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Smith Liv Tyler and Ben Affleck on the Jersey Girl set

How did you come to cast Ben Affleck as the lead?

Smith: Affleck said, "I want to make a movie like Chasing Amy again. Can we do something like that?" And I said, "I've got 50 pages of something. Do you want to check it out?" I gave it to him and he responded. "This is what I'm talking about. It's something where it's about the performance and the relationships of the characters."

He was coming off of Pearl Harbor where he spent the better part of the year promoting it while he was making it, and then it had this massive premiere in Hawaii, and everything was a very big deal. He said he just felt like a cog in a machine and he wanted to feel like more than that, and feel like his performance meant something to a movie, as opposed to that movie where the special effects were the stars really.

So I gave him these pages, and he was like, "Let's do this."

So, is the future of Kevin Smith "touchy-feely"?

Smith: Jersey Girl for me is a one-off. I've said everything I could say about fatherhood. I don't really have another touchy-feely movie in me at this point. I've gotten this movie out of my system.

The next movie is a comic book movie which I've never done before, and that to me is the real 180. That's the departure from everything we've done, except that Jersey Girl, while it lacks the profanity of the first five, it's still a relationship movie like the other five. Green Hornet, while it still has relationships in it, that's not the focus. It's a big eye-candy spectacle.

[Smith pauses, thinking about it, and then shrugs.]

Of course, knowing me it'll be just two shots of those two dudes sitting there talking about sex.

A longer transcript of this interview, along with my own review of Jersey Girl, will be posted at Looking Closer this weekend.

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