Film Interview: Chasing a dream in his own back yard

Director Kevin Smith had a hit with his low budget film 'Clerks'. And he is about to have another with lesbian-love-triangle comedy 'Chasing Amy'. But, he tells Nick Hasted, all he really wants to do is hang out in New Jersey with his ten and only friends, and save Hollywood for a rainy day

When his microbudget debut Clerks was raved about three years ago, Kevin Smith called himself "a 24-year-old with a talent for dick jokes". Clerks revealed his most obvious areas of strength.

Smith's script turned the numbing boredom of casual work in his New Jersey hometown into an epic of twisted sex and drop-dead, deadpan dialogue. He had honed his words on the twisted literacy of British comics writers such as Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. He'd sharpened it still further out of a need to riff on anything in sight, a skill which he and his fellow bored clerks developed on dull New Jersey nights.

Chasing Amy has brought Smith back to low-budget ways, and given him one of the biggest indie hits of the year in America. It's also kept him in New Jersey, an insistence that could mark Smith as a limited film-maker. But Chasing Amy reveals rigorous development in Smith's work; indicates, in fact, that he's one of the most substantial American directors around.

Chasing Amy's male leads, taboo-ploughing offence master Banky and straight- laced Holden, are the sort of riff-happy dudes Clerks all but patented. But this time, that's just the beginning. The heart of the film is a painful love triangle between the friends and Alyssa, the lesbian object of Holden's affections. It's as autobiographical as fiction gets. Smith sees Banky as the relentlessly funny fraud he's been in previous films, smothering true feelings; Holden is his romantic side, Alyssa is drawn from recent gay friendships. Smith is breaking down the barriers to his life, even as he refuses to leave home. He's moving on without leaving the spot.

Sitting in a Soho basement, Smith, talkative and earnest, seems to be in a process of self-discovery as he speaks, circling round the lessons Chasing Amy has taught him, back to the complicated comfort of New Jersey. The film's gay characters are one indication of his deepening perspective. Sexuality takes right-angle twists in every one of the film's characters, and it shows Smith's immersion in gay life in the film community. But the film still grew in Jersey's roots. Smith's brother is gay and, like Smith himself, a church-going Catholic. But that didn't stop their local priest spending two straight months throwing hellfire at homosexuals. "It's tough to sit there in church and listen to somebody bash the ones you love," Smith sighs. "It's where the film's gay themes came from."

Did it rip him in half, having his faith represented by someone so hateful ? "Oh, absolutely. For a while I pulled away from the Catholic church, I tried to find a different religion that wasn't so castigating. In the end you're hard-pressed to find a religion that doesn't find something wrong with somebody. The thing is, my whole life is quite a great gift, and not just because of what I do for a living. And in return for all that, I go to church, and as soon as they start proselytising against something that I know in my heart to be right, I tune out. It's easy to do."

As he wrote his feelings out in Chasing Amy, did Smith feel his own identity was up for grabs? "To some degree. In terms of sexual identity, I know I'm a dude who's always liked chicks. But then I'm not the kind of cat who could say, 'I'd never be gay in a million years'. We all have the split, and it can go either way. In the end for me it comes down to two simple things. I like female genitalia too much. And I would never know what to say to a dude after I blow him."

Not all Smith's friends are so enlightened. One of Chasing Amy's most painful scenes sees Holden physically shove Alyssa away from him when he can't deal with her sexual past. Most preview audiences gasped in shock. Smith's hometown friends were more straightforward. "I love my friends very dearly," he says, "but most of them have a hang-up with girlfriends' pasts. When I screened that scene for my friends, they were just like, 'Yes!' One of them said, 'You know that feeling, dude, you know it, you're so full of disgust you just want them out of there'. This is what I grew up with. At a certain point, that has to be left behind."

He won't leave those friends behind, any more than he'll leave the church. It seems that, to Smith, to do so would be a sin. When he speaks in public, Smith puts himself down remorselessly, getting the first blow in, as if the success he's had cannot be trusted.

"Oh, absolutely," he agrees. "I think a lot of that insecurity comes from the fact that I grew up kind of a hefty kid. There was always this thinking that: 'I don't deserve anything I get, do I?' There must be something Catholic in there too. Everything we have, we have only because of God. You can't earn the reviews Clerks got." Does it feel like people are looking at him when they watch his films? "Yeah, because when people go to your films, they judge you. There are times when it's like people are walking on your grave. You'll be walking along, and it'll feel like 'Somebody, somewhere, is not liking my movie'."

Smith's brief experience of Hollywood was equally disconcerting. His studio-financed tribute to the films of John Hughes, Mallrats, had its script toned down before he'd shot a frame, scenes like a Jaws parody comparing cunnilingus scars deemed unacceptable (till he slipped it into Chasing Amy). Recently, he got the chance to script the new Superman film. He survived producer Jon Peters' interventions. He even survived calling studio executives "the most anxious group of motherfuckers I've ever met" in an interview.

But when Tim Burton "wanted to make a sure thing real badly because Mars Attacks failed", the writing was on the wall. Burton is currently tearing Smith's scripts to shreds. Smith doesn't care. He'll write for the studios. But he'll never direct for them again. He doesn't like working with crews so large he can't recall their names. He's content to stay on the margins, in New Jersey, where Hollywood can't find him. "It's very important to stay where I live," he says. "If I didn't, I wouldn't make the films I do. When you leave, you forget. If I'm not filming from home, then it becomes artifice, and it's not the same thing."

Recently, an old girlfriend sent Smith a hate note. In it, she said what many in Hollywood must secretly think of him. She said he lived in a fantasy land, that he talked to so few people, he didn't know what the real world was like. It hurt him for a little while, made him obsess over the criticism. Then he realised she was right. "I live in a world where I talk to maybe 10 people," he says. "That is a fantasy land That's my heart. That's who I want to be."

Chasing Amy is on general release next week