MichaelParks Tagged Articles at Cinematical

"It's so bleak, it makes f**king Dark Knight look like Strawberry Shortcake." -- Kevin Smith on Red State

Last month, I traveled to Red Bank, New Jersey and enjoyed a very cool lunch with a very cool dude by the name of Kevin Smith. While we scarfed down some tasty Italian food, I recorded roughly an hour and a half of our conversation -- all of which would be way too much to read in one post. Thus, I've decided to break some stuff up into sections and post them separately, then I'll be back with much more in the coming days leading up to the October 31st release of the hilarious Zack and Miri Make a Porno. Toward the end of our conversation, we turned to Smith's future projects -- most notably Red State. Check out what he had to say about the film, as well as which Tarantino regular he wrote a part for.

On financing Red State: "It's tough to get money for this one. And I don't want to bring it up to [The Weinsteins] again because there's something kind of exciting about going out and trying to finance it myself and raise some financing. I mean the harsh reality is if I said hey, who wants to do my next comedy, I've got money coming out the ass. But when I hand in this, like, 89-page script that is dark, there's nobody to root for, there are no heroes, it's depressing, it's critical -- it's so bleak it makes f**king Dark Knight look like Strawberry Shortcake. Not a lot of people want to pony up for that movie, man. Especially when I start out by saying, 'Look, it's decidedly not commercial. It's not a standard horror movie where you make it for $20 million. It's bleak and it's not going to get any lighter.' People aren't whipping out checkbooks when you give them that rundown."