From 1994’s Clerks to last year’s Cop Out, Kevin Smith has worn a lot of hats, and not just as his iconic Silent Bob character. As a film writer, director, producer, editor, and even a performance artist himself via his An Evening with Kevin Smith DVDs, comedy has been Smith’s bread and butter. Until now.

Red State, his latest, is a sharp left turn from his comedic comfort zone that screams right into religious fundamentalism-inspired horror. First screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January, the movie, which stars Academy Award-winning actress Melissa Leo, is set for an October release.

Can't wait that long? Beginning Saturday at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall, Smith is peddling the film across the country on an ambitious 16-date “Red State, U.S.A.” tour, which offers screenings of the film followed by a special audience Q&A with the writer-director at each stop. In this extended, exclusive interview, I spoke with the New Jersey native about the roadshow’s roots, and touched on points from his nearly 20-year career in flicks.

Talking about roadshows, this is the first time a filmmaker like you has done something like this.

I guess it’s for me, too; I can’t think of too many who’ve gone out there. Here’s the thing, it’s weird: I think of myself as being out there all the time because I spend a lot of time on the road doing gigs between movies. Like, between movies I’m usually out there talking about the last movie I made, or the next movie I’m about to make, or something like that. For the last 10 years, I’ve been doing that more and more. So for me, I’m like, well, this is no different from what I normally do; I just travel around and talk about movies, but this time I’m showing the movie.

But now that you put it that way, that’s true; I can’t think of another filmmaker that’s gone from place to place. But when I think about the other side of it, which is normally, that’s what you do to promote the movie. Like, when I go out there to sell the flicks or go out and do press, I’ve done, city-by-city tours. You have a screening there—there’s always an awareness screening—and then you wind up sitting down and talking to all the press from that region. So it’s not really different from that; it’s just, rather than like, you’ve gotta win tickets off the radio or something, you can actually just flat out buy the tickets and go yourself. So I don’t know—until you said that, I was sitting there going, “Ahh, everybody does this,” and then I’m like, “I guess they don’t; I guess this is kind of, like, a little bit different.

And that’s what’s kind of neat about it, you know? That’s what you can support about the thing, is it’s like, wow, he must believe in the movie; he’s actually going out with it and hanging out with it. And that’s the truth. Like, at the end of the day, I would much rather do that than, like, sit at a junket with 100 or 200 assembled journalists, you know, where they’ve all watched the movie and then you’re just going through an assembly line of interviews. I’d much rather—I love the grassroots campaign, man; I’ve been doing it since day one with Clerks.

Why should people catch this film on the tour instead of waiting for its October debut?

If you’ve got any loose income, then definitely catch it on the tour, because you can see me talking to you right afterwards. As long as the movie is, I’ll be sitting there talking to you, answering questions or standing there being responsible for the movie afterwards. Other than that, though, wait until the fall, when you can see it in a multiplex for the standard price.

Red State is a departure for you in genre. Does it bear any similarities to your previous work?

Only inasmuch as, the flick deals with—there’s some religious subject matter to some degree, so there’s a passing familiarity with Dogma that at one point in the movie really helps to create a weird mood. We kind of earn off the credits we’ve earned with Dogma years and years ago. But other than that, not really. You won’t see, if any, Kevin Smith in this movie at all.

And also, this (Red State) is the lowest budgeted movie I’ve done since Chasing Amy, so that kind of affords you the opportunity to try something different. Because for years and years, they’ve released my movies and I’ve watched them spend so much money on marketing. Sometimes twice the budget, sometimes four times the amount of budget, depending on what the movie was. And, you know, I was always like, man, I can keep the budgets low, but I can’t keep the marketing costs low. I can’t change the price of a commercial on TV; it costs what it costs. So I was always like, wouldn’t it be awesome to try it once, playing it straight with no ads whatsoever? Like, just trying to get your budget back without spending the marketing costs.

And it took me years to kind of build up an audience enough where I could kind of give that a shot, where I’m like, okay, man, we’re not going to spend that exorbitant amount of money to market the movie and take out very expensive TV spots and whatnot; we’re not going to spend the standard $20 million like Lionsgate [Studios] if they release your movie. About 20 million bucks if you’re a Tyler Perry or a Saw movie, probably a little bit more. But generally speaking, that’s their modest launch; their modest marketing launch of movies is $20 million, and that is incredibly low by the industry standard, when you consider that Tron [Legacy] was marketed to the tune of $100 million. Just marketed, not made—just marketed later on, all the ads, all the billboards, all that stuff; building the awareness to launch a franchise.

That kind of math makes sense when you’re running a studio and you’re doing big studio pictures, but I come from a world where we’re creatures of little interest, man; we make movies for, like, 10 people, you know what I’m saying? We’re not playing to the whole world; we’re not Spielberg. We’re people that make these weird little flicks that play to a certain amount of people.

If we could talk numbers, how much of the advertising and marketing budget are you looking to spend in total for Red State?

That’s the thing: Right now, we’re trying not to spend anything. There’s a term called P&A; it stands for prints and advertising. We have to spend on the prints because you have to make the prints. And whether that’s a digital print or a physical film print, that’s still cost; there’s a degree of cost there. But let’s say a film print costs about 1,500 to 2,500 bucks. If you’ve got, you know, a thousand-print run, you could do the math right there, that’s pretty much what you’d need to create your prints. The rest of it, the other side of it, is the A, as in P&A, advertising. Advertising is the biggest chunk. Let’s say, of a $20 million P&A budget, $2 million is for the actual prints, $18 million is spent on advertising—television, billboards, radio, all sorts of ads; anyplace that you can get the word out about the movie. Internet—it used to be a smaller ad buy; now it’s a much larger ad buy. Our aim is to not spend that, at all.

Now, we’ll see if we’re successful; that’s the thing. When you set the bar that low, you got to set the bar—actually, maybe it’s pretty high. The bar is set for failure, because sooner or later we may have to spend a buck or two. But the idea is to try to spend nothing. I mean, even internally, we’re like, look, if push comes to shove, we can never really spend more than what we spent making the movie. So we’re trying to keep it, like: Let’s say $4 million was a cap, but we’re even trying not to hit that; we’re trying to not spend anything. That’s the dream; that’s the experiment. And even if we fail at the experiment, we feel like the amount of cost cutting and saving that we’ve already done just trying the experiment kind of makes it all [worthwhile].

What was the production budget for Red State?

It was a $5 million movie, but because of the rebate we got, we ultimately only spent $4 million. So it’s a $4 million movie.

You shot it in Canada?

Oh, no, right here in California. We got an awesome rebate rate right here in our backyard, so we shot the movie in Whittier and up in Agua Dulce.

How does its advertising budget compare to your last two films, Cop Out and Zack and Miri Make a Porno?

That’s a good question. I’m not sure what they spent on Cop Out, because I was never privy to that on the Warner Brothers side—they don’t really share that kind of information with the filmmaker, particularly if you’re just a gun for hire director, because marketing is a whole department there, you know what I’m saying? It’s a department that has as much power and influence and sway as production, because their job is just as creative; they’ve got to figure out a way to sell these movies and make hundreds of millions of dollars. So they never told me what the Cop Out one was, but on Zack and Miri, I was told it was 20 [million]. Who knows if it was a little more?

What are your financial goals with the Red State tour?

Our goals are very minimal. Basically, what we were looking at was, we weren’t expecting the movie to even be done in time for Sundance. Basically, we started shooting September 21st; I was cutting the whole way we were shooting, so I wound up being kind of able to submit the movie, and they liked it, and boom!—we were in the fest, but we weren’t intending to release the movie until October. So our feeling was, what are we going to do between now and then? Well, if we were owned by a studio, we would go out on an awareness tour. Basically, I would go from college to college or film festival to film festival and show the movie and start creating word of mouth. But to do that, that costs money; money that we didn’t have. So we were sitting there going, what’s the best way to do word of mouth screenings with no money to pay for them? And we were like, what if we start just doing our own shows? Because basically, all you have to do is sell a certain amount of tickets per theater, and then the rest of the gig is covered.

For example, Radio City Music Hall—this is what I loved, man, ’cause I was like, “You can actually rent Radio City Music Hall?”—is 6,000 seats. Again, we could never sell 6,000 seats. At my best, in New York City, I sold out Carnegie Hall, which is only 2,600 seats. So we felt like, okay, but it’s iconic venue, we’d love to go there; what do we need to sell to break even? And it was 1,700 seats, and I know I can sell 1,700 seats in [the] New York-New Jersey-Pennsylvania area. So I’m sitting there going, okay, we can get Radio City Music Hall, man, and it’s not going to cost us a dime at the end of the day, and everything we sell above 1,700 is pure profit. So right now as we’re looking at the schedule, almost across the board, over half the venues are already into their profit margins; we’ve already hit our minimums across the board, and now we’re into profit on the others. So for us, the tour’s not so much about making money, although there is a nice potential to make some cash. It’s just about not spending money, and right now, we’re at the point where we’re almost flush, where we didn’t have to spend a dime to do this entire tour, and that’s kind of cool.

You’re happy with the sales so far?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, look, happy would—I would love to be ecstatic; I’d love to sit here and be like, “We sold out on day one!” but I’ve never been able to do that for anything, and it’s 15 dates across the country, and we only had a month to sell from the end of Sundance to the first gig, so we always knew it was going to be a game of inches, not so much like, “Boom, Boom!” so that’s why I’m out there doing lots of press and whatnot, because that’s the easiest way to kind of get the word out about it, in a world where you’re not spending money on commercials. There’s no commercial out there going, “The Red State tour is coming to your town! See it nearby” or anything like that, so you kind of jump on the radio or talk to the Examiner; or you kind of go on The Joy Behar Show, or just any place that wants to give you some time, you’re out there trying to build awareness and sell tickets for this tour that kind of pays for itself.

So the notion of going from place to place—not only showing the movie, but talking to people about the movie, and in this case you get to talk to the audience right after the screening, and then probably talk to the press while you’re in town, too—that’s awesome. But it’s no different than what I’ve been doing now for a bunch of years. I think the only difference is me kind of stepping out there and saying, rather than let somebody else do this, I’m gonna do it myself. Because I’ll sit here—I’ve been sitting here since 6:00 this morning doing interviews. And that’s no different than what I normally do on the other stuff, but if you think about it, all the other stuff—I was benefiting, absolutely, but really, the people that own the material benefit the most. So if you’re going to get up at 6:00 in the morning, or sometimes 4:00 in the morning, and talk and spread the gospel of whatever it is you’re selling, why not do it for yourself?

That’s the key, man: you want to set your goals low, because a lot of people, of course, instantly, they want profitability. They’re like, “you’re going to make a bunch of money, right?” and it’s like, hey, man, this is experimental. The first stage is not spending any money. See how much we can accomplish, and see how much we can learn without costing us anything, and that’s the key. Once you do that, once you figure out how to build the apparatus that doesn’t cost you anything, then you can start figuring out how to profit on top of that, and usually it’s very simple; it’s a very simple math equation. Once you’ve got your minimum seats, everything beyond that is good. So yeah, we’re pretty happy. It would be nice if, you know, oh my God, I’d love to sit here and say, like, “Oh, on day one we sold out.” And will we sell out all of them? No. I don’t even know if we’ll sell out any of them. But we’ll be in profit on each one before we go, I hope. It seems like it; we’re in spitting distance.

You’ve had a pretty good start.

It’s not bad. Here’s the thing that I always think about, because the other day, one of our investors was going, like, because I said, hey man, what I want to do is—we know we’re never going to sell more than 3,000 tickets in New York City at Radio City Music Hall—I said, we’re going to have all those empty seats; I want to give a bunch of the tickets away to the NYPD, and we’ll call it, like, an apology for Cop Out [which was shot in New York] or something cute and funny like that. But you know, it’ll be a nice night out. If a bunch of cops can bring their wives or boyfriends or girlfriends or whatever and see the flick for free, and we’ll have the safest premiere on the planet, because you’ll have, like, thousands of John McClanes running around. And one of the investors was just like, “Wait, why do you want to give away tickets? We can sell those,” and I’m like, number one, we’re never going to sell all those tickets, dude, you’ve got to be realistic about it. And number two, why not give it away?

I would rather have thousands of cops watching the movie for free…cops deal with everybody, dude. Everybody. And cops sit around and talk all day long—that’s free word of mouth. So to me, I was going to the investor, I was like, “Look, man, you’ve got to stop thinking of it as how much can we make. Look at the amount of tickets we’ve sold thus far without spending a dime, dude. Look at the—everything we’ve accomplished thus far has cost us nothing. Like, that’s business. And thankfully, we’ve got investors on the movie who come from outside of film, and so they’re a lot more rational and reasonable about business, and suddenly, that’s where they got it. They were like, “Oh yeah, this has cost us nothing, and we’re already almost in profit over here.” So it’s kind of like that. It’s always a game of inches. Every once in while, somebody comes along with a billion dollar idea, but I’m not that guy. Sometimes you just have to, you know, dig in; grind it out a little bit.

Are you planning to make any changes to the film after the tour is finished?

I went to Sundance and watched it; that was the first time I got to see it with a real audience, and it was 97 minutes [long] at Sundance. And when I sat in the back, I sat down to watch it as a director at work, seeing it onscreen for the first time…all of a sudden, I put my editing cap back on, and I [said], “Why did I keep that? Ooh, I could lose that. Ooh, I should tighten this. I’m not doing anybody any good service by leaving this long.” So suddenly, by the end of the movie I found a bunch of time that I was like, “Ahh, I guess I can pull more time out of it.” But I came home, and now the cutis, from end to end, it was 97 and now it’s 88, so I guess I pulled out about nine minutes. And it runs so damn fast right now. I mean, from picture to picture you’re talking about 81, 82 minutes, and then you’ve got about six, seven minutes of credits in the back end. So it’s a lean, mean fighting machine, to borrow from John Candy back in Stripes.

And it’s very economic storytelling; that’s what I believe in. I’m not one of these guys that makes the film chunky; I always cut it to the bone. I don’t like people being there much longer than they want to, because I always figure, like, particularly in the theater, I always figure on DVD I can put everything back in and make it as long as you want, because there you can pause it, go take a dump, go upstairs and make a sandwich, come back and make a phone call, and then the movie never seems that long.

Click here for part 2.

Red State kicks off its 16-city national tour at New York’s Radio City Music Hall on Saturday, March 5. Visit www.viewaskew.com/redstate for dates and tickets. Visit Kevin online at www.smodcast.com and on Twitter at http://twitter.com/thatkevinsmith.

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