REAL LIFE SEGUES TO REEL LIFE
Kevin Smith’s first post-heart-attack film
Kevin Smith is feeling good today, snooch to the noochlevel good.
The multihyphenate responsible for a litany of cult classics (“Clerks,” “Chasing Amy” and “Dogma”) is celebrating a new lease on life, gearing up to release his first feature film since suffering a heart attack in 2018 at age 47.
“Jay and Silent Bob Reboot,” hitting theaters in a limited engagement Tuesday and Thursday, is probably not the reboot fans expect from the titular meta stoners, reprised by Jason “Jay” Mewes and Smith, respectively.
“We had a story because Jay became a dad,” Smith told the Daily News of Mewes and his 4-year-old daughter, Logan. “Over the course of watching him become a dad, the script wrote itself. He was the guy least likely. You wouldn’t hand Jay a carton of eggs, let alone another human life, let alone a small, baby human life. And still, there he was, trapped in new responsibility, hands down, the best father I ever met in my life.”
In “Reboot,” Smith’s reallife daughter, 20-year-old Harley Quinn Smith, plays Jay’s daughter Milly.
“On my Instagram account, anytime I put up a picture of me and my daughter, every smarta-s in the world goes, ‘I don’t know, Bro, she looks more like Jay than Silent Bob,’ ” Smith says. “And one day, I was like, ‘F—k y’all, that’s the plot of the movie. My daughter is his daughter.’ ”
After learning about Milly’s existence, Jay and Silent Bob are all but coerced into letting her and a friend tag along on their road trip to Hollywood to stop the fictional Kevin Smith (also played by the real Smith) from rebooting an earlier movie based on the pair. Make sense?
In order to bring the multilayered flick to life, Smith recruited big-name former collaborators like Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and one very strategically placed Avenger.
As for Jay and Silent Bob, the characters turn 25 on Saturday, along with “Clerks,” where they debuted. So it only make sense that Smith confirmed earlier this month that “Clerks III” is underway – which, if you can believe it, is even more meta than “Reboot.”
At the start of “Clerks III,” Smith told The News, “Randal [Jeff Anderson] — and I’m taking this right out of my real life — has a heart attack. And almost dies.”
Unlike Smith, though, Randal doesn’t have a family of his own, just fellow “Clerks” alum Dante (Brian O’Halloran), so what else can he do but make a movie about his own life? Of course, it wouldn’t be a Smith movie unless Randal’s fictional movie became, wait for it, the original “Clerks.”
Like Randal, Smith credits his health scare with the urgency to bring “Reboot” to life.
“I was like, ‘We gotta go in case … my heart attack comes back again,’ ” Smith said, though he also hoped “to be done in the same year to celebrate the 25th anniversary of ‘Clerks.’
“I honestly think once we stop shooting ‘Clerks III,’ I cease to exist,” he joked.
Is it just an endless franchise then?
“Oh, my God, if I could just blend into the franchise and never die… I bet you a lot of people will feel like I faded into my own movie after they see ‘Jay and Silent Bob Reboot,’ ” Smith muses. “But I’m really hoping that they let me get away with it because they understand, like, all right, this is the movie he made after his heart attack. So naturally, he’s in every f——g frame of the movie. Naturally, he’s superemotional.
“Hopefully, they’ll let me off the hook for it,” he tells The News. “But if not, I don’t care. I almost died, so people can say whatever they want about my movies.”