“You’re asking a guy who made ‘Goodfellas’ what he thinks about Spider-Man, what do you think you’re going to get?” Smith said.
With the long-awaited (by some) “Clerks 3” hitting theaters this fall and the NFT horror flick “Kilroy Was Here” on the way, Kevin Smith has a lot to talk about right now.
The outspoken filmmaker and podcaster spoke to Forbes for a wide-ranging interview that covered everything from his latest work to Lady Gaga being cast as Harley Quinn in the upcoming “Joker” sequel. But the conversation eventually turned to Martin Scorsese and his long-running feud with Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe. Naturally, the comic book-loving Smith had some thoughts.
“In our very tribal culture, somebody like Martin Scorsese referring to comic book movies as amusement parks and theme park rides gets a bunch of people who have made comic book movies their lives for the last 10 years very unhappy,” Smith said.
While Smith strongly disagrees with Scorsese’s concerns about these movies, he wonders why the “Taxi Driver” director’s approval was so coveted by comic book fans in the first place.
“You’re asking a guy who made ‘Goodfellas’ what he thinks about Spider-Man, what do you think you’re going to get?,” Smith said. “He’s a very serious filmmaker, and he’s a man who’s of a certain age and stuck in his ways. You should not be surprised that’s his response.”
Smith believes that the larger conversation about auteurs criticizing Marvel movies could largely be eliminated if filmmakers were more press savvy and avoided loaded questions about these topics.
“We just learned early on. ‘Oh, don’t answer that question. That’s just setting you up for failure. Just redirect,’” he said. “If somebody’s like, ‘What do you think about these comic book movies?’ Just talk about like, ‘I love all movies, movies are my life, blah, blah, blah.’”
At the end of the day, Smith sees no reason why fans of different types of cinema can’t peacefully coexist despite their disagreements.
“It doesn’t take away from your enjoyment of the thing. Guess what? For every old filmmaker who’s like, ‘I don’t get it,’ there’s a bunch of young filmmakers who are like, ‘I get it and I want to do it,’” Smith said. “We don’t have to ostracize the people that maybe don’t get or aren’t into the same movies we are.”
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