Kevin Smith returns to the View Askewniverse this week with the release of Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, after which – as he revealed earlier this month – he’ll be returning to the Quick Stop, reuniting Brian O’Halloran’s Dante Hicks and Jeff Anderson’s Randal Graves for Clerks III.
Smith had originally planned to make Clerks III prior to the new Jay and Silent Bob film, only for the threequel to fall apart when Anderson turned down the opportunity to reprise his role as Randal. However, while the project is now moving ahead, Smith has revealed to The Wrap that he’s working on a completely new script – one that is inspired by his own heart attack last year, and will see Dante and Randal getting behind the camera to make their very own low budget black and white movie about two convenience store employees.
“Randal has a heart attack, decides that he came so close to death, and his life has meant nothing, there’s nobody to memoralize him, he has no family or anything like that,” said Smith. “And in the recovery, while under fentanyl, he comes to the conclusion at mid-life, having almost died, having worked in a movie store his whole life and watched other people’s movies, he tells Dante, I think we need to make a movie. So Dante and Randal make Clerks. That’s the story of Clerks 3“.
“I’m going to bring my boys right back to where they brought me,” Smith continued. “I’m writing it, it writes itself because I fucking lived it 25 years ago. It’s just warm and fucking wonderful. They’re figuring it out the same way I figured it out, but I have the benefit of being able to cherry-pick all my favorite stories and moments of making Clerks and putting it right back into their hands.”
Smith also spoke about his original script, which he recently presented as a live-reading, and how his own recent life experiences convinced him to change things up:
“That was a movie that was written by a guy who was obsessed with middle-aged and dying, and it was all about death. And that was before I almost died. Then I almost died, and now I don’t really want to talk about that shit. I’ve been too close. Now I just want to do life-affirming things. The tone is going to shift completely. I owe those guys, those characters, Dante and Randal, a lot more than the kind of doom and gloom I was about to put them through. I loved that script, and I loved reading it, but there wasn’t a dry eye in the house for the last 15 pages.”
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