Kevin Smith talks Red State

As Hollywood gears down for the three-day Labour Day weekend and the end of summer (if news is slow at the start of next week, you’ll know why), it’s comforting that some directors are still talking about their new projects even as the rest of the town prepares to take a break.

Kevin Smith is that man, and in response to fan demands for more blogging (good grief people… doesn’t he do enough for you already between the blog and the SModcast podcasts?) he sat down at the computer to tell us a little more about Red State, the horror film script he’ll shoot after comedy Zack And Miri Make A Porno.

Apparently Kev was up until 1am on Thursday getting the Red State screenplay out of his head and on to paper… “It’s totally different than anything I’ve written before. Very fucked up. Shortest script I’ve ever written, too, as well as the least dialogue-driven (not to say there’s not a lot of dialogue in it still; just not nearly as much as I’m used to writing). It’s a weird, relentlessly bleak and extremely unsettling affair. If you didn’t know I wrote it, and you read it, and I told you afterwards that I’d written it, you’d be like ‘Bullshit.’”

And it was also one of his quickest efforts: “After letting said story stew in my head for nearly a year, the actual writing didn’t take very long at all. Granted, I’d done about twenty pages of an outline that I worked off of, but from the moment I started the actual screenplay (from ‘INT AIRPORT – DAY’) to the moment I finished what I’d consider the first draft (‘The End’), it was a five-day affair.”

The script has cautious thumbs up from regular collaborator and producer Scott Mosier, so here’s hoping this really is something special from Smith. Come on Kev… Scare us Silly. And not by threatening to have Linda Fiorentino act in it.