by MATTHEW HAYS

Kevin Smith says there really wasn’t a lot of demand from fans to make a sequel to Clerks, his 1994 low-budget cult hit. In fact, there was pressure not to take on Clerks II.

“People were like, ‘Dude, don’t mess with a good thing!’” he says. “I think a lot of the fans were worried I was just going to retread the same old story. But I think of it as another chapter in their story.”

The story, of course, was of two hapless clerks in a store in a strip mall in New Jersey. Brian O’Halloran and Jeff Anderson played the duo, who exchanged lengthy inane banter on various pop-culture-related subjects and discussed their various sexual fixations. Clerks has become legendary for taking off immediately at Sundance, going on to become a hugely profitable film. “I really never expected that film to take off the way it did,” Smith says now. “We thought we were making a calling card, just a way of showing people we knew how to hold a camera, sort of. It was gratifying as hell, like winning the fucking lottery.”

Smith has continued to make films, including Mallrats, Chasing Amy and Dogma, his controversial meditation on Christianity. There was even a short-lived animated series based on Clerks, but Smith says he’d never really considered the idea of making a sequel. “Many of the characters in my films reappear, so I always felt like the movies I make tie together anyway, like they’re one big ongoing story. And a sequel is a very tough thing—on the one hand, people want to see more of the same. On the other, they want something completely new and different. It’s a high-wire act, for sure.”

Changing shop

Smith adds that a decade in time meant that he could avoid “sequelitus.” In the new film, the Clerks duo lose their jobs when the shop they work in burns down. The only choice they have is to head further down the street and get work at a nasty fast-food restaurant. Again, there’s plenty of silly conversation, and Smith is particularly inspired at coming up with banter that is both odd and funny. As well, there is—wait for it—romantic tension, as O’Halloran has fallen in love and is engaged to marry a nasty Ann Coulter look-a-like. Rosario Dawson also co-stars as a fellow clerk and love interest.

If the fans were wary of a sequel, getting the main players back turned out to be tricky as well. “Jeff Anderson was really uncertain about getting back into this,” Smith recalls. “He kind of went through a Leonard Nimoy, I Am Not Spock phase. He did some acting after Clerks, but nothing major. He runs a successful tile import company. He constantly had to have the same conversation with people, who’d be like, ‘Aren’t you the guy from Clerks?’ And he’d have to explain that he did some movies but now he’s moved on. He was just comfortable with it a decade later, and sure enough, I come along with the idea for a sequel.”

Though Smith is renowned for low-budget successes (not to mention his legendary Degrassi fixation), he did flirt with big-budget studio projects, in particular the Superman cycle. Smith was hired to write a Superman script, but was bumped from the project. The director then attached to the Man of Steel, Tim Burton, proposed to rework the script himself. Having said that, Smith now seems to have no hard feelings given that Superman Returns ended up in Bryan Singer’s hands. “It’s a bit too long, and Superman doesn’t get to punch it out with someone. I mean, dude, bring on a giant robot and have them duke it out! But what I was happy about was to see a Superman movie that was clearly the work of one person. That was Singer’s vision. He had clearly worked up enough cred with the first two X-Men movies that they gave him the ability to make the movie he wanted to. With a budget of $200-million, that’s astounding.”

Clerks II opens Friday, July 21

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