The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

236 Kevin Smith
place I’d really heard the term before. And then suddenly here it was as a
title of a movie. I at least had a working idea of what the term meant.
After the movie, did you glean any deeper meaning of that term, if
there is such a thing as a deeper meaning of that word?
Smith: After the movie, I kind of walked away with an excellent understanding
of what he was going for. In that film, everyone seemed to have
finished college. But Slacker, to me, encapsulated that group of people who
knew a lot about useless things that didn’t really provide a living. It also kind
of encapsulated, for me, the overeducated and idle. Or even the people who
are just too smart for their own good, which kind of felt like me a little bit at
that point when I was working in the convenience store.
I didn’t really go to college at that point. I dropped out—didn’t even have
enough credits for an associate’s degree. I had enough of an education where
I shouldn’t have been working in a convenience store. It felt like that applied
to some degree to the term slacker: to take refuge in not actually joining the
workforce, the serious workforce, take refuge in sitting around and bullshitting
with your friends and talking about, oh, I don’t know . . . pop culture.
There’s not a lot going on in Slacker, but there are moments.
It was the movie that got me off my ass; it was the movie that lit a fire
under me, the movie that made me think, “Hey, I could be a filmmaker.”
And I had never seen a movie like that before ever in my life. I mean, you
sit there watching Die Hard, it’s not like you go, “Man, I wanna make that.”
Or at least I don’t. I’m sure somebody does, but that wasn’t me. Some movies
are made to solely be watched, and Slacker had the benefit of being one
of those movies that you could watch, but it was almost the movie that just
kept telling me, as I was watching it: “You can do this. You can do this. Give
it a shot.” It had possibility written all over it.
As I read all the reviews around Slacker, I was fascinated by how polarizing
it was.
Smith: Really, there were people who didn’t like that movie?
Kenneth Turan wrote that Slacker “does not offer much to anyone
who likes to stay awake.” But the New York Times said, “Slacker is a