Kevin Smith Celebrates 25th Anniversary of Chasing Amy With Heartfelt Instagram Post
It has been 25 years since the release of Chasing Amy, Kevin Smith's third film as a writer/director, which gave Ben Affleck a chance to really shine as a leading man for one of the first times in his career. Smith, who exploded onto the indie film scene with Clerks in the early 1990s, had a pretty massive sophomore slump with Mallrats, which has since become a cult classic, but at the time earned poor reviews and a dismal box office return. Enter Chasing Amy, which not only revived Smith's reputation with critics and studios, but set the stage for much of what would follow, establishing the Bluntman and Chronic comic and its characters, as well as a scene that firmly established that all three films took place in the same universe, where everybody knew everybody.
Smith released a heartfelt message on Instagram, alongside a photo of the cast from 25 years ago, including Jason Lee, Joey Lauren Adams, Jay Mewes, Dwight Ewell, and Affleck. In it, he contextualized what was so special about Amy at the time.
"Mallrats had been so reviled and ignored that I was nearly exiled from the movie biz," Smith wrote. "Amy saved my career – but even better, it helped me mature as an artist and a person in the process. A quarter century's gone by since these ancient indie film kids, then in their 20's, all felt they all had something to prove.
You can see the post below.
While Clerks has had two direct sequels, Mallrats has one on the way, and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back got Reboot-ed, Chasing Amy has remained decidedly stand-alone, with its only real follow-up being a scene in Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, in which we learn the nature of Holden, Alyssa, and Banky's relationships all these years later. That scene also marked the first return of Affleck to the "View Askewniverse" in about a decade, and re-established Holden as Smith's own alter ego.
"I am represented in my movies by Holden," Smith told ComicBook at the time. "It used to be Dante, but then I don't resemble Dante's life at all anymore, because I haven't been a guy working at a real job in 25 years at this point. But Holden is my closest avatar in as much as he is exactly who I was when I made Chasing Amy. I got to mature, because of Holden and stuff, so he's always represented me. Suddenly, I got to play with that card in this movie again. And in playing with Holden, I got to go one level deeper, and stand there in the middle of the movie, put on the brakes, and make a speech through him, where I'm like, 'Look, this is where I am in life now.' And it's basically a speech for everybody who's like, 'You're still making movies with your f---ing kid? Would you stop?'"
