The latest film from one of comedy's raunchiest filmmakers could be his breakout from cult status
By Carl Kozlowski 10/30/2008
Zach and Miri are two people in their late 20s who suddenly realize they've accomplished nothing since finishing high school. Coming up on their 10-year reunion, their lives consist of dead-end jobs and an apartment where the hot water and electricity just got cut off. Even worse, they're about to be evicted amid a harsh Pittsburgh winter and, after all these years of living together, they've never hooked up.
These are dire circumstances calling for unusual and immediate action. After encountering a classmate at the reunion who appears to be rolling in dough and admits to being a gay porn star in his own highly successful string of self-produced films, Zach takes it as a sign that his and Miri's way out of poverty might be to gather up their other impoverished friends, hold some auditions and create and market their own porno.
What could go wrong?
That's the premise of "Zach and Miri Make a Porno," the eighth and latest film by writer-director Kevin Smith. While the film is undeniably raunchy, it retains the central sweetness and emotional truth at its core that has been the trademark of Smith's fiercely observant comedies over the past 14 years since his debut indie-film sensation, "Clerks." More importantly, the film marks Smith's first true cinematic foray outside of the "Askewniverse," his term for the fictional city in New Jersey populated by many of the same recurring characters in most of his films.
In fact, by picking stars Seth Rogen, Elizabeth Banks and Craig Robinson from the talent stable of fellow raunch-comedy auteur Judd Apatow ("The 40 Year Old Virgin," "Knocked Up"), he's aiming to create a major comedy event that could be his first breakout beyond hipster cult status.
In an interview with the Pasadena Weekly at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, Smith explained his decision to head to Pittsburgh and take some comedic and cinematic chances.
"When we finished with ‘Clerks 2' [in 2006], it felt like we're done with the Askewniverse, that I said as much as I can with this world. Now that that was done, I felt we were free to go anywhere and tell any story and I wanted to step out of Jersey -otherwise people are gonna say ‘he made another Jersey film,'" says Smith. "I also wanted to find the last place in the world where people would think to make porn, and Jersey didn't seem like it. I thought you can conceive of people making porn in Jersey, but western Pennsylvania in the dead of winter doesn't seem like a place where people would make porn at all."
Smith noted that he has been seeking to do a comedy set in the porn world ever since he finished the film "Chasing Amy" in 1997, but was inhibited by thinking that fellow writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson had made the "perfect" porn-world film the same year with "Boogie Nights," and he "didn't want to step on his turf."
Ultimately, Smith found his inspiration when he saw Rogen's supporting performance in "The 40 Year Old Virgin" and decided his solution was to "make a movie on the periphery of porn, where porn wasn't the main function but just color and background dressing."
As a bonus, Rogen's appeal as a "chubby," average-guy leading man gave Smith the sense he had finally found an onscreen stand-in for himself and helped him write the screenplay from a more personal standpoint.
"He didn't even know I wrote it for him until I was finished with it. I thought he might have gotten too big to do it, but five minutes after I emailed him to ask if he was interested in reading the script, he wrote back," Smith recalls. "He said, ‘When I first got to LA, my agent asked me what I wanted to do, and I said star in a Kevin Smith movie.' So he read the script immediately and got onboard."
While most of the film is straightforward, highly verbal and very funny, the actual dilemma of how to handle the central sex scene between Zach and Miri hung over the set throughout the shoot.
"It's always gonna be dicey, but shooting fake porn was easy because you've got naked people flopping around on each other, and in terms of shooting that sex scene between [supporting actors Katie Morgan and Jason Mewes], she does porn for a living and he's been pretending to do it since he came from the womb. Those two were totally game for it," says Smith.
"We put Seth and Elizabeth's scene in the last week of production so they spent a lot of time together and in case they had to take their clothes off, it wouldn't be as uncomfortable. It also gave me lots of time to think about how I wanted to shoot it.
"On the day of the shoot, I'm driving to the set to shoot that scene and I thought it's not about sex, it's in the connection they make and you read it in the eyes, not about the body. I told them, ‘You guys can wear all your clothes and I'm just gonna shoot your faces,'" Smith continues. "Before the moment of relief kicked in for them there was a moment of outrage. She was like why the fuck - she worked out six months to get ready for the big scene, and he was like, why the fuck did I shave my back? But then they were relieved they didn't have to do it nude."
Ever since his first film, "Clerks," in 1994, Smith has faced battles with the movie-ratings board, which often threatens him with a dreaded NC-17. The issues usually center on his raunchy dialogue rather than any onscreen sex or violence. With "Zach and Miri," he won an R rating through the ratings appeal process, without making any cuts. He attempted a detour into cleaner family fare with 2004's extremely underrated "Jersey Girl," about a widowed father learning to raise his daughter and find new love again, but he believes it will be a long while before he steps out of the R-rated zone of comedy again.
"No person or movie is ever one thing totally, so you want to make it multi-faceted as much as you can while still maintaining a balance of genres," Smith explains. "If they're looking for the romantic comedy that they heard this movie is, and they see a bunch of dicks and boobs in their face, they're gonna be like ‘Where the hell is the romance I heard about?' It takes its time getting there, and I can't say I know the exact equation, but I know it for myself. But as far as language, I want to write films that are real to the way people talk, and this ain't a PG-13 world."
A surprising twist in the battles over "Zach and Miri" came over its ad campaign, which the ratings board also oversees for all movies. In Philadelphia, the city refused to allow the billboards to be carried at all, while in Boston a child studies expert argued publicly that the posters should be taken down. After having several run-ins with the board over any depiction of the stars' actual faces or bodies, Smith and his team ultimately decided to put out posters of stick figures intended to represent Rogen and Banks.
"I find it disconcerting people have such a hard time with a word like ‘porno.' It's not like we actually slapped pornographic images on bus stops - you've seen the poster with stick figures. The poster is actually more text than graphics," says Smith. "But the point of the child studies expert was the stick figures get their attention and they read it and next thing out of their mouth is ‘what's a porno?' I got a 9-year-old. Who can't answer that question for that kid? They ask me, and I say it's a grown-up movie, not for you, you'd be bored anyway. Someday you may like it, but there's no Hannah Montana, Jonas Brothers, or any of the ‘High School Musical' cast, so you're not gonna give a fuck about it anyway."
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