During a recent live Q&A following an episode of his podcast Fat Man on Batman, geek icon Kevin Smith gave a few more details about the upcoming film Jay & Silent Bob Reboot, which he told fans would begin filming in August.
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While called “Reboot,” the film is actually technically a sequel, albeit one that feels kind of like a remake…and that’s all on purpose, Smith said. It’s part of the joke.
“We’re doing a sequel to Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and it’s called Jay and Silent Bob Reboot,” Smith told fans. “It’s us, it’s me and Jay so it’s not really strictly a reboot in the way that people think of a reboot. If you remember Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back it was a movie in which Jay and Silent Bob found out Hollywood was making a movie about them so they went cross country to Hollywood to stop that from happening. Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is completely f—ing different. In Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, Jay and Silent Bob find out that Hollywood is making a reboot of that old movie that they had made about them, and they have to go cross the country to Hollywood to stop it all over again. it’s literally the same f—ing movie all over again. It’s a movie that makes fun of sequels and remakes and reboots while being all three at the same time.”
Smith compared the movie to filmmaker Gus Van Sant’s decision to remake Psycho — a move that he made in between directing Good Will Hunting and appearing in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. In that film, Van Sant (playing himself) was making a sequel to Good Will Hunting, letting Ben Affleck and Matt Damon more or less direct themselves while he counted stacks of money.
“One of my favorite little director tricks or experiments of the last 20-25 years was Gus Van Sant, He’s coming off the heat of Good Will Hunting. He’s an Academy Award-nominated director. The film won awards. Ben and Matt won for screenwriting, Robin Williams won Best Actor in it. Gus had his pick of anything, he could do anything he wanted, and he went into Universal and he was like ‘I want to remake Psycho,’” Smith said. “They were like ‘Are you crazy? It’s Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho,’ and he was like, ‘yeah, but it’s a black and white movie. There’s a whole generation of kids who will never watch this movie’…. I thought that was so crazy, ballsy, he wanted to do a shot-for-shot remake of Psycho, but in color with new actors. It’s a very film-school experiment. It’s something a young-buck director who’s figuring out what they want to be, does. It felt very avant-garde. Some people will argue from not until the end of time that it was absolutely f—ing unnecessary, but I like that it was just ballsy. He literally just made the same f—ing movie over again. Mine’s not that, we have a completely different script, but I used the script of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back to build the script to Jay and Silent Bob Reboot. So there’ a van in it with three girls in it.”
Tremors: A Cold Day in Hell star Jamie Kennedy is hoping his character from Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back will come back for Kevin Smith‘s upcoming reboot — and he’s angling for a promotion along the way.
“Man, I hope I get in [the movie]. That’d be awesome,” Kennedy told ComicBook.com. “Chaka’s coffee boy, I think he needs to make a cameo! That’d be funny if now he’s directing. You should tweet that at him!”
Smith said that the August production date means he hopes to have the film available for fans by 2019.
