With the release of the first official trailer for Clerks III, writer/director Kevin Smith made it clear that he’s still as meta as ever after all of these years. In the new film, Randall (Jeff Anderson) suffers a heart attack, which gives him the push he needs to finally make his own movie after years complaining about everyone’s else. Unsurprisingly, the movie he sets out to make is awfully similar to the original Clerks that put Smith on the map when it was famously scooped up at Sundance by, um, some guy. Let’s go with that.
However, the real life parallels don’t stop there. As fans of Smith know, he suffered a massive heart attack in 2018, and his wife and daughter were not exactly thrilled to relive that experience. Via Entertainment Weekly:
“My wife and kid don’t enjoy the movie the way I do, at least the first half hour,” says the director. “My wife’s like, ‘Look, what you think is funny now was the worst moment of our f—ing lives.’ And I was like, ‘Well, don’t say that to the critics, for Christ’s sakes! It’s too easy a lay-up for them!’”
As Smith notes, mining his personal life and previous films is his whole schtick, so of course, he’s going to use his health scare for the perpetually self-referential movie universe. “It’s incredibly meta,” Smith said. “The snake really eats its own tail, swallows itself, and s—s itself out, and that is Clerks III. You can put that on the poster!”
Clerks III clocks into theaters on September 13, 2022.
(Via Entertainment Weekly)