Dogma Bites Man

Kevin Smith no longer has to worry about convict Harvey Weinstein making another dime from Dogma

Dogma.

“THERE WILL ALWAYS BE A SPACE FOR THESE KINDS OF FILMS, so long as you make space for yourself. The key to my job for thirty years in this business, has not been waiting for somebody to tell me I could do a thing. It's been nice when I have and somebody was like, ‘Here's some money. Go do a thing.’ But if I waited for like, a studio or waited for the market to tell me that I could do a thing, I never would have done anything! Sometimes you just have to do it,” Kevin Smith told The Talks at the end of October.

Looking back to 1999, I’m excavating my festival review of Dogma, as well as an extended conversation where Smith and I spoke before Disney forced its sale to another distributor. Theology, dirty jokes and criticism of Smith’s visual style are just part of the smorgasbord.

Smith offered a status report on Dogma in 2022, telling The Wrap: “He’s holding it hostage. My movie about angels is owned by the devil himself… My movie about heaven is in limbo.” But now it’s out of Weinstein’s prison: “The movie’s been bought away from the guy that had it for years and whatnot,” he said on That Hashtag Show (six-minute video). “The company that bought it, we met with them a couple months ago. They were like, ‘Would you be interested in re-releasing it and touring it like you do with your movies?’ I said, ‘One-hundred percent, are you kidding me? Touring a movie that I know people like, and it’s sentimental and nostalgic? We’ll clean up.'”

Smith and I spoke at the 1999 New York Film Festival where I had written this review on deadline. (We had been acquainted since Clerks was on the festival circuit in 1994 since its Sundance debut.) A shorter version of the interview that follows appeared at the now-defunct Playboy.com and was edited by Rob Walton. Special thanks: Skyler Rowe.

In the beginning, there are words. Talk, talk, talk: Kevin Smith is determined to be our Eric Rohmer, but with better fuck-yous. A source of uproar even before its Cannes debut, Dogma is a comic powerhouse, filled with the most basic of metaphysical contemplation and some of the dirtiest jokes in a movie this year. (And Smith’s idea of God, let’s just say she has amazing dimples alongside her sweet smile.)

The movie begins as a New Jersey cardinal, determined to reinvent the modern Church, introduces a program called “Catholicism Wow!” One of his cracked ideas sets up a loophole in the rules that keep fallen angels from returning to heaven, and a pair of truly bad ones, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, begin stealing across the country starting from their purgatory—Wisconsin. Affleck and Damon are almost too good as the frat-boy angels, as typecast for their looks as they’ll ever be: shiny, neutered, mean. (“I just love fucking with the clergy,” Damon’s angel giggles after his first, small nasty steps toward furthering Apocalypse.)

While a few minuscule groups that have not seen the film have taken offense, the smallest group to affect Smith’s movie is the executives of the Disney corporation who used whatever means necessary to convince the honchos at Miramax to un-tether the film. While it’s conceivable that Dogma may hold an attraction for Lionsgate, the the new distributor of the film—its savior—it’s even more clear what elements of Dogma were unappealing to Disney.

Let’s take the real religion: While Mel Brooks‘ parody of 1970s corporate takeovers was pointed in Silent Movie, portraying the actions of the insane corporate parents Engulf and Devour toward a few measly filmmakers, Smith is a daring satirist, sending his avenging angels into the boardroom of a corporation that has made movies, videos, food tie-ins and a veritable mint off of Mooby the Cow—he's a Mickey-Moused golden calf. Accusations fly, judgment is proclaimed, the angels take their bloody slaughter. It’s a shocking scene, if only because satire is almost always de-fanged in a contemporary world of cowardly corporate power.

Smith mingles high and low with vertiginous effect throughout. His knack for the wild verbal fusillade remains unmatched, and he puts it to double-barreled use here. First, there are his traditional pop-culture-stoked reveries about love, sex, and comix in the modern young mind. But second, and strikingly, there’s similarly heady rumination on Catholic dogma that are both clearly delineated for the non-Catholic viewer and studded with exorbitantly outrageous jokes.

Smith, raised a strict Catholic, demonstrates an idiosyncratic form of affection toward the Roman Catholic Church, a personal take on the language and forms of faith that may leave him in several wildernesses. Yet he remains independent in the best sense of the word, following not only the extremes of his artistic inspiration, but also his faith—in movies, in humor, and in God.

Dogma.

Kevin Smith is spreading his gospel about the gospels, but leavened liberally with "fart and dick jokes," as the smooth-tongued yet calm twenty-nine-year-old writer-director-producer likes to put it. Dogma will open in November on 1,269 screens. [Some strong language, natch.]

Ray, I owe you a blowjob or something. I saw that review that you wrote.

Indiewire?

Yeah. Yeah. Really sweet, man. Thank you.

Well, thanks.

I dug it.

I was hoping to find fresh angles after all the post-Cannes noise. How old are you?

Twenty-nine.

Wow. Thirty coming up.

Yeah. Right on the horizon.

But you're settled in.

That's the thing. People have been saying like, are you going to wig out on your thirtieth birthday? It's a topic of conversation in our office because we're all heading toward thirty within the span of the next year. I dunno, I've arrived at the conclusion that it doesn't bug me as much, because most people who get to thirty, they're like, "What have I done with my life?" I'm okay, I feel pretty good about what I've done so far. I'm content, I guess. Y'know, I got married, I have a kid, my career. I can't really bitch.

I don't know how much longer I'm gonna do this. I'm not a born filmmaker. One of these days when I'm done talking, when I'm done having something to say, I'll just stop. But I'm waiting for the day where, I hope I'm five, six, seven, maybe ten films in, maximum, they look back and go like, oh, the reason the movies look so bad, because that's what he does. It's not because of a lack of talent, it's because this is all he ever wanted to do or aspired to, visually.

Alanis Morrisette said that she didn't have the baggage of her career behind her playing your God. The two of you have drawn a dimply, chick girl-God.

It seems that most people are getting past the casting. It makes sense no matter who she is. That's what she is. And a real centered one. She's kind of ethereal in nature, so it tended to work quite well for what we were trying to put up there.

This year (1999) has been an interesting year for American movies, including independent ones. That's always a good thing. People seem to be taking chances. You're in a special situation, working with Miramax again, who have been supportive.

There are a lot of Miramax-type films coming out. Just not from Miramax! It's weird. Looking at something like Being John Malkovich. Wow. That clearly smells like a Miramax film.

How many screens are you on? (The final count was 1,269.)

Between twelve and thirteen hundred. We'll see how many they actually get. It helps, of course, with the cast. But it doesn't help that there's a perception of the movie out there we're still working against. But usually when the exhibitors see it, they say, "Oh, it wasn't what I heard it was."

There's also that boatload of movies waiting to be seen.

There is assload of flicks out there! And y'know, there are some things that are falling by the wayside. Fight Club is not doing too well, getting it out of theaters helps. Random Hearts and stuff like that clearing out helps.

So other folks' failure adds to your success!

Exactly. It's not enough that I succeed, others must fail!

Smith laughs.

Can you make a funny joke about anything?

Yeah. I mean, of course, there are always lines and there will always be lines for me. I mean, I would never make a rape joke. I don't think it's possible to make a rape joke funny, with the exception of, like Clerks. We got as close to as possible without crossing the line, when Caitlin comes out of the back from fucking the dead guy and there's that questionable... Dante says, "Call the police," and Randall's like, "She said she did all the work, y'know." That's as close as I could get without feeling like, "Oh, man, I've really just betrayed something in humanity."

What about the supposed male fear of anal rape?

Yeah. Definitely, that's something you can make grist for the mill. There's humor there somewhere. Still, I have yet to find the real good male ass-rape joke to tell. But it's not one of those things where you sit down and say, what can I say this time that will, y'know, push the edge of the envelope. I'm not endeavoring to push the edge of the envelope in terms of telling a joke. It's just what works in the story. If something comes up...

Dogma.

In a movie where you're talking about religion, yeah, some religious humor is going to come up. But since I'm a practicing Catholic, but more importantly, I feel I'm a devout Christian, like, there's jokes that I wouldn't do which are probably easy, but why bother heading in that direction if you can make a joke where you have to think a little more. Those always feel like the well-earned jokes to me.There is a lot of comedy in the culture that isn't easy, whatever that means, but that seem cynical or cheap. To my taste, is closer to amoral.

Even for somebody who's as facile as a Jay Leno to be bashing on somebody, I guess it just points to the cynicism of the culture.

Absolutely, man. I agree with that completely. And if you take it even a step further, or a step back, I mean, Christ is the first rockstar, Christ is the first superhero, Christ is the first pop culture icon. Here's a guy that shows up on people's dashboards and on their shirts as well in their churches and bedrooms. It's not that far a leap for me to take between the stuff that I usually do and this flick, especially when dealing with the essential figure of Christianity.

We haven't seen David Copperfield do water into wine and loaves to fishes yet.

Yet! But his career ain't over.

And there are not as many fart and dick jokes in the Bible.

Yeah, not at all. But, y'know, that's because they had really good editors! They knew they were going for the widest possible audience. That's the thing that I find really fascinating about the Bible, when I was first introduced to the notion back in Catholic school, that y'know, there are books that never made it in. There are passages that never made it in. Say what you will about Stigmata (1999) being an over-directed movie, but they were talking about something that's not far off the mark. There are gospels which contradict the other gospels. That exist in the Bible. Apocrypha. Stuff that's apocryphal, when they were compiling the book that is the Bible, they were just like, "This contradicts this, so let's just leave this out."

There's all those Gnostic gospels where they paint Christ, rather than as the redeemer, but as the enlightener. Which is just as valid as calling him the redeemer, but that stuff gets left out. If you read back on Catholic history, it's kind of spooky or sad, the things that get put in and why they get put in. The things that get left out and why. The corporate politics of the Church is just as scandalous as anything that goes on in Washington today. Something like the infallibility of the Pope. It's something that's been in existence for only 150 years or so. I think it was Pius IX who in the mid-1800s had a papal conference, Vatican I, essentially, and floated the notion of papal infallibility, which had never existed up until that point. It wasn't really divinely inspired so much as it was politically inspired. A Pope would decree something and the Pope who followed him would knock it out of the box.

And so they decide, well, if we do this, no Pope can ever undo something Is ay. If everything that a Pope says when he's talking ex cathedra, everything that he says in regards to moral or the faith is accurate. I just believe that if you're going to be part of a club, know all of the rules and know the club's history. I don't think looking at that stuff is blasphemy. It's not like I'm doubting God in any way shape or form and it 's not like I'm even doubting Catholicism, specifically. I'm just talking about the politics

A certain blind faith, I think, is healthy. Blind faith in God is something that you can't adhere to any faith or spirituality without first accepting. I can't prove there's a God, but I have blind faith there is. I believe. But when it comes to matters of the church itself, that's when you sit there and go, aren't I allowed to ask a question? I mean, some guy made the rules, and I'm just some guy. There's very little difference between me and that guy, it's not like he's any more righteous or holy or infallible than I am, I mean, we're both just men and infallible. I guess their fear is that with too many questions, you'll bow out, or convince others to bow out. But if you want to bow out? You don't bother asking questions, you just go. Asking questions implies that you want to stay, you just want to know more. I was raising a question, having a discussion. Christ didn't work in this fashion where he was like, what I say, goes. He would have dialogues. He would have discourses. They would start with a parable and work from there and tell a very simple story to get a very philosophical message across.

"God save me from my followers."

Yes, but this is one of the examples of, God, save me from your followers. The notion of hell, y'know, of course, is a created notion. It's not like Christ really spoke about hell. Christ spoke about likening the human condition of sin to a place in the holy land where they used to burn refuse and offer sacrifices. It was apparently a place black clouds hung over. A garbage dump. He likened falling out of grace with God with that, like when you're separated from God, you feel like that. Then centuries later, the church turns around and says, well, Christ was referring to a place. There is a physical place called hell and that's where you go when you're bad and you don't believe. And you burn. Recently, the church just turned it around and said, no, hell is not a physical place. It's kind of like, let's find a little consistency here!

Are you going to return to the personal?

I don't know. In terms of a flick....

A Clerks, a Chasing Amy...

Yeah. I mean, I imagine there will be more personal stories to tell when I have something personal to say. I've pretty much bared my heart and soul in a lot of matters. The things that matters to a guy in his twenties are a little different than a guy in his thirties and forties. It's all universal, but you put a different face to it. But I don't know. Thankfully, I don't feel the need to be profound, like I've got to keep saying something deep and important. If I'm going to continue doing this, I hope I feel the need to be entertaining first and not just go out on a limb and talk about issues that don't matter to me. At the end of the day, faith is such an important part of me, I just had to make a movie. I wanted to get that out there.

Sexual jealousy and inadequacy and fear, the stuff that was in Chasing Amy, that was important to me at the time, I had to get it out there. Ray, now there's nothing on my mind that's all that important or pressing to communicate. So I'm just kind of relaxing and working on the "Clerks" cartoon, a nighttime "Simpsons" kind of thing on ABC.

Talk about having a character who works in a strip club.

In many ways? A plot device. I wish I could come up with something more profound. You can make some kind of assumption that's it yet another discussion of the flesh and the spiritual that makes up so much of who we are, the struggle between earth and heaven.

Well, stripping is in 1990s culture, talked about. That role for women, whether it's empowering—

—or disempowering, right. A few years ago, I would have said, "Hey, man, if you're in charge, it's empowering." But being married now—to a woman!—and not just dating a woman, who's fiercely adamant about women's issues, she's completely opened my eyes to the difficulty, the challenge, the horror that sometimes comes along with being one of the distaff. Suddenly, you're looking at the issue from not just your point of view, but hers as well. And then having a daughter adds to that, because suddenly, you're not completely divorced from femininity. It's like, I have to raise a woman to some degree. And thankfully, there's a woman int he house to help me doing that, so I'm not saying, "Hey, man, if you want to be a stripper and you're in charge, hey, that's all cool." My wife has completely different points of view, inasmuch as there's no such thing as being in control of something sexual.

The things I'd never taken into consideration, I looked at from the surface, not what goes on underneath that kind of decision. In the context of this picture, which was written so long ago, I can't even cling to that and go that's what the scene is about. With Serendipity, the Muse, you have somebody responsible for great literary works, who decides to go into business for themselves, "Fuck writing for everybody else, I'm going to write for me." When she gets here? Writer's block. And what do you do when you can't do what you do best? You take something else. Stripping just seemed like an amusing thing.

We did a miniseries in the comic that ran from their last scene in Chasing Amy from when they leave the diner and brings them to the first moment they step into Dogma. It was four issues, and I got to do some fun stuff I wouldn't take the time to do in a movie. I never want to do a movie all about them.

Jay and Silent Bob as supermodels.

Yeah. Exactly. In issue two, they wind up on this porno set, and Jay's in heaven. But the guy is like, the only gig we have for you is as a fluffer, y'know, shove his hand onto some dude's cock to keep him hard between takes. It's playing with stuff like that. He has a monologue in a bus bathroom, and people are making a stink because they assume that there's two guys in there fucking each other. Instead, they're just getting high! They get thrown off the bus and Jay goes into this long speech, "What if I did want to fuck you? What would be so wrong about that?" The artist did this wonderful rendering of Jay on a soapbox in one of those parkway rest stops, you just see lots of legs under the booths. He's sitting there, like in this garter belt-lingerie number holding onto a flag, y'know? It's out now as a trade paperback as one story, it's called "Chasing Dogma." It's pretty much the Jay show for four issues, since Silent Bob doesn't really talk.

What do you think of the controversy?

Like, I hated it. Then they want you to go on five-ten minutes about it. Everybody's who's talked about it has hit on the stuff that's in there. It's wonderful art there are thinkpieces being written about a movie that has so much bathroom humor. But it's by design!

They're not as simple as dick-and-fart-jokes movies. There's a little something more going on. Hopefully! It's funny when people start talking about it, it has that whole lowbrow humor element they do have to comment on about sooner or later. That's always fun, for me to read how people get to that, in a piece where they're talking about theology, how they're going to finally engage the discussion with, yes, there are a lot of dick and fart jokes.

No one's said it, but I have been waiting for someone to make a remark about this being your first widescreen movie, something like, "Kevin Smith made a widescreen movie because he couldn't figure out how else to get more than two characters in the frame.”

Smith laughs.

That's definitely something nobody's said so far! That's, that's good, I'll take a good joke on my behalf, if it's a good joke and that's pretty funny. Widescreen, the motivation was, let' s make it look like a real movie this time! You want to make it seem epic.

Whereas Clerks is a movie that won't look bad in that little postage stamp window on the internet.

It'd look about the same as it did on video. This is a movie that, thankfully, doesn't. Which presumably means that people have to see it in the theater! I've seen the TV spots they're doing. They're taken from a pan-and-scan print, so now we're seeing how the film plays on the small screen. For all these people who say, you didn't even use the widescreen, I've seen the spots, and people are getting cropped off. I'll give you the fact that I'm kind of a lazy visualist, but I think in this flick, we did use the widescreen. The TV version is crappy-looking. There is shit, there is information that is just missing.

It's negative space. Merely the fact space is there affects how you read it.

I'd have to agree with that to some degree. I think there are people who are far more visual than me, but I'm always taking slaps across the knuckles for not being that guy. All right, I'm weak there, but how about the content? At the end of the day, that's chiefly what's it about to me, it's not how pretty the picture is, it's what the picture says. If you want to see pretty pictures, you can go to a Denny's or Perkin's and look at painting on the wall some guy did in oil on canvas that don't mean anything, but god, don't they look nice?

Looking at something that evokes something in you, that gets some form of reaction or makes you think, that's what it's about. That's why I'm all about the characters and dialogue. If the visuals sag, they sag. I'm just waiting for—

I don't know how much longer I'm gonna do this, Ray. I'm not a born filmmaker. One of these days when I'm done talking, when I'm done having something to say, I'll just stop. But I'm waiting for the day where, I hope I'm five, six, seven, maybe ten films in, maximum, they look back and go like, oh, the reason the movies look so bad, because that's what he does. It's not because of a lack of talent, it's because this is all he ever wanted to do or aspired to, visually.

There's something to say about a character, and a movie that doesn't look as brilliant as other movies, it has character to it. It's like what they say about ugly people—it's like, he may not be beautiful, but his face has a lot of character. I hope that's what they'll say about my work visually.