Kevin Smith shares his brother’s chilling account of their father’s sudden death, fueling his relentless pursuit of dreams while rejecting others’ opinions—like Joe Rogan’s dislike of Mallrats—and credits friends Brian Johnson and Walter for shaping his rebellious humor. They debate rare violent robberies (e.g., a Kmart shooting) and wildlife attacks, like Yellowstone’s 2015 bear fatalities and a polar bear survivor’s brutal fight, before pivoting to acting: Daniel Day-Lewis’s compartmentalized genius in The Fighter, Denzel Washington’s rigorous boxing prep for Training Day under Terry Claibon, and Michael Parks’ transformative, ad-libbed role in Red State—praised by Tarantino—proving true artistry demands discipline beyond scripted lines. Smith’s shift from "destination" to "journey" mindset mirrors how mastery, like Miyamoto Musashi’s samurai ethos, thrives when artists embrace the process over fleeting validation. [Automatically generated summary]
My brother just has this expression where he just kind of gives me the slow nod, which is, he's gone.
You know, my father was dead, and I went in and I saw him on a gurney and shit, and it was so strange.
And I go outside, and I was a smoker, like a cigarette smoker in those days.
I always go to have a cigarette, and Donald comes out, and I was like, oh, this is a shock, and whatever, you know, we were upset and stuff.
And I said, how was it?
Because he was there.
I said, what happened?
And Donald tells me the story of, like, Dad woke up and had this, like, big reaction, like, just like, I'm hot, I'm hot, and he was throwing the sheets off, and Mom freaked out.
She's like, what's the matter, what's the matter?
She told Donald, call the ambulance, call the hospital, and he was gone within seconds.
So, that's, you know, bad enough.
You know, he was hot and uncomfortable.
You didn't want to hear, like, oh, he died in his sleep, and we woke up, and he just didn't.
But then my brother says this thing, probably defined my life.
My brother goes, he died screaming.
And I go, what?
And he goes, he died screaming.
And I was like, I mean, is that a figure of speech?
And he goes, no, he literally, he died screaming.
And you could see my brother was haunted by it.
And my father wasn't like a, I wouldn't say he was a butch man or a strong man, but he wasn't a soft man by the stretch of the imagination.
And I never heard him get real loud or anything like that.
And the notion of my father dying screaming It changed my life because I was like, even a good man in this world, you play the game, you play it straight, you play it by the rules, you do everything you're supposed to, you're going to die screaming.
And at that point, I was like, there's no point in not trying to accomplish every stupid fucking dream I've got.
Even if it's dumb shit like fucking, you know, oh my god, I've always wanted to collect this many fucking Wayne Gretzky cards in one fucking binder.
Or if it's like, I want to make a movie.
Or if it's like, I want to put on a podcast.
Or I want to do a TV show now.
Or I want to write a book.
Chase it all down.
Chasing whimsies is what I've been doing for the last few years.
Just smoking weed and chasing whimsies.
Any time I'm like, back in the day, I'd have a good idea, something I really wanted to follow through on.
And so you get scared, you start thinking about what some motherfucker's gonna say.
And be like, oh, it's stupid.
Why would you fucking do that?
And fucking why, why?
A lot of why people in this world.
I try to surround myself with the why nots, motherfuckers.
So you're like, I want to try this.
They're like, why not?
Let's go.
Let's give it a shot.
You got to be game, man.
People help you achieve your dreams and shit.
So for me, the last few years, I've just been trying to accomplish every dopey dream, the big shit, the little shit.
You got to do them all.
You can't just do the climb every mountain shit.
You know, sometimes lay the bar down, step over it and be like, ta-da, so you feel accomplished.
But chase it all and do it all, because we're all going to die screaming.
And you might as well enjoy it here.
And when I say chase it all, don't fucking do it at the expense of someone else.
Obviously, don't hurt somebody else.
But go after your dreams, man.
If your dream is to like, I want to kill 12 children, I'm not talking to you.
But go after your dreams if they're not going to hurt anybody.
But, like, the hard boys, as my mom used to say when I was a kid.
Leave those hard boys alone, Kevin.
I didn't have the roughhouse playing around like, let's wrestle and shit like that.
What I had was more psychological, more oral.
And that sounds dirty, but I don't mean oral.
More like the dozens.
Motherfuckers keeping you tight.
You grow up fat.
You gotta be fucking sharp.
Stay on your toes or else you're a fucking victim every time you walk in a room.
Because most of the world don't look like you.
So you get sharp.
You learn how to fucking...
Take yourself out first before anybody else can.
Steal their thunder.
Hey, I'm fucking fat.
And then people are like, oh, he knows.
And then you've removed their fucking card.
You're taking their biggest weapon out of their quiver, the biggest thing they got.
And then suddenly you've changed the focus and, hey, he's easy with himself, blah, blah, blah.
And it makes people, you know, just all that shit you pick up over the years.
It's what shapes you.
It's what makes you who you are.
So being able to hang out with people who were quick enough to shred you, but you had to be able to protect yourself.
It's like hanging out with ninjas all the time.
Or not ninjas so much as Kato from the old Pink Panther movies where he just hired him to literally attack him out of nowhere.
That's what your friends do.
They just attack you out of fucking nowhere.
And so by doing this all the time, it made me sharp.
But it also kept me very, very real.
So these cats, even when the movies would take off, or I was doing this one or this one, they were never like, oh my god, the fucking, we had no idea you were hidden genius.
And they'll let you, like, I brought them on to Mallrats to come work on the movie and stuff, and they made it, they were in it in a few scenes, but they worked beyond the scenes.
They quit after about two weeks because they're just like, I don't want to do this.
I have no interest in this.
I mean, and that's cool.
Like, I respected that.
I was like, that's Brian.
That's Walter.
Like, that's who they are rather than be like, all right, man, we're going to do it because it might upset Kev.
If we don't, they're just like, oh, we don't want to do this, dude.
I think my sense of humor largely came from them, largely came from my friend, Brian Johnson and Walter also kind of shaped it to some degree.
I was funny, like, don't get me wrong, in high school I write sketches for the comedy shows and shit like that.
But it was their sensibility, married to whatever sensibility I had as one of three kids raised Catholic in Highlands, New Jersey, that clicked.
That, like, kind of made me the version of me you know.
The person that you would want to meet or the person like that was different It was like Kev, 18 years old, 17, 18, before he started hanging out with Brian and Walter.
Those were the cats that kind of helped me define who I was.
And if you look at Clerks, that movie is, I'm kind of Dante, and my friend Brian Johnson is meant to be Randall, the guy that I most wanted to be.
He always knew what to say.
He was fucking funny in a room and shit like that.
Really misanthropic and stuff.
And so it kind of all communicated.
Without those cats, I know I wouldn't have the jobs I've had because I wouldn't have the sense of humor I have now.
And I don't think I'd be...
Let's say I got into entertainment somehow, I doubt I'd be as grounded.
Knowing those dudes have kept me kind of grounded for years.
Out of nowhere, this big, tall, black guy, about 6'2", wearing a fake gray beard, like a Santa Claus beard, that was, like, tied on with white strings and a hat and this big hobo jacket, shoves a gun to my chest, and was like, give me your fucking wallet.
Hearing him yell at her, you think that you're just going to look around and look for a weapon or something like that, but when you're in that big of a shock, you're just like, Defenseless.
And three months before that, or six months before that, I was in Fuddruckers in Burbank, and some guy's stealing this girl's purse and running out the door, and I'm chasing him.
I'm like, I'm in Burbank right now.
And we talked about the Kmart shooting in one podcast.
The dude literally tells a story where him and his troop are out in the fucking woods or something like that.
And there's a kid sleeping next to him in a tent.
And this polar bear comes fucking through the tent.
The kid woke up to, like, wailing and gnashing of teeth and the fucking thing growling, and blood all over its face.
And the thing bit him on the head, had his head in its mouth.
A polar bear had this kid's head in his mouth, and he said...
It bit so hard, they cracked his fucking skull.
And he heard it crack in his head, and what he also heard in his head, louder than life, sense-around style from the 70s, was growling, because its fucking mouth was over his ear, dude.
And he starts punching this fucking beast in the head.
Punching it in the head real hard and shit.
And finally it lets go enough for him to make a move or something like that.
So he survived.
His buddy who was right next to him died.
And they interviewed the kid and he was talking about it.
He's like, I got a lot of guilt, man.
It could have been me.
If I had slept on that side, I'd be dead.
But I'm like, dude, you got your head bit by a polar bear.
I'm not going to say it's worse, but that's pretty damn bad.
Lately, I think I've been sitting a certain way where it squeezes the blood pressure off of one of my balls and then it feels like my whole crotch is numb.
Wow, alright, you're getting something out of me I haven't said publicly, maybe ever.
When I was a kid...
I remember, like, I'd take a shit, and I'm trying to remember what age this stopped, but I'd be like, I'm done, and somebody would get up, you'd stand up, and they'd wipe your ass for you, and I think I did that until I was, like, seven, which is weird.
Don't do that for that long because if you look at the taint or the button of the thing, sometimes if you get a second wipe, you might have a little poo on your hand and that builds up.
I go home and it was like somebody shoving their fingernail into your asshole from the inside and just sitting there and twisting it and turning it like a fucking knife.
But, you know, the gates, it's almost always sold out.
Almost all the domestic UFC sell out.
We've had a few problems in other countries where they weren't, like, hip on the UFC. You know, Germany wasn't, like, the biggest success when we were over there.
I mean, when you hear all the different shit that he was on when he died, There's a lot of those don't give a fuck guys that can put in spectacular performances like that.
Like that Heath Ledger Joker was a fucking pretty spectacular performance.
That is one of those stories that everybody knows that Daniel Day-Lewis It captured everybody's imagination.
Whether he was serious about it or not, it may have been his most brilliant fucking move.
Because for the next ten years, whenever somebody says Daniel Day-Lewis, somewhere in the next minute they're going to go, you know, he quit to be a cobbler?
He studied shoemaking.
Like, it captured people's imagination.
Like, why would a guy this good at the job go off, quit, and make shoes?
Well, he came back sooner or later.
But that shoe thing captures people's imagination.
And you think he probably went to it because it wasn't acting.
It was the furthest thing from acting, because you're right.
You look at a dude who gets into a role like he does, he probably does go to someplace fucking dark, and you...
You know, a crew, a bunch of years of doing that, one after another, maybe going to fucking make shoes in Milan feels good, sounds good, simple, doesn't require much, use a different part of your brain, no darkness and fucking cobbling, you know, unless one of those fucking witches show up.
I mean, he looks like a guy who can kick your ass.
Don't get me wrong.
The way a professional fighter moves is very specific.
Unless you're some Roy Jones Jr. freak of nature athlete who can keep your hands down and do all kinds of crazy shit because nobody can touch you because you're so fast and your timing is so good, but there's only a few of those guys ever.
If you look at a classic boxer, they have very simple characteristics.
The hands are always up high, the chin's tucked, the shoulders are up.
Nobody does that in a movie.
In a movie, everybody's Their hands are down, they're throwing wild punches and flexing their muscles, and it's my turn to hit you, and then it's your turn to hit me, and it looks very obvious.
My friend Terry Claibon trained him for some of that, and he would go down to the Hollywood boxing gym.
It was on La Brea.
And he said that guy would be out there every fucking morning at 7 o'clock, blaring his music in the parking lot, Fired up, and he said he would run up the stairs and he would train like a professional boxer.
He said he did everything I asked him to do, did it exactly the way I told him to do it, skipped rope, sit-ups, and he's in there every day.
He literally transformed himself into a professional boxer.
There's only a few guys who can hit that level, that Daniel Day-Lewis, that Denzel Washington level of commitment.
If I looked at the boxer that Daniel Day-Lewis was and I looked at the boxer that Denzel Washington was, I think Denzel Washington looks like a very good athlete, moves very well, but it looks more like Daniel Day-Lewis is a real boxer.
They should have given him to him for Malcolm X. That performance, if you ever go watch Malcolm X footage on YouTube, which you can now, they've got tons of it, nothing but free.
Fascinating.
You look at that and you realize, you want to talk about a Denzel Washington up at six training like a boxer.
He didn't even have YouTube to pull clips from.
He became Malcolm X. The mannerisms, the way he holds his hand as he speaks, it's crazy.
I remember when they first gave him the award, I hadn't seen the movie.
I was like, oh, they're making up for fucking overlooking Malcolm X. But then you see his performance in that movie, and what could be a simple programmer or a simple good guy, bad guy...
He took that role to the next level.
So it may have been overdue payback for a fantastic performance he didn't get enough credit for, but I think he earned that 10 on training day.
Who you worked with that you're like, I've seen someone go to that place?
On Red State, we were with Michael Parks.
I don't think I've ever seen Michael Parks and Melissa Lea went to weird places, like incredible places where I'm like, oh shit, this is otherworldly stuff.
It's like, you have to throw out everything you think of as a Kevin Smith movie.
Kevin Smith movies are always fun comedies.
And this movie just gets so fucking crazy so quick...
And just keeps, and goes, and you know, I really, I appreciate so much about that movie, but what I really, well, the one thing that's staggering right off the bat was that guy who played the preacher, Michael Parks.
To a 70-year-old man who this business turned its back on a long time ago and clearly has better chops than most of his peers who went on to other things, It means something.
It may not mean shit to me, like me getting awards, but him, that award means something.
He comes from an era where it does mean something.
I wish we could substitute that with the greater opinion of...
Whatever people, nice people all across the country, people discerning individuals.
If you watch this movie and don't think this guy's a fucking super genius, all that shit that I said about Daniel Day-Lewis, exact same shit I'm saying about this guy.
I mean, it was kind of a two- or three-pronged thing.
Like, number one, I saw Parks in From Dusk Till Dawn, which was Quentin's movie with Robert Rodriguez.
And he's in the opening ten minutes.
He's astounding.
Like, I love acting.
Love actors.
Love people, actresses.
People that can take the words off page and make it sing.
But, you know, there's only so many ways to skin a cat and fuck.
And even the best of them, you pretty much can see the strings and whatnot.
You know how acting works.
Every once in a while, you meet one of these performers or see a performer.
You're lucky you get to meet him.
That takes it off the fucking grid, off the charts.
This guy does this.
In the opening of this movie, which from Dusk Till Dawn is a fun vampire fucking romp.
This guy comes in and drops a performance that in a fair, just world would have won a supporting Oscar.
Like, you know, Judi Dench gets one for Shakespeare in Love, and she's in the movie, what, seven or nine minutes?
Parks is in From Dusk Till Dawn roughly at the same time and gives a performance that's as electric, as believable, as off-the-charts wonderful, but, you know, it's a genre film, so he don't get the attention and stuff.
This guy fell in love with him.
I'm watching From Dusk Till Dawn, 1995 to Lumley Sunset 5. I was like, yeah, fuck yeah, I want to see the vampire movie.
And I went to go see this vampire movie made by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez.
But what I left there was, I have to work with that man.
I don't know who that fucking man is, that sheriff guy, in the first 10 minutes, who, spoiler, spoilers, the movie's fucking 16 years old, but just in case, he gets killed in the first fucking 10 minutes.
Whole movie, I'm like, no!
That dude was the fucking truth!
The absolute truth!
I walk out of that theater, I go, I gotta work with that guy.
Just sit at the fucking feet of a Yoda like that, and for a month on a set, Imagine the amount of fucking information you could glean, steal, fucking benefit from.
But his grandfather still also had a sense of humor for the kids.
So his grandfather would be the one in the kitchen, you know, pulling like a train whistle down with one fist and lifting a leg and farting with the other.
So he was still kind of human.
So he loved his grandfather, Ivan Cooper, even though he preached the holy word and he loved him for it.
His father also preached the holy word.
This killed me because part's going on all eloquently.
He goes, His father also preached the Holy Word, but he probably touched his dick, so he don't talk about his father ever.
I love this story because it shows you that we're all like fucking kids in this business.
We go see the movie.
Quentin's got his own fucking movie theater at his house.
Looks like a fucking real movie theater.
Movie seats, fucking popcorn and shit.
He's got these awesome sculptures from his movies all around by this artist named Cleet Shields.
Great.
Own personal movie theater sits about 50 or 60 or something like that.
Maybe a little less.
So we go watch Red State.
There's me, Quentin, and Parks.
Michael Parks.
And he liked it.
He liked it.
He really loved it.
I don't want to oversell it.
But he dug the movie so much, he watched it without us when he wasn't supposed to.
Like, he got the print two days early.
We were supposed to watch it with him the day that we joined him.
And he was like, I'm going to be honest with you.
I watched it already.
Twice.
Fucking love it.
You know, I was like, oh, you don't have to apologize.
That's fucking awesome and shit.
So he watched it with us again.
Then afterwards he goes, come in the house, because the theater is separate from the house.
And he brings us in the house, and this fucking charmed me.
I will never forget this.
He goes, I've got to show you my tape.
I've got to show you my Michael Parks tape.
And he goes into, you know, he's got big entertainment centers, DVDs everywhere and stuff, high tech everywhere, but he also still has VHS. And the dude lays hands on a fucking VHS tape, almost as if I thought I hit the fucking flux capacitor, because I ain't seen one in a while.
And there, scribble on the fucking side and marker, because remember, we used to write on the side of our videotapes when we made our own tapes.
Um...
The best of Michael Parks.
And Quentin throws this tape in.
And what it is, is he's such a fan of this guy's work.
He loves him going back to then-came Bronson.
He loves this dude's work so much.
Anytime this dude's going to turn up on TV or gets a video of him, he records from tape to tape or from TV to tape.
The segments of his performance, everything that involves Michael Parks, and particularly the highlights and shit.
So what you have is a collection of some of the cheesiest exploitation straight-to-TV movies, about a high school volleyball team or college volleyball team and stuff like that, murder mysteries and whatnot.
Like, real programmers.
And as he's showing you the clips, even though it's programmers all around him, Michael Parks is still in each one of these scenes that Quentin has pulled off and put onto this VHS, dropping science, performance science, where you're just like, this is crazy.
Like, this dude's doing Shakespeare in the middle of shit.
And not to put anybody who made those movies down or off or whatever, but clearly, like, everyone else is kind of like, you know, here we are collecting a check and this is about the furthest we can go.
They're all TV movies from the 60s and 70s and a little bit into the 80s.
And that's what Quentin had collected.
He's got an encyclopedic knowledge of cinema and even bad trash cinema.
But there is no such thing as trash cinema to this guy.
He watched that movie and he found gold.
Like diamonds in the midst of shit that was just maybe simple or fucking programming material.
And he collected them for years on a fucking VHS tape.
Long before he ever knew he would be a filmmaker.
Long before he ever knew he'd meet Michael Parks.
Let alone become a filmmaker, make movies with Michael Parks in them, direct Michael Parks and inspire me to make a fucking movie where I put Michael Parks in it.
Like, that's what he said to me.
He's like...
Oh my God, he's going, as a Michael Parks fan, I love this.
This is the ultimate Michael Parks movie.
I was like, right, right!
So for me, I loved that.
The tape, dude.
He still had it.
If he had just told us the story of, I used to have this tape, man.
That would have been cool enough, dude.
But he produced it, and we all watched it together.
And I sat in a chair off to the side, and him and Parks sat on the couch.
I would have rolled a tear if it wouldn't have embarrassed them both or made them be like, get out.
But there they were.
The man whose work that this kid filmmaker loved so much.
Think about the shit you made mixtapes of when you were a kid.
He made this guy's performance and there he is watching that very same tape With the guy on the tape.
And look, we have a society where obviously that's illegal.
You can't beat people up.
It's good.
We want everything to be civilized.
But in the midst of evolution where we find ourselves in this stage along the way from changing from a wild animal to a conscious being, we still got a lot of chimpanzee DNA that needs to be satisfied.
And there's one or two ways to do it.
Either you can suppress it, you can pretend it doesn't exist, or you can give it something like porn or violence on television and movies and in sports.
You could give it something to live vicariously through.
It's got to be weird when an entire country looks so similar physically.
I mean, obviously you can tell the difference between one Japanese guy to another.
I know a lot of Japanese people, but essentially the vast majority of the people that live in Japan have this one look, dark hair, you know, the Japanese look.
I mean, they are a clear race.
It's got to be so strange to be a part of such a specific ethnicity.
I'm a mutt.
You look like you're probably a mutt.
You're a mutt.
We're a combination.
I'm a little bit Irish, a little bit Italian.
I'm just a white guy to most people.
Japanese people, that is a very clear race.
It's got to be very strange to be a part of a real powerful, dominant...
You know what I'm saying?
You look at...
Some Italians you can see this in.
You look at them and you go, oh, clearly that guy's some sort of an Italian guy.
Or if not, he's Armenian or something like that.
That sort of dark look.
But it could be a bunch of different things.
Japanese guys look like Japanese guys.
If you understand what Asian people look like, Koreans have a different look to them, but it must be interesting to be a part of one of, I mean, how many millions of Japanese people are there?
And to have such a similar look with all these different people like you that you could be recognized immediately somewhere else in the country.
What always impressed me about the Japanese is the culture of discipline.
They've had this culture of discipline and of martial arts.
The discipline of war and strategy way before any of the European countries ever figured out what the fuck was going on.
Like Shogun.
This tattoo that I have on my arm is Miyamoto Musashi battling a tiger.
This famous samurai guy, and he wrote this book called The Book of Five Rings.
It's an amazing book, man, where you've got to get into this guy's head that he's living, I believe it was the 15th century.
So I think it was like the 1400s.
I might be wrong.
Whenever he was writing this book, basically, he was a ronin.
So he would travel the earth.
He had no master.
He had no emperor.
So he was traveling the earth, basically having fucking sword fights with people.
He had, like, 60 duels, one-on-one duels with other men and killed them in hand-to-hand, one-on-one combat.
I mean, it's a crazy thought, the thing about killing people with swords.
This guy did it to, like, 60 different guys.
Swords, and in some situations he thought swords were too easy, so he would let them use a sword and he would use a stick.
I mean, he was fucking...
He was a fascinating character.
But his...
His whole life was based on balance.
It was about art.
It was about philosophy.
It was about seeking the correct way.
And for him, the way of the sword was simply the way to be successful, the most successful movements in any given situation as far as what combat is.
But he equated this combat to artistic integrity, The ability to create things freely, the ability to draw and paint, the ability to write poetry and to elegantly express your feelings.
To him, it was all connected.
It was all one piece of excellence and that is like a guide to live your life by.
And he had this statement that I read when I was a kid and it always stuck with me.
Once you understand the way broadly, you can see it in all things.
The idea being that once you find out how to tap into anything, like find out how to be a great movie director, find out how to be a great guy who draws animation, a fucking singer, a chess player.
Once you understand the way broadly you can see it in all things.
This is a translation from Japanese, so it's not...
Probably not totally accurate.
But that's what he meant, is that you find greatness.
You find greatness as a carpenter.
You find greatness as a samurai.
There's that same thing when you just tap into the zone where you're just really tuning into whatever the fuck you're doing, and then you let creativity sort of spread it out for you.