Silent bob strikes back

After a rocky relationship that spanned almost two decades, this was the year Kevin Smith and Hollywood finally decided to see other people. Having raged against critics who panned his 2010 cop-buddy movie Cop-Out, fallen out with his one-time mentor and movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and announced his upcoming two-part film Hit Somebody will be his final film as a director, Smith used his Sundance premiere of Red State in January to sound his official war-cry. In a passionate 20-minute speech, he lambasted movie studios for their elitist and outdated approach to marketing, which he claimed is too expensive and advertisement-focused for new and independent filmmakers.

“I never once knew jack-shit about business. I’m a fat, masturbating stoner,” Smith proclaimed. “If somebody told me all the stupid, horseshit, uncreative, backwards ass bullshit business that I now have in my head that I’ve pushed out creative things to make way for, like, ‘It’s going to be a four quadrant movie, we’re going to show it here, here, here and here. If we do that then we’re going to look at this money coming in and then that goes back, don’t forget about the revenue stream with DVDs…’ It’s too much fucking horseshit. I just want to tell stories.”
Them’s fighting words! And if any story was well suited to Smiths’ unapologetic and uncompromising vision – as well as his attraction to controversy – it’s Red State. Based around a group of religious fundamentalists very obviously modelled on the Westbro Baptist Church – known for protesting the funerals of dead soldiers and their now infamous slogan of ‘God Hates Fags’ – Michael Parks plays the patriarch and pastor, Abin Cooper. Both Parks and Smith were determined to give the character some depth, and to portray the American government as no less morally confused than the gun-toting Baptists.

“You know what’s boring? It’s boring to do Abin Cooper as a moustache-twirling demon. What’s interesting is to do Abin Cooper as a human being, because that’s even scarier. It’s one thing if it’s just, ‘I hate all gay people.’ It becomes a cartoon. Look at how sweet he is to his grandkids. Look at how he cares about his family. And yet he still feels these horrible things. That’s what intrigues me, not the superficiality of good triumphing over evil. I knew I couldn’t make a flat-out horror movie, but I knew I could unsettle people with the flick, and I could just constantly put out unnerving notions. One of the most unnerving notions is that Abin Cooper, aside from the politics, doesn’t seem like such a horrible monster.”
This unnerving, unpredictable thread runs throughout the entire film, which takes some shocking twists.
“Yeah, the movie plays with you like that. I don’t consider it a straight-up three-act film. It’s a parlour trick. I am using the tenets of cinema against you to keep you rope-a-doped, so you don’t see what’s coming next. That’s fun. The whole movie’s designed as a trick. At one point we write large on the screen: ‘4.47am’. It means nothing. It’s such a subversive move – it’s me throwing the time on the big screen just to fake you out so you think, ‘That must matter, it must be important, I better remember that.’ We never revisit it, it never happens before, but it leaves you off-centre just enough that the next scene can come in and hit you on the side of the head. Nobody gets to autopilot during Red State.”
However it’s just this messy blend of political satire, horror, action and Smith’s trademark mischievousness that prevents Red State from being the brilliant and cohesive horror movie it should have been. But no matter. The real success story isn’t the film itself, but its distribution.

Controversially setting up a fake auction at Sundance only to buy the distribution rights himself, Smith declared: “When I came here 17 years ago, all I wanted to do was sell my movie and I can’t think of anything fucking worse 17 years later than selling our movies to people who just don’t fucking get it.” Smith used Twitter and his SModcast, his popular podcast with Scott Mosier, to promote it, releasing Red State straight to video-on-demand and touring it in cinemas. And he insists that any filmmaker can do the same thing.
“We’re the captains of our own future,” Smith said, “It’s time to kick open the next logical step in evolution... You’re going to put out your movies through our studio and it ain’t gonna cost you a fucking dime. Brute force if you will. Hate us if you must, but I can’t think of a more interesting business news story you’re ever going to hear about this year. We’re definitely going to find a new distribution model.”
And we’re sure he’ll cause ripples there too. For you can take the boy out of Hollywood…

Red State is in cinemas from September 30.