Kevin Smith Says Jay & Silent Bob Reboot Contains A Follow-Up to Chasing Amy

Kevin Smith's upcoming film Jay & Silent Bob Reboot will feature what he described during his panel at Comic Con International last night as a short sequel to Chasing Amy, Smith's 1997 film starring Ben Affleck and Joey Lauren Adams. The decision to follow up Chasing Amy, one of Smith's most well-reviewed films, came when the filmmaker unexpectedly discovered that Ben Affleck was interested in coming back to shoot a cameo in Jay & Silent Bob Reboot. The movie was almost done with principal photography by then, so finding a role worthy of his longtime friend and collaborator was a bit of a challenge.

"I didn't know what to cast him in, because we'd cast everything. There was nothing really left," Smith explained. "So I was like, 'maybe I can make up a part; maybe I can stick him in this scene or something like that.' All of it seemed like a waste because he was coming. He didn't even make us do it in LA, he was like, 'I'll come to New Orleans.' He was making the trip. I fell asleep one night thinking about it, and I was like, 'I haven't seen him eight years and he's willing to come down here and shoot the scene, he didn't even know what it is. I should do something special.' So the next morning I texted him, and I was like, 'Would you mind playing Holden again?' And he was like, 'I was hoping you would say that.'"

The result, though, sounds like it is significantly more than the throwaway scene that one might expect from such a setup.

"I wrote an eight-page sequel to Chasing Amy that follows up twenty years later, and functions perfectly within the movie," Smith said. "When you see it, you're going to be like, 'wait, that scene didn't exist when you started the movie? Why would you have bothered?' It is the emotional culmination fo the movie and sends us into a really great place. So he came and did the scene. It's eight pages, and when I sent him the scene, the first thing he texted back was, 'bro -- I have not done this much dialogue in the last three movies I was in."

Jay & Silent Bob Reboot will start a theatrical roadshow in October.