There was good news on the Clerks front earlier this month when writer/director/Silent Bob himself, Kevin Smith, announced that he had resolved any differences with Jeff "Randal" Anderson and that he would finally be able to make a third film to close out his trilogy. Now, talking with The Wrap, Smith outlines how his real-life brush with death inspired the new script he's been writing.
Smith, of course, suffered a severe heart attack last year, one which caused him to reflect on his life and choices, change his eating habits and re-visit the View Askewniverse where his cinematic career began. In particular, he's going right back to the start to tell a final – probably – story with Randal and Brian O'Halloran's Dante. "Randal has a heart attack, decides that he came so close to death, and his life has meant nothing, there’s nobody to memoralize him, he has no family or anything like that,” Smith told the trade mag. "And in the recovery, while under fentanyl, he comes to the conclusion at mid-life, having almost died, having worked in a movie store his whole life and watched other people’s movies, he tells Dante, 'I think we need to make a movie'. So Dante and Randal make Clerks. That’s the story of Clerks 3.'
"I’m going to bring my boys right back to where they brought me," Smith continues. "I’m writing it, it writes itself because I fucking lived it 25 years ago. It’s just warm and fucking wonderful. They’re figuring it out the same way I figured it out, but I have the benefit of being able to cherry-pick all my favorite stories and moments of making Clerks and putting it right back into their hands."
And Smith admits that his previous plan for the third Clerks was quite different, though interesting in its own way. "That was a movie that was written by a guy who was obsessed with middle-aged and dying, and it was all about death. And that was before I almost died," he says. "Then I almost died, and now I don’t really want to talk about that shit. I’ve been too close. Now I just want to do life-affirming things. The tone is going to shift completely. I owe those guys, those characters, Dante and Randal, a lot more than the kind of doom and gloom I was about to put them through. I loved that script, and I loved reading it, but there wasn’t a dry eye in the house for the last 15 pages."
Next from the director is Jay And Silent Bob Reboot, which will arrive in the UK on 29 November.