Back in February of last year, Kevin Smith announced that he’d be returning to the View Askewniverse, not with the long-planned Clerks 3 or Mallrats sequel series, but with Jay and Silent Bob Reboot. After recovering from his recent heart attack, Smith is now in final preparation on the movie ahead of an August shoot, and during a recent live Q&A, the filmmaker has been talking about the project, its storyline, and his inspirations.
“We’re doing a sequel to Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and it’s called Jay and Silent Bob Reboot,” said Smith (via Comic Book). “It’s us, it’s me and Jay so it’s not really strictly a reboot in the way that people think of a reboot. If you remember Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back it was a movie in which Jay and Silent Bob found out Hollywood was making a movie about them so they went cross country to Hollywood to stop that from happening. Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is completely fucking different. In Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, Jay and Silent Bob find out that Hollywood is making a reboot of that old movie that they had made about them, and they have to go cross the country to Hollywood to stop it all over again. it’s literally the same fucking movie all over again. It’s a movie that makes fun of sequels and remakes and reboots while being all three at the same time.”
“One of my favorite little director tricks or experiments of the last 20-25 years was Gus Van Sant,” he continued. “He’s coming off the heat of Good Will Hunting. He’s an Academy Award-nominated director. The film won awards. Ben and Matt won for screenwriting, Robin Williams won Best Actor in it. Gus had his pick of anything, he could do anything he wanted, and he went into Universal and he was like ‘I want to remake Psycho.’ They were like ‘Are you crazy? It’s Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho,’ and he was like, ‘yeah, but it’s a black and white movie. There’s a whole generation of kids who will never watch this movie’…. I thought that was so crazy, ballsy, he wanted to do a shot-for-shot remake of Psycho, but in color with new actors. It’s a very film-school experiment. It’s something a young-buck director who’s figuring out what they want to be, does. It felt very avant-garde. Some people will argue from not until the end of time that it was absolutely fucking unnecessary, but I like that it was just ballsy. He literally just made the same fucking movie over again. Mine’s not that, we have a completely different script, but I used the script of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back to build the script to Jay and Silent Bob Reboot. So there’ a van in it with three girls in it.”
Are you excited for Smith’s upcoming return to the View Askewniverse? Would you rather have seen Clerks 3 than Jay and Silent Bob Reboot? Let us know in the comments below…
