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Let's talk about Jersey Girl. In a New York Times interview, you talked about your favorite movie A Man for All Seasons, and you commented on "the world's loss of tolerance for the lone, principled man, especially when it involves an issue of faith." That thread seems to run through Dogma, where you were concerned about having a serious faith rather than a wishy-washy faith. With Ollie, the reluctant father in Jersey Girl, you're not addressing an overtly religious issue. But it is a matter of principles and ethics. He's growing up into moral responsibility and the larger forms of love. In this "post-Passion" world, will you continue exploring the theme of the principled man? And, since audiences seem open to it, are you interested in developing more works that deal explicitly with faith?

Smith: Well, that's all pre-supposing that I give it that much thought ahead of time. I'm flattered that you would feel that I do. But I'd be lying if I said, "When I sat down to write years ago, I wanted to write a tale of redemption." It doesn't work like that. Sometimes you're sitting around and somebody says, "It's kind of a tale of redemption, isn't it?" and you're like, "Hadn't thought about it!" And then you spend the next few interviews going, "It's really a tale of redemption!"

But I didn't really think about it in terms like that. That's why I like it when people write about film. You suddenly see film from a different point of view. As the guy who makes the film, I love reading somebody else's take on it and thinking, "Whoah! I didn't even notice that myself." Sometimes it's right, sometimes it's not.

My next movie's Green Hornet [due August '05]. It has that "lone principled man" thing going for it. But I'm certainly not sitting down to that movie going, "I must write about the lone principled man." It's just a vigilante story, a superhero story, a one-man-against-a-city story.

With Jersey Girl, did you think, I'm trying to make a film about a father's responsibility and fidelity, for an audience that wants to hear me say 'Do whatever you want'? This is not a "follow your heart" flick. "Follow your heart" leads to so many broken marriages. Jersey Girl says the reverse: "Stick with your commitments."

Smith: Yes. Responsibility.

Did you ask yourself, "How do I make these virtues attractive or meaningful to an audience that's thinking, 'I'm going my own way'"?

Smith: No, but I realized going into it there were going to be some people that are certainly not going to dig it. I'm touching on issues of sentimentality, and some people don't like sentiment.

I've had a career full of cynicism. That's how some people look at my movies thus far—they're funny, they're edgy, they're cynical. But if you scrape away the cynicism, there's a romantic underneath every one of those movies. For me, [Jersey Girl] was like, "I'm going to try to make a flick where I don't hide behind the cynicism or the jokes." There are jokes in this movie, but they're not there to mask the sentiment. They're there to earn the sentiment. It's first and foremost a sentimental film.

Unfortunately, that strays into the area of "sap" for some people. What I feel is sentiment, they feel is sap. For me, it was difficult to make that decision stick with it. When I sat down to write this movie, I thought, I'm going to commit to wearing my heart on my sleeve and that's it … I'm not going back on it. I'm not throwing a safety net under me in terms of the familiar, re-invoking Jay and Silent Bob and invoking references to past movies. I'm not going to be cynical for the sake of undercutting the sentiment. I'm married to it. I'm going to go with it. If it works for people, fantastic. If it doesn't, I can't help that. And at least that made the movie the exact movie that I wanted to make, the one I committed to doing.

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