A couple of weeks back, Ian and myself took part in a roundtable interview with Brian O’Halloran (Dante) and Jeff Anderson (Randal) of Kevin Smith’s latest flick, Clerks II. Hilarity and insight ensued.
Clerks II
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Roundtable interviews consist of a gaggle of critics and press types throwing questions at often very weary actors and crew promoting their films. Brian and Jeff were more than up to the task, as you’ll see below. Questions are in bold, and their answers in plain faced type. Enjoy.
Why did it take 10 years to come up with a sequel?
Jeff: They had to negotiate my contract.
Brian: I don’t know. It’s the not the type of film that sequels….That screamed to be made. It was the type of film that you could do 2 or 3 or even 5 years later. You had to give it some time for the characters to grow. You know he had some other stories to tell, he did sprinkle the characters in his other films from time to time. I can project, ya know? (As everyone is situating their microphones)
Jeff: He’s a theater man!
Brian: I think it was something that uh, it was time.
Are any of the bits (in the film) true to life?
Jeff: Donkey show, oh yeah.
Brian: Well, I did food service for a couple of years back in high school.
Did you have good customer relations?
Brian: Uh, yah and no. I would say things like ‘Fuck you very much’ as they
walked out the door. They already had their food, so they’d say ‘Did he say
fuck you?’
You mentioned the Donkey Show. Let’s talk about the Donkey Show.
Brian: He (Jeff) mentioned it, not me!
What was your reaction when you first read the script or even on
the set when they brought in the donkey?
Jeff: Well, they were two entirely different reactions. My first reaction was you know, “I can’t wait to see this!”. You know on the set it was you know, the funnier day, but for different reasons. We shot at this abandoned Burger King that we turned into Moobies. We painted it pink and yellow and orange. People couldn’t miss it on the street, let’s put it that way. But we filmed on kind of a busy street, so the police would, if we were filming on the street, close up the street, but if we were filming interior stuff the police would open up the street and let cars come by.
For the last few days we had the pen out in the parking lot with the donkey
in there, and I always just enjoyed it when cars would drive by as we carried
the leather clad donkey into a fast food establishment. Lots of car accidents,
so that made it kind of funny.
How long did it take to shoot all the donkey stuff?
Jeff: It was pretty fast. I think we did it in 2 nights work. Lot of cleaning
up in between. The Donkey liked to mark his territory.
If you had someone like Randall who was pissing in your drink, would
you, I know you wouldn’t drink it, but would you report him to his manager,
or would you let him do his thing?
Jeff: I’d just keep right on drinking it and let him do his thing. No, I think
I’d choose option C and kick his ass. No, I don’t know. I don’t have experience
with that. I think that’s a situation you have to be in, or not.
A question that actually that I’ve always wondered, and my girlfriend’d
never seen Clerks; we watched it the other night.. With the exception of a
couple other smaller projects all you guys have really done is Kevin Smith
stuff. And both of you, she said ‘What else have those guys done, they’re great?”
I had all the Kevin Smith stuff and Now You Know the film you (Jeff Anderson)
did, is there a reason that you guys stuck close to home and did the smaller
stuff.
Brian: I came from a theater background and, I stuck…I like doing theater a lot, and I’ve done other independent films since. It’s just that I like working with new, smaller type projects. I’ve been out to LA from time to time, once or twice a year. And when the first Clerks came out the film didn’t really catch on immediately…but I’m getting regular work all the time.
What do you want to aspire to? Is there any type of movie or project
you’d like to do either together or separately?
Jeff: I’ll go back and [answer the previous] so that there’s no lingering ‘I can’t act’ or anything. I haven’t been in anything else. The thing I’m concentrating on is writing. I had done the voiceover work, but I’ve stopped doing that now. That’s what I want to concentrate on; just writing. I wrote and directed ‘Now You Know’, which the Weinstien Company is going to put out right next to Clerks II straight to DVD, but I just wrote another script that I hope to just direct.
Brian: I hope to start a production company, and to direct and produce. I’ve
produced and directed in theater, so I’d like to move on.
With your theater experience, was that much of a leap? Because it’s
a different style of acting, you know? Emoting from the stage and emoting in
10 second bursts?
Brian: It’s a matter of bringing it down, actually. It’s always the best foundation
for any actor, I always say – doing live on stage because there’s not ‘cut,
stop, wait, can we do it again?’ You gotta, you’re in front a live audience.
There’s no stopping, and interacting is always a great thing for knowing –
the immediate gratification of knowing ‘oh, you’re doing something right’ or
you’re not. And you have the ability to change it up, and in film it’s up to
the director to pick out the best cut or the best takes. And you’re like ‘oh,
god I wish he’d have taken the other one’, but he has different reasons for
why he would have taken reactions from a different cut.
Do you wonder after those takes what the audience’s reaction will
be? I mean you can’t go by – sometimes you can go by how the crew reacts but….
Brian: Right, right. Well that’s where the goal of having a really good director
is in letting you know how he’s feeling on how you come across. But technology’s
great; you actually have a digital DV as well as the film, you’re actually
able to go back and see how a take went. Which we were able to, from time to
time. But also, Kevin was editing the film as we were shooting so, we had an
editing suite hooked right into – We took over a Day’s Inn which was right
next to the movie’s location where we all stayed, and he also had an editing
suite. And Kevin was editing the film as we were going along, so we always
had a rough assembly to know what we needed, or what we had rather, and if
we needing anything we’d go down the next morning and quickly get a pick up
shot or anything of that nature.
So, to go back to an earlier question – This film has everything
to do with Clerks and the View Askew universe, and it has this cult following.
I was wondering how often you guys get recognized?
Brian: If I’m wearing the Van Dyke or doing the goatee thing, I get recognized
pretty much 3 or 4 times a week. It’s never at the right time. By the police
when I grab something or a loan officer, or a discount rate on hookers.
Is that helpful in opening up opportunities, with people already thinking
they kinda know you? Is it in a friendly way, not in like an intimidating
or ‘you’re a jackass’ way?
Jeff: Unless it’s me. I very rarely get recognized from the movie. Take off
the backwards baseball cap and I’m a free man.
Brian: You’re really the Clark Kent.
It sounds like you guys are okay with that.
Jeff: Actually I’m more than okay with that. That was actually part of my not rushing into doingClerks II. I sort of like the way it is. I get very nice letters from time to time. Every now and then I’ll meet someone that, you know, knows about the film and it’s never been a bad thing, never interferes with anything and that was sort of – a little bit making me gun shy about doing II. I’m hoping the hat throws them off again.
You’re kinda lucky in that respect. It’s kind of an actor’s conflict.
I’ve talked to a lot of actors and they want the fame and the fortune (especially
the fortune), but sometimes the notoriety and the intrusion into their privacy
kind of bothers them after a while.
Jeff: It’s not even that. It’s just – look; I just don’t fancy myself an actor,
and it’s always weird to sit down and have a discussion with somebody about
whatever, and I feel weird the whole time. If someone asks me to sign something
I spend like 15 minutes arguing with them. I’m like ‘Why? What are you going
to do with this? You don’t want this. It doesn’t’ mean anything’. It always
just becomes awkward.
Is the film going to have an R rating or NC-17?
Jeff: Somehow it slipped through with an R. I think maybe they didn’t stay
for the end of the movie. As we were shooting it we sort of figured – I mean
the first Clerks was the first movie given an NC-17 strictly due to language.
And for that one they hired Alan Dershowitz to go in and fight for it, and
it was reluctantly given an “R” For this one it was thought for sure that it
was ‘NC-17’, and it was always talked about on the set that it was going to
go out NC-17, that Kevin wasn’t going to make changes. So Kevin just handed
it in to the MPAA, more or less did it to get the press of ‘they got an NC-17’
and they were going to run with that. Then we got the phone call that it went
through with R, and we were all perplexed and kinda disappointed.
How much editing was done?
Jeff: There was none. The cut that Kevin handed in the first run, that he
assumed was going to be NC-17 they didn’t ask for – not one cut.
So the donkey dong goes these days?
Jeff: Apparently. Kevin was like ‘maybe we could have gone further!”
You started out with the first movie, and then you moved to the animated series, and then you came to back to live-action. Could you talk about the changes over that period of time? You had to clean up the characters with the TV show. How was it coming back to the full out characters of Dante and Randall?
Brian: Well, we didn’t come back by choice. We would have loved to have been going on our uh, sixth year of the cartoon. Yeah, that something that was the most fun we ever had was doing the cartoon. Unfortunately the biggest offer was from ABC, but we didn’t know the politics that were going on behind the scenes were pretty much for it to be bought just to be buried. It was cancelled before it even aired, and contractually they were obligated to air at least
two episodes.
But Kevin, you know, it has such a following, the cartoon alone, that Kevin
will be doing a feature length, uncensored animated film. It’ll probably go
straight to DVD, it depends of the reaction. Maybe it’ll get a theatrical release,
but that’s something down the road. Like 2008, 2009-ish. And then coming back
to this, we’ve been sprinkled in to other films and other things. We did a
short for Jay Leno a couple of years back. It’s nice coming back, it’s kinda
weird. I don’t know how to explain it. We both – [Jeff] lives in L.A. and I’ve
lived in New Jersey since…and we only get to see each other over the years
for these Kevin Smith events. And so the chemistry, as people keep telling
us, that we have is something that we can’t figure out. It just happens.
So coming back, it’s not that hard to do. You know it’s also a testament to
Kevin’s writing. That he can put together such dialogue that we can ‘bing bing
bing’ and….
Jeff: Doing the cartoon definitely screwed with the characters a litte bit,
because when we first went in to do the cartoon I sat down and was like ‘Do
you want this to be Randall? Cause that’s kinda boring and flat’. Obviously
for animation you have to kinda take it up a little bit so the voice went up
a little, the hands gotta go When we did the animated series everything is
so much bigger and heightened, and you have to change your inflections.
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When we did the flying car thing, which was a Jay Leno short, we went in and it was the first time we’d done live action Dante and Randal in a while. When we did the first setup we did me and did all my stuff, and then we were going to do all Brian’s stuff. The first time I did it, I read it as Randal would do it from the movie, because we’re not in cartoonland. Then they switched the camera over to Brian, and when Brian was reading I amped him up to cartoon Randal. The voice went up a little higher, I was throwing the hands up, basically trying to get him to mess up and forget his lines. And as I was doing that I saw Kevin over by the monitor and his eyebrows got like (arched in idea pose) so immediately we stopped and he was like ‘Put the camera back over’, so they put the camera back over and he goes ‘Cartoon Randal’.
So I did it just more with the hands, and being a little more animated than
the flat Randall from the movie. So for this one we’d go into a scene and I’d
ask ‘Do you want cartoon?’, and he’d say ‘We’ll see’. And then I’d do it and
somewhere off behind the monitor you’d hear ‘More cartoon! More cartoon!’ So
you’d bring it up a little, so it did make the characters a little different.
Brian: Those are the new working terms: “Cartoon Randal! Cartoon Brian!’
Can you tell us anything about the animated movie?
Brian: Nothing that I know of, except that I was at a press thing with Kevin
recently and he put out the fact that he’s definitely going to do it some time.
He has several projects before that that he wants to work on. So sometime like
2008.
Did the unfortunate ABC experience sour you on television?
Brian: No, not at all. You learn not to listen to the politics of television.
‘Cause UPN had offered Kevin and the producers a full season. Guaranteed, on
the air a full season. And with the ratings that UPN was getting at the time,
we would have been the rating gods. ABC was like, they didn’t want the property
that Disney owned, because they owned Miramax. You know like, ‘keep it in the
family’ type of thing. They didn’t want one of their properties to make another
channel successful.
What’s it like having an action figure of yourselves? Do you have
one?
Brian: I do! Two things that you’ve brought up are both little successes and things I always wanted to have. Number one: a cartoon of some sort. And number 2 having a Star Wars figure, but this is the next best thing. It’s kinda weird in the sense that it’s like ‘Alright, I’m done’.
Jeff: I didn’t even know about it. My niece called me up and said “Uncle Jeff, you’re an action figure’ and I was like ‘No, no. Your uncle is not G.I. Joe.’ And then when I knew about it – I actually just got one.
I asked Kevin ‘Am I ever getting one?” and he brought me one like 6 months ago. I was like ‘Not a lot of them around, huh?’ And he was like ‘One.’
Why do you think these characters resonate with people? Any thoughts?
Brian: (Long pause) I’m just taken in by the passion of your question. It’s
kind of weird. It came out at a weird time. If the first one came out any later
or any sooner I don’t think it would have resonated. It was the end, or the
beginning, of grunge in a sense where it was that kind of Generation X, I know
we shouldn’t use that term anymore, but it spoke to those slackers who didn’t
know where they wanted to go coming out of high school, and the college wasn’t
their thing. There were a lot of people in their 20s back then, in that time,
that didn’t know where they wanted to go. They didn’t want to go to college,
or they tried college and it just wasn’t them. And where do we go? And they
just had the friendships that they had.
I think that it was also the beginning of independent film at that time, being
really accepted by the mainstream. You had Pulp Fiction coming out, there was
El Mariachi. Everyone caught on to this black and white, low budget…you know
the dialogue was something that you hadn’t heard really in a mainstream movie
before, or the subject matter, for that matter, was not subjects that were
tackled by our age group in the movies before. And that were actually funny
and watchable for any length of time.
It was something that was passed around like ‘you gotta see this movie’ even
though it never made such a great impact theatrically. It just took off with
that word of mouth and then its four years later. It’s almost like that college
band that takes many years like, let’s take REM, to get around. They got out
of Atlanta and they were just in southern American and then a couple of years
later they finally made it up the East Coast and to New York. and then they
spread out. [Clerks] was that type of feel; it was something that spoke to
them because it wasn’t a wide, mainstream release.
From all of us at RazorFine and all those View Askew fans worldwide,
Thanks Guys!
