Toronto Film Festival

Mr. Smith makes a "Porno"

Kevin Smith explains how he got the imaginary poo and fake sex in "Zack and Miri Make a Porno" past those dirty minds at the MPAA.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Read more: Stephanie Zacharek, Movies, Arts & Entertainment, Kevin Smith, Toronto Film Festival, Salon Conversations

Ian Muttoo

Listen to the interview with Kevin Smith

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Sept. 9, 2008 | TORONTO -- By giving his movie a title like "Zack and Miri Make a Porno," Kevin Smith knew he was asking for trouble from the MPAA ratings board, and he got it. Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks play Zack and Miri, down-and-out roommates who hope to turn a quick buck by making a porno film. The "actors" they enlist for this extremely amateur enterprise include the tall, dumb and randy Lester (Jason Mewes); Stacey, a sweetie pie with a girlish voice (played by real-life porn star Katie Morgan); and Bubbles (Traci Lords), who has a particular trick that you can probably guess. "Zack and Miri" features some nudity, heaps of crude language and lots of exaggerated bumping and grinding -- the film-within-a-film is shot, guerrilla style, after hours in a Starbucks-style coffee shop, so the joint is no stranger to grinding at least.

But in typical Smith style, "Zack and Miri Make a Porno" -- which shows here in Toronto on Tuesday and opens in U.S. theaters on Oct. 31 -- also incorporates a love story: While there's nothing wrong with mindless rutting, this is a picture with a belief in romance at its core -- a fact that not even Joan Graves, the head of the MPAA, could ignore. Even so, as Smith explained in an interview here in Toronto, the MPAA expressed its extreme displeasure with several scenes in the movie, including what Smith blithely refers to as "the shit shot." (To explain it here would give too much away, so all you need to know is that the gag involves an unusual camera angle and -- I'll leave the rest to your imagination.)

When Smith first submitted the picture, he received an NC-17 rating; he resubmitted a trimmed version (which involved tinkering with the sound behind the shit shot -- who ever knew a shit shot could have too many notes?) and got the same verdict. Smith and his producer, Scott Mosier, filed an appeal, which they won, as Smith explains in the interview, partly by citing precedents such as the Fart Helmet in the movie version of "Jackass." Still, the MPAA has forbidden the Weinstein Co., the studio behind "Zack and Miri," to use the original poster for the movie, and also clamped down on Smith's use of certain online trailers. It also took umbrage at the sight of some imaginary poo -- but I'll leave that to Smith, who spoke with me in Toronto, to explain. (Listen to the interview here.)

I think when you're talking about your PG or PG-13 romantic comedies, they pretty much remain the same. They're all meet-cute stories, and there's nothing in there that could offend anybody, unless you're offended by happy endings. But the R-rated stuff seems to have gotten a little more -- I felt like we nudged the door open a little bit for other people.

Why that movie worked, at least to me, is because it was about something nobody had really talked about in a film before, which was male sexual insecurity. That's really the root of the movie. It's about Holden feeling he can't possibly live up to his new girlfriend's past. At the time I wrote it, I was mired in that mind-set, and writing that movie got me out of it. And now I couldn't care less. Now you want to meet women -- well, now I'm married, but after that movie I wanted to meet women with massive sexual histories, because A) they bring experience to [a relationship], B) because everything they've done in their life leads them up to the moment where you're together, and C) you learn something from somebody who has more experience than you, not just sexually but in general. That movie came from my relationship with Joey [Lauren] Adams, who was a far more worldly person than I was, not just sexually speaking. But she had lived a pretty big life up to that point. And I had just come from the suburbs of Jersey, where I'd lived forever and really hadn't done much.

This is how it went: I submitted an hour-and-45-minute cut of the movie, because that's what we had just test-screened in Kansas City, and it played through the roof. And so I was like, I'm going to submit this one because I saw 10 minutes in that screening that I wanted to pull out. It was the first time I had seen the movie with an audience. So I thought, while I'm working on this cut, let's submit [the original] cut to the MPAA in case they do give us an NC-17, because then we can turn around and resubmit two days later and say, Look we did a bunch of work.

So we did that, and we did wind up getting NC-17. A few days later I resubmitted, and they said, "Wow, you did a lot of work, but there's still a little ways to go. You should really concentrate on the Lester and Stacey porno scene and the shit shot." In fact, they flat-out said, "The shit shot will never play in an R-rated movie."

I said, lemme work with it, maybe I can make it work. So I lowered the sound on the shit shot, because that's what they'd suggested: Maybe the sound is what makes it such a heinous moment. And I said, "Really? It's not the visual? I think the visual is heinous enough."

So I took the sound way down on that clip, and then went into the sex scene and took out six seconds of thrusting. And when I resubmitted, they said, "You're so close. There's just a little bit further to go."

At that point I said, You know what? I'm not comfortable going any further because then I'm cutting into stuff that I think is essential. So let's just go to the appeals process.

And at that point I was able to reincorporate [some of the things I'd previously cut] that I felt were missing. And really, it was just the sound on the shit shot, a couple frames of the sex scene, that I reincorporated.

Next page: "A caricature of a caricature of sex"

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