Kevin Smith has now delivered the first look at the main cast from “Clerks III” along with new story details for the closing chapter in his film series…
Kevin Smith has never been shy when giving credit to the career he built around his first film “Clerks” and he’s paying homage to that indie classic with the upcoming third and final film in the series.
Filming is underway on “Clerks III” in New Jersey with Smith returning to his old stomping ground in New Jersey with the movie actually taking place at the same store where he once worked, which gave him the inspiration to write and direct “Clerks” back in the early 1990s.
While the central characters for the upcoming trilogy are the same, the main focus will shift in this film from Dante (Brian O’Halloran) to his foul-mouthed sidekick Randal (Jeff Anderson) as Smith actually passes along some of what happened to him in real life to the characters he created nearly 30 years ago.
In the original film, Smith loosely based Dante on himself while Randal was based upon his best friend Bryan Johnson, who previously appeared in films such as “Mallrats” before serving as one of the leads in the reality series “Comic Book Men” on AMC. For “Clerks III,” Smith says he’s shifting the primary lead role over to Randal this time around but basing the main story on his own very public health emergency after he suffered a heart attack three years ago.
“The film is predicated on the idea that Randal survives a heart attack, a massive heart attack, quite like I did, and then winds up, you know, deciding that he’s wasted his life,” Smith told Vanity Fair. “But before he dies he wants to memorialize himself. He wants to make a movie. So our boys essentially wind up making Clerks.”
While “Clerks III” will be in color, Randal’s film titled “Inconvenience” — which was coincidentally Smith’s original title for his debut movie — will be shot in black and white. That will allow Smith to recreate many of the same scenarios from the original “Clerks” as he revisits his first film 27 years after he shot the original.
Smith previously revisited these same character in 2006’s “Clerks II” but looking back on that film, the now 51-year-old director admits that the story was really just fiction and not based on reality as much as the original or the upcoming third film.
As much as “Clerks II” remains a treasured film from Smith’s history, he believes “Clerks III” will take a page from his own life much like the original film did when it was released in 1994.
“I love it so much, but the problem with Clerks II is it’s pure artifice to a large degree,” Smith said. “Clerks was based solely on reality. I woke up, I went to that store; crazy people came in; kids hung out outside and sold drugs; I had a friend who worked next door. All of it was very autobiographical.
“Clerks II is completely fabricated, right down to the fact that I never even worked in fast food.”
At the end of “Clerks II,” Smith took his characters in a much different direction after Dante and Randal decide to purchase the Quick Stop and RST Video store where they previously worked right out of high school. Dante was also welcoming his first child with new girlfriend Becky (played by Rosario Dawson). They are also rejoined by Elias (Trevor Fehrman), who followed Dante and Randal from their job at Mooby’s to the revamped Quick Stop.
The third film will address how real life starts to settle in for these lifetime clerks that no matter how much it means to own a store, they are still defined by jockeying a register and selling cigarettes to locals.
“In the last movie we gave them autonomy,” Smith said “Like, ‘Hey, man, we can buy the store and shit.’ We gave them a way to live so they didn’t have to work for somebody else. And now this time we give them their hearts’ deepest desires. We take Randal, a motherfucker who wears cynicism on his sleeve, and we turn him into a dreamer.”
“In the last shot [of Clerks II] they’re in the store that they now own, masters of their own destiny, and as we pull back, it goes from color back to black and white because, you know, you have to be careful what you wish for. Those dudes are like, ‘Yeah, man, now we own the store!’ But they’re still at the store. And when we pick up 15 years later, they’re still at the store…. It’s all disrupted with the heart attack.”
There was a different version of “Clerks III” that Smith wrote several years ago that he couldn’t get funded and ultimately shelved. He eventually did a live reading of that film in New Jersey to help save the local theater where he first did the casting call for “Clerks” back in 1993 but that same story does not exist in the new version he’s currently shooting.
Instead, “Clerks III” truly does imitate real life from giving Randal the heart attack he suffered to the movie Smith originally shot that allowed him to actually become a filmmaker.
He addresses all of that in this third movie while injecting even more of his personality after his own heart attack made him realize that nothing is promised in this world.
“You can’t slack after a heart attack. It’s that simple,” Smith said. “That being the motivating factor in our story just gives us a way to leap off into the theme of: There is less time ahead of us than there is behind us at this point. When we made Clerks, our whole lives were ahead of us.
“Now I know for a fact, a medical fact, I ain’t going to live another 51 years. So that means that there is less time ahead of me…. I can get as healthy as possible, but I’m dealing with genetics, and those genetics have a ticking clock on them.”
“Clerks III” is currently shooting in New Jersey and the film will eventually be distributed by Lionsgate but there’s no release date set for the movie just yet.
