done by now. I wouldn’t be out there, hat in hand going “You want to give me money for that moose movie?”
I believe that we’ll get there. In a world where they’ve made Cocaine Bear, they have to make Moose Jaws one day.
