Kevin Smith Talks ‘The 4:30 Movie’s Love Letter To Theaters

As Hollywood attempts to keep up with the ever-changing face of streaming, Kevin Smith has gotten into the movie theater business.

The director’s latest film is The 4:30 Movie, which serves as a love letter to small-town cinemas. It came at a time when he was feeling “existential” about being “one more goofy-ass tile to this never-ending wall” of film and television content on streaming platforms.

“I know it’s hard out there. It’s always been hard,” he said. “That’s the one thing I could say. But it’s worth the struggle. It’s worth the fight. Like, it’s worth making that tile, man, because that tile winds up being all the difference in some person’s life you’ll never meet.

“I meet people who tell you wonderful things about movies you’ve made years ago that other people lambast, and they’re like: ‘That’s my favorite movie. That’s the movie that saved my life,’” added Smith. “So it’s always worth the struggle to get there because you know that whatever you make, by process of elimination — and this is not exaggeration — it will be somebody’s favorite movie. It will be the movie that saved somebody’s life, so do it.”

Known for such indie hits as Clerks (1994), Mallrats (1995), Chasing Amy (1997), Dogma (1999) and Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back (2001), Smith’s latest title is a teen film wrapped in an ’80s period piece, quite the departure from his View Askewniverse.

After saving his hometown movie theater in Atlantic Highlands, NJ, from closing down, and reopening as Smodcastle Cinemas, Smith saw a unique opportunity to make a deeply personal film that hearkens to a time before streaming.

The 4:30 Movie, now playing in select theaters via Saban Films, follows 16-year-old Brian (Austin Zajur) as he spends the summer of 1986 sneaking into movies with his best friends (Nicholas Cirillo and Reed Northrup). After inviting his crush Melody (Siena Agudong) to an R-rated screening, his feud with the theater manager (Ken Jeong) and teenage rivalries threaten to upend his date.

In addition to the new generation of actors, The 4:30 Movie also features familiar faces from the View Askewniverse, including Jason Mewes, Brian O’Halloran, Jeff Anderson, Jason Lee, Rosario Dawson, Justin Long, Jason Biggs, Kate Micucci and Diedrich Bader. Smith’s wife Jennifer Schwalbach and daughter Harley Quinn Smith also make cameos.

When he’s not running a movie theater or plotting his latest “dream job” as a morning radio DJ, Smith is in talks with Universal about the long-awaited sequel to Mallrats, following Shannen Doherty‘s recent death.

Ahead of The 4:30 Movie‘s premiere, Deadline caught up with Kevin Smith about capturing nostalgia on-screen while keeping up with the times.

DEADLINE: What was it like departing from the View Askewniverse to make your first quintessential teen movie?

KEVIN SMITH: This is the furthest I’ve reached back to tell a story. Most of the stories that I started telling in the 90s have always been kind of 90s-facing or 90s-inspired. So for this, I went back to the teenage years, the formative years and then it wasn’t even, “let me do some deep soul searching.” I bought this movie theater in Atlantic Highlands, the borough next to the borough where I grew up — I grew up in Highlands, New Jersey. Atlantic was the next town over and that was the movie theater that we went to in our childhood, the Atlantic Cinemas. So we bought that two years ago, me and my friends. They were gonna try to close it down and we were like, let’s keep it alive. 

When we got the theater, the first thing I thought about was, well, everything inside is old. The last time they did refurbishments, it had been a couple of decades back. So if you point a camera inside the theater, you got a period piece. The seats in the theater were the same seats I sat in when I saw Friday the 13th Part Two when I was a kid. So at that point I was like, ok, well, if I’ve got a period piece, that means I could probably do a relatively inexpensive 80s movie and pull from my youth where I used to hop from theater to theater. We would pay to see one movie and then when it was over, go to the other movie and then go to another, hoping not to get caught and thrown out. 

So in the movie theater, I guess the means — you know, the location — dictated what came next. And so because I had the theater and because it was so old and whatnot, it brought me, oddly enough, to a high school movie. So, yeah, this is definitely the youngest story I’ve ever told. But this is a genre that raised me. I’m a big John Hughes fan, that was a filmmaker who a lot of us when we were kids, he made us feel seen for the first time by having face-forward characters that we could recognize as opposed to somebody’s stereotypical idea of what a teenager was. So really, location dictated my walk down memory lane. 

DEADLINE: Is this your first period piece?

SMITH: It is. I mean, it’s no Merchant Ivory, but this is the furthest we’ve gone back. We actually had to spend money to make it look like another time, but granted that was very, very minimal cash. Like whenever we were in the lobby, looking out the front doors into Atlantic Highlands, that’s when we had to swap out older cars, make sure you didn’t see any URLs on buildings and ads and stuff like that. Just the weird things like that, even something as simple as the area code was different. So if somebody has the area code on their sign across the street, then you’re like, oh s—. So as long as we kept the lens pointed inside and made sure that everyone was wearing period appropriate clothing, it was a very inexpensive period piece to pull off. 

The idea too was like, well before we change the seats in theater one because it’s the old ass seats and it’s a big complaint everyone has about the theater — like, popcorn’s great, those seats suck — so, we were like, before we take the seats out, let’s shoot the movie there because it’s gonna look older. But now that we’ve shot the movie there, there’s a thought process of like, well, we can’t take the seats out now because people see what the movie theater looks like in the movie and they’ll be disappointed if they come and the crappy seats aren’t there. 

DEADLINE: My first job was actually at a movie theater, so I really appreciated that whole personal connection of filming in your hometown theater. 

SMITH: And, you know, that’s actually when I first started thinking about writing it, I was like, oh, do I essentially do Clerks set in a movie theater. Do I do Ushers? But since I never worked in a movie theater, I thought that would be pretending, stolen valor. So I was like, you know what? I went to the movies a lot. I can easily write about that. 

DEADLINE: It also felt like a love letter to small town movie theaters in the age of streaming, which I appreciated. 

SMITH: Oh, heavens yes. I mean, I’m sure there are some cats who eventually click on a tile on some streaming service, and if they ever get deep in the movie and see what our lives were like back in 1986, how we consumed, I doubt they’d believe it. Like, “What do you mean? You actually went to a place and sat next to people in public and you watched the movie and it wasn’t on your phone?”

So, it does act as a kind of sentimental ode to a time that seems to be, it won’t ever go away, but it’s slipping from our grasp in terms of how we’ve always known it. It’s just that simple, people have changed how they consume their media and, just like how Broadway never went away and just got more expensive, movies will never go away in movie theaters. It’ll just get more expensive to make up for the lack of people who aren’t going. 

And as a film exhibitor, as somebody with a movie theater, I know what that’s like. If we do an event at my movie theater, that’s based around our stuff, like just recently we did Vulgarathon where we showed all eight View Askewniverse movies, from Saturday at 9 in the morning until Sunday at 5 in the morning. So it was like an all-day event, we sold 700 seats at 69 bucks. So the place was packed, we could have sold out the entire theater. We had four of the theaters filled for the event. We had to leave one, the small theater, the 92 seater open for Deadpool & Wolverine or else Disney was not gonna give us the movie. So, when we do events, I could pack it. … But when it comes to new movies, like I asked my friend, Smodcastle keeper, Ernie O’Donnell, “How’d we do with Beetlejuice man?” And he said, Friday, we did 43 tickets and Saturday we did the 113, which in our theater is good for a first run movie. A lot of the first run movies that come out you sit there. It looks like you’re going to see a Kevin Smith movie. There’s like one or two people in the theater next to you and that’s about it. …

But at a certain point, how many tiles can you get to in a lifetime? Sometimes, I just scroll through Netflix and Amazon Prime and Max. Like before I made The 4:30 Movie, I was just scrolling at the endless tile after tile of, quote unquote, what they call now content, we used to call movies and stuff. And I was sitting there going like, what am I doing? I’m just gonna add one more goofy ass tile to this never-ending wall. And as I scroll past the thing, someone will scroll past my thing as well. I kind of got existential about it for second there. I was like, why bother? And then I remembered the situation has always been the same, the presentation is different now, but the situation has always been the same. There are lots of people who wanna tell a story. And so I’m breathing rarefied air 30 years into a career where I could still be like, “Hey, I wanna make a movie,” and accomplish it.

I know for a fact with most of my movies, it’s gonna be seen more at home than it’ll ever be seen in a movie theater. But the one thing I know about The 4:30 Movie, in our movie theater, Smodcastle Cinemas, when this movie has done its theatrical life — it’s only playing on like 250 screens or something like that — but when it’s long forgotten in a pile on some streaming service, we will continue showing The 4:30 Movie every Sunday at that movie theater because it’s made there. Very few movie theaters get to show a movie where the movie was made there. And the movie theater is like one of the stars of the flick itself. So, we talked about it and I was like, “There ain’t no reason for the rest of our lives that this movie can’t play at 4:30 every Sunday.” So that’s a nice little kind of PS to whatever the story of The 4:30 Movie winds up being. 

DEADLINE: I want to say as a fan, thank you for continuing to make these films because I’m continuing to watch them. 

SMITH: In the climate that we’ve got, it’s such a hostile world. I mean, shit, if the internet had existed when I started, I doubt I would have started now because you could talk me out of anything. And a bunch of strangers going “you suck” would have been enough for me to be like, “I’m not even gonna try.” But 30 years in, there isn’t a day goes by where some stranger on the internet doesn’t tell me I suck at my job. But I am 30 years in on that job, so I must be doing something right. 

DEADLINE: Is there anything you can tell me about Twilight of the Mallrats? 

SMITH: So, with Shannen’s passing, at that point, I was like, “Well, I guess that kind of closes the book for us.” But then a couple of weeks ago, my producer was having a conversation with some folks at Universal. The thing has been for years that, of course I’d love to make the Mallrats sequel as I’ve said many times. Any time I turn in a script, the good folks at Universal are like, “This is neither fast nor furious.” So, we never go anywhere. 

At one point, we were gonna make a $5 million version of it through one division they used to have maybe, I don’t know, I forget what it was called, but like they did smaller straight to streaming or straight to video type movies. 

And then it kind of fell apart and we’ve tried to get it out of there but they’re like, you know, Universal has never released a title. But I think we’re going back to have a discussion again about like, look, you guys are never gonna do anything with this. Like, but we can and would and would and would love to. So can you let us take it out? We’re not asking Universal to finance it, but it’s just like, hey, can we have it so we can go out because I can get that movie financed in a heartbeat, Mallrats 2. 

So, fingers crossed the good folks at Universal go like, “You know what? We’re never gonna do anything with this. Go ahead.” I mean, it’s hysterical. There are times when I’ve dealt with folks at Universal to talk about a Mallrats sequel and the people I deal with are like, “We have Mallrats?” …

So, hopefully it can go forward and if it doesn’t, I get it. I’m not spoiled where it’s like, “I get to make everything I want!” If I can’t make a Mallrats sequel, I will live and make something else, but it looks like we’re going back at it to see if it’s possible this time, and hopefully Universal is just like, “Yeah, go ahead and take it.”