Kevin Smith Credits ‘Clerks’ To ‘Reservoir Dogs’, Says Quentin Tarantino Debut Made Him Realize Characters “Can Just Talk About Pop Culture”
Perhaps equally if not more so than Richard Linklater’s Slacker, veteran View Askewniverse director Kevin Smith has revealed that it was Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs that truly allowed him to pursue his film making dreams, particularly as it opened his eyes to the fact that the ‘discussing pop culture’ was an acceptable way to write dialogue.
Asked during a recent interview with Collider‘s Steven Weintraub if he could expand on his anecdote regarding the massive influence Tarantino’s sophomore Pulp Fiction had on Dogma, as he originally recapped in the Revelations: Making Dogma documentary included in the film’s recent 4K 25th anniversary release, Smith began by recalling the pair’s first meeting during the 1994 Cannes Film Festival.
Referring to a past interview given by Tarantino wherein he admitted that he was glad Reservoir Dogs was his first film over his unfinished comedy My Best Friend’s Birthday, as he felt the former was far more representative of ‘real cinema’ than the latter, Smith asserted, “When I first met him, [Tarantino] was like, ‘I almost made Clerks!” And I knew that because I had read in a New York Times Magazine interview that he had done, predicated on Reservoir Dogs. I guess it was maybe when Reservoir Dogs hit home video or something like that, but I’ll never forget this article because I read it the week that I was going into production on Clerks.
“In the piece, he talks about, and I’m paraphrasing, making cinema.He had a low-budget movie that he wanted to do called My Best Friend’s Birthday Part that was just people sitting around talking, and he’s glad that he didn’t do that. He’s glad that Reservoir Dogs was the first movie he made, because that represents cinema.
“The quote he gave her, the thing he said that I was like, ‘Oh no,’ was because he talked about being at the video store [where Tarantino was working prior to his time as a filmmaker], and he goes, ‘Why would I make a movie about working at the video store? That’s not stupid, but what a waste of time. That’s not cinema.’ I was about to make a movie about working at a video store, and I was like, ‘Oh no. Oh no.'”
“I told him that story and stuff. I think he might have felt a little guilty because I was just like, ‘I read that right before I went into production,’ and so he was like, ‘Well, you’ve got to come see Pulp Fiction then,’ because I blew him up about Reservoir Dogs. I said, “Honestly, my hearing the Madonna, Like a Virgin dialogue at the beginning of Reservoir Dogs allowed me to write Clerks. Because I remember watching that movie in Third Street Cinema here in Manhattan and going, ‘Wait, this counts? You can just talk about pop culture? This is what me and my friends do all the time. If this counts as movie dialogue, I think I could write movie dialogue and stuff.'”
Upon hearing just how influential Reservoir Dogs‘ ‘casual’ dialogue style had been on Clerks, Smith says Tarantino doubled down on his invitation to “come see Pulp“, which he ultimately accepted and as a result had “an eye-opening experience”.
“Not just what he does with storytelling structure and whatnot, but tonally, the tone was what was breathtaking to me because Quentin could have you laughing one second and then fucking shoot somebody brutally in the next. It’s typified in the Sam Jackson moment where he shoots Flock of Seagulls [as played by Burr Steers] on the couch, and goes, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. Did I break your concentration?’Moments like that, I was like, ‘Oh my God, you could dramatically go from that to that?’
And in repeating history, Smith’s viewing of Tarantino’s then-latest would have a massive influence on his own upcoming work, as “the Dogma draft that came out of Pulp Fiction got a lot more violent.”
“All the blood, all the Angel of Death stuff, and whatnot, that got bigger. All the tone shifts going from something comedic to Ben [Affleck] in the garage, barking about being cast out of heaven in Matt [Damon]’s face, that stuff, those big swings came after seeing Pulp Fiction early.”
