The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

234 Kevin Smith
very clever, very funny—humorous more than anything else. But I wasn’t
dumbfounded by the comedy.
And I was sitting there thinking, “God, if they think this is funny, I think
I could give them a funny movie.” And Slacker, I’ve always said I viewed it
with this mixture of awe and arrogance. I was amazed at the movie, because
I’d never seen anything like it and it was so original. What a great idea: a
movie that has no plot, just goes from character to character, just drifts for
ninety minutes and change. And the arrogance comes in when I’m sitting
there going, “Well, shit, if this is a movie, I could make a movie.”
Vincent had always been the one who wanted to be a director, talked about
being a director, and so at that point I had never really considered it seriously.
I wanted to be a writer, but not necessarily a screenwriter. I wanted to write for
Saturday Night Live. But that night on the way home, I started talking about
the possibility of making a film and how I could get my head around doing it,
and maybe that’s what I was meant to do, or give it a shot at least. So from that
moment forward, I wanted to be a filmmaker.
And as I talk to more and more filmmakers for this book, the epiphany
moments are of two types. The first is, “Wow, that’s amazing, I want to
make films, but I could never do that.” And the second is, “Hey, I can
do that!” This sounds like your experience. Were there other films that
gave you confidence to think that you could direct?
Smith: Yeah, that would be Trust. A few weeks later I went to see Trust at the
Angelica. It was very basically shot, but what really struck me about the movie
was the dialogue. The dialogue was very stagey, almost surrealistic dialogue.
Very clever, but not very realistic. And I said, “Oh my God, so you can flout
convention in films.” They don’t have to speak like most characters do in the
mainstream stuff I’ve seen or in TV shows or even like people in real life. You
can craft the ideal, the way you would want characters to speak.
So that was another linchpin. Off the heels of those movies, I started getting
knee-deep in indie film and trying to get my hands on anything I could
to watch. Back home we had a great video store near us called Choice Video,
which carried a lot of tapes. That’s where I first found the Jarmusch stuff,
which I’d read about in some film book. Watching Stranger Than Paradise,
that was the movie that made it seem absolutely possible—“Oh my God,