What’s today? Monday? Um, I’m kind of closing up a cut on this TV show that I’m working on, Sucks Less with Kevin Smith, that airs on mtvU and on the Amp’d Mobile phone—we call them Mobisodes.

That’s right. I was looking at the first cut of the show and just doing the last second notes. I mean, it’s a quick show—it’s like eight minutes long—but it’s really pretty good. I’m so happy with how it turned out, especially because all the kids in the class produced it.

It’s tough. I did two different episodes like a month apart. I sat in for Roger because he’s been sick. I haven’t really bashed anything. I think I was thumbs down on the last Woody Allen movie. And that was tough to do because you’re like, “Woody Allen knows more about filmmaking than I’ll ever know. Is it really my place? This movie stinks.”

I’m not worried about that because I certainly wasn’t alone in terms of the reviews on that Woody Allen picture, but we did get an email from somebody who was just like, “Who the fuck do you think you are?” And [the review] was the most kid-gloved, soft pedaled, “Yeah, I wasn’t wild about it;” it wasn’t like, “Fuck this movie!” It was just like, man it sucks when somebody who’s a filmmaking god makes something that you’re not really into. But generally, it’s surprising how many movies I actually like. I’ve been in the audience and I know how difficult it is to make a movie as well. So I go in a lot more forgiving than say, Richard Roeper. I had to watch The Guardian—and I was like, “Hey, I like this kind of movie my father would like.” He was like, “All right, this is the first Guardian you’ve seen all year. I’ve seen six.”

Yeah, I do it at home. I just wake up and start writing and, if I need to get out of this space because there’s too much going on, I just head off and hole up in a hotel and write for a while.

Not really. Thankfully, the kid goes to school, so there’s a good period of time from eight in the morning until three or four in the afternoon where she’s off doing something, so you don’t feel like, “Oh man, I’m not spending any time with my kid.” Then, it’s just about spending time with the wife and we find a nice balancing act. I tend to get up earlier and get some work done ahead of time. She gets up and we hang out. She goes off to yoga or something and I’ll go back to work. And then, there’s some days where I’ll bury myself in my office and not come out till night, but I’ve got an office right off my bedroom and there’s an office down the street, so I could be one of two places. It kind of works out.

Yeah, I wish they were all like that because it was such a fulfilling experience, not just the creative aspect, but just the work atmosphere was wonderful. There’s something to be said for working on a lower budget; people tend to pull together a lot more and they’re in it more for the passion than the paycheck. It was just great from beginning to end. I mean, shooting the donkey show sequence was fairly memorable. We had a great set up. We were pretty much in one location the whole time, shooting at that fake Mooby’s and then right next door we’re all holed up in a motel and that’s where I had the editing equipment. So the whole block functioned as a studio of sorts where, if I wasn’t on set, if they were setting up for the next shot, I was right next door up in the editing room cutting between takes so it was kind of fun.

Very much. Of course, you can’t do that lightning in a bottle thing twice. The first time around it was just me, Dave, Kleine, and Scott Mosier, and the actors in a convenience store closed down after hours and the second time around we had to create a place that didn’t exist. We had to build that Mooby’s from an old closed down Burger King. So of course, the budget was going to be exponentially more, but that being said, $5 million bucks—not a lot of money when it comes to making feature films. It was actually a low budget flick and functioned as one, so it was comfy having money and nice to be able to pay people for their time, but at the same time, we didn’t have so much money that we could get ourselves in trouble or we were wasting anything; everything’s up there on the screen.

Everyone else seemed to feel a lot of pressure and by everyone else, I mean people who had nothing to do with the movie. When we announced the film, the Internet lit up with a bunch of people going, “What a stupid idea. This is gonna be fucking terrible. Why would you bother sequelizing something like Clerks? It’s its own perfect unique thing. Stay away from it.” People seem to think that it was a tough act to follow. For me, I wasn’t really trying to be better than the first Clerks. I just wanted to make a movie that complimented the original and just kind of revisit all of those characters and that mindset years later because the movie is about what happens to that mindset as you age—what happens to the angry young man when he hits his mid-thirties. So for me, I never felt that pressure of where this has got to be as good or better than the first one. I just felt that this has to compliment the first one. I was really happy that it did and totally satisfied that it did. To people outside the production, they had no idea of what it was going to be, but I had the benefit of knowing what it was going to be so I knew that it was like, “All right, it’s not a sellout. It’s certainly not us retreading the same fucking jokes. It’s really the next chapter in these dudes’ lives.”

I wanted to make a flick about what it felt like to be in my thirties. Clerks was what it felt like to be in my twenties, so why not use Dante and Randall as a way into that story? There’s a certain built in poignancy in seeing those dudes get older. Most movies go out of their way to make everyone look aesthetically presentable, and we were just like, “You know it’s cooler that everyone looks older and paunchier and stuff like that because that’s what real life is. You get older, you get fatter—you just get older—and we didn’t try to hide that. We kind of wore it like a badge of honor on our sleeves. It felt like that was the story I wanted to tell at that exact moment in time.

Probably working at that convenient store still. It was a really good job. They didn’t expect a lot out of you. You got paid under the table. It was pretty good. You could watch TV all day. You could eat anything you wanted.