Kevin Smith’s new verison of Clerks III, which the filmmaker has suggested will leave Dante Hicks (Brian O’Halloran) and Randal Graves (Jeff Anderson) in a better place by the time it’s over, will be scored by My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way, the filmmaker revealed during a stop on his “Reboot Roadshow,” where he has been traveling the country screening Jay and Silent Bob Reboot for fans, and doing a Q&A session afterwards. The filmmaker recently revealed that he has persuaded his old friend and franchise star Jeff Anderson to return to the role of Randal Graves — the stumbling block which killed a previous version of Clerks III which, in hindsight, Smith said was likely too dark anyway.
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The music for Jay & Silent Bob Reboot came from Clerks: The Animated Series veteran James Venable, who also provided the score for Clerks II. Unlike many of Smith’s collaborators, though, Venable comes and goes, rather than working with him on every film. He works on quite a bit of animation, including Clarence, Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths, and Jay and Silent Bob’s Super Groovy Cartoon Movie, which Smith did not direct himself.
Way, who also oversees DC Comics’s Young Animal imprint and writes their Doom Patrol comics, provided (with My Chemical Romance) a song for the Watchmen soundtrack ten years ago, a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row.” He also provided songs for Smith’s Tusk and Netflix’s adaptation of Umbrella Academy, a comic Way co-created. Clerks III will be his first film score.
Anderson and Smith famously had a falling out after the original Clerks, which is likely part of why Anderson did not appear in another of Smith’s films for several years. In Clerks II, Anderson and O’Halloran reprised their roles from the 1994 original, leading fans to assume that their disagreements were behind them, but that may not be the case, as Smith referred during his convention panel to trying to make things right with Anderson. He also used the actor’s name directly when discussing the idea, which is something Smith has resisted doing in the past. Even in the same panel, earlier in the evening he had said simply that “one of our number” was not on board for the threequel the first time around. That said, he is hoping that the rewritten version might lure Anderson back. Smith said that after Jay & Silent Bob Reboot, he feels like the time is right to explore the View Askewniverse characters again.
“Jay and Bob gave us so much that this movie is kind of like us giving something back to Jay and Silent Bob,” Smith said. “Where they end up in this movie is a place where they deserve to be because they gave us so much.”
He said that he feels the same way about Dante and Randal, who got a great moment at the end of Clerks II, when they realized that they are in command of their own future.
“When I wrote Clerks III, I wrote it during a weirder, darker point in my life, and it’s kind of like the King Lear of our movies,” he said, adding that the movie is about death. “I love it, it’s one of my favorite scripts, but it’s dark. It’s bleak, and it’s not what Dante and Randal deserve. We’re never going to make that verison of Clerks III, but I’m going to write a different Clerks III and we’re going to make that f–king film, I promise. And in a world where we got to bring Ben back, I’ll be able to bring Jeff back.”
“They gave me this much, I owe them one last thing,” Smith said.
There is no clear timetable for production to start on Clerks III, which would likely have to wait until the competion of the Reboot Roadshow in 2020.
