Hollywood director and writer Kevin Smith has never been a conventional "celebrity". His slew of "slacker" comedy films – Clerks, Mallrats and Chasing Amy among them – have polarised audiences and critics but his connection with his fans sets him apart from most filmmakers. It's seen him spin off a secondary career by merely being Kevin Smith.
After setting up a podcast, SModcast, with friend and producing partner Scott Mosier in 2007 – self-described as an hour-long session of "talking shit" – Smith found the medium "addictive" and began expanding his repertoire (he now hosts or co-hosts six different podcasts) before realising it was a format that would work live.
Although the weekly podcasts are free, Smith, inspired by old-school radio program formats, charges fans to come along and be part of live recordings. These were so successful he bought a 50-seat theatre in Los Angeles, Smodcastle Theatre, where his and others podcasts are often recorded live.
And it's a portable concept that he and long-time co-star Jason Mewes now tour; this month the pair bring An Evening With Kevin Smith to Australia.
Which is not, incidentally, as genteel as it may sound.
"You can bring your mom, but just let her know that we're gonna talk about all the unsavoury things she never wants to talk about," Smith says on the phone from the US.
He takes his cue from late comedian and social commentator George Carlin.
"I used to watch him as a kid; he could curse his head off but he was intelligent. I learnt from an early age that you can curse your head off so long as you back it up with something. In Carlin's case it was intelligence.
"So I try that – and I also try and back it up with inspiration. When people come to the show, I try to make them laugh as much as possible but I also like to slip a little inspiration in."
Smith wants to inspire people to unleash their own creativity: "I tell people, it's fun to sit here and watch me doing shit, but honestly, you can be doing it too. All I'm doing it up here, is spending my currency. My voice is my currency and voice is the only currency you have," he says.
"I encourage people to get up, spend as much as possible. Do all the things you wanna do and say all the things you wanna say. Unless you wanna hunt children – don't do that."
This is the age, Smith says, in which anybody can be a broadcaster.
"There's no gatekeeper for this right now. If you wanna make a movie, you can make a movie but if you wanna show it in the movie theatres, good luck – somebody's gotta tell you whether or not you can and you can make any TV show, but it's the same thing. But not in podcasting – iTunes takes everybody. Boom – you're a broadcaster. Suddenly you've joined the ranks of Edward R f--king Murrow!"
Smith describes his lives shows as "part stand-up comedy part revival Baptist preacher show". "But with dick jokes," he adds.
An Evening With Kevin Smith is in two parts: the first, Jay And Silent Bob Get Old, is based on a weekly podcast he and Mewes have been doing since 2010, which exists primarily as a tool to help keep former drug addict Mewes clean and sober.
"It really is the intervention podcast," says Smith. "It's basically an AA meeting but we sit around, we bullshit, we talk about him being clean, we tell sex stories. Lately we've been reading from his journal. He went to rehab so many times and whenever he's in rehab they make you start a journal. Recently he found a box of 30 journals and he's written all this sobriety poetry and it is dreadfully wonderful."
Mewes – Smith's best friend since they were teenagers – lost all the money he made from co-starring with Smith in five films after becoming addicted to heroin in the late 1990s.
"He's five years sober now and this changed his life," says Smith. "All the money he made, he just blew on drugs and stupid shit. He didn't save anything." says Smith.
"The show gave him a way to earn, to have self respect, to keep his wife when his life was falling apart. Now he's got a house, he's got a car … it's really sweet, man."
Smith says the podcast has inspired fans to kick drugs and booze: "People actually say they're clean because they listen to the show – it's crazy how real it can get sometimes."
But it's still, he says, "funny as f--k".
"Some people just wanna get f--ked up and watch us talk about pussy – and we do that too."
The second part of the live show, a Q and A, is an open forum. "We go anywhere people want us to go. I love to share. And the more uncomfortable, the better," he says.
"Especially after the whole plane thing, where everybody was talking what a fat f--k I was, that was my nightmare," he says, referring to his 2010 ejection from a US airline for being too overweight for his seat. Smith immediately took to Twitter, mobilising his 1.6 million followers (these days he has 2.8million), eventually forcing the airline to issue an apology.
In recent months, Smith has used the show as something of a testing board for his next two films, Moose Jaws, (another horror in his True North trilogy after Tusk and Yoga Hosers) and Mallrats 2, a sequel to his 1995 cult film.
"Why haven't I been doing this my whole f--king career? You can read the script to the audience and find out what works, what doesn't – you can test-run this shit!"
As with Smith's podcasting, it's a new kind of business model – and one some filmmaking traditionalists don't like.
"People have said 'Whoah, what good is that? You're testing-reading scripts with people who think Jay and Silent Bob are funny'. I'm like, who the f--k is paying to see a movie with us in anyway?
"I've always had a really symbiotic relationship ship with my audiences, now they can help me edit this shit before I even shoot it."
The podcasts, he says, have helped him re-assess his filmmaking – just a few years ago Smith said he was done with directing.
"Tusk brought me back. I thought, if they're gonna let me make this kind of weird shit, I'll make movies," he says.
"I just have to not make a movie that I would never make – that's the deal I made with myself. Make it your job to make only Kevin Smith movies; nobody wants to make those but me."
An Evening With Kevin Smith is at the State Theatre, Sydney, on September 18; The Palais, Melbourne, on September 21; the Thebarton Theatre, Adelaide, on September 23; and the Sydney Opera House on September 28.
