For Kevin Smith, it’s the parish priests who take him most by surprise. “They’ll come up to me and be like, ‘Dogma is the movie that I use to connect with the youth!’” Nice, Smith thinks. “Of course, they never mention the anal jokes.”
Dogma, Smith’s potty-mouthed Jesus comedy from 1999, remains his masterpiece: a thoughtfully profane and profanely thoughtful exercise in asking all of the big questions, with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon as fallen angels pulling apart the rules of Catholicism amid a killing spree. Nineties stalwart Linda Fiorentino is the jaded abortion clinic worker recruited by God to take them down. It’s being re-released in UK cinemas this week, in celebration of Smith winning back the rights to the film from its disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein, and on the heels of a very successful cross-country tour of the film in the US. Smith, surrounded in his LA office by merchandise from the Sixties cartoon Rocky & Bullwinkle (“I think I’m trying to recapture my childhood,” he sighs), tells me he’s spent the last year watching Dogma over and over again. He has some thoughts.
“I think it’s probably the best I can be,” he says – and not sadly or solemnly, but in the same rat-a-tat register of all his declarations. Chasing Amy, his 1997 romcom about a straight man in love with a lesbian, used to be his “umbrella film”, he thinks, meaning the movie that will always get him kudos and respect regardless of where the rest of his career goes. “But it’s aged differently,” he continues. “For some people, who weren’t around when it came out, it’s offensive. Dogma, I think, has taken its place – as ‘the best this idiot can be’, ‘before he tumbled down the hill’, ‘up his own a***hole’, or whatever the f*** they think…”
He broaches it before I do, at least. Smith hasn’t fallen off exactly, but his career is undeniably different in 2025 to what it was 26 years ago. Back then he was one of Hollywood’s most recognisable indie talents, a proud nerdist in the Tarantino mould, and as famous for his talky comedies (the charmingly lo-fi Clerks put him on the map in 1994) as his penchant for oversized jorts and backward caps. Doobie in hand and with a Superman screed ready to go, he was the foremost celebrity comic book geek before everybody became comic book geeks. He was, for want of a better word, commercial. Today he’s nestled more gently in the bosom of his own kind. Tusk (2014) and Yoga Hosers (2016) were oddball experiments for horror hounds. The Bruce Willis buddy comedy Cop Out (2010) was a pay cheque. Jay and Silent Bob Reboot (2019) and Clerks II (2006) and III (2022) were inside-baseball commentaries on the Kevin Smith universe as a whole.
“If you go back and look at Clerks and Amy and Dogma, [critics] were like, ‘this motherf***er shows promise – he’s gonna be a great one day!’ And then I didn’t do that.” Ask him why (ish – the very chatty Smith has a way of setting up and answering his own questions from within answers to different ones), and he thinks it’s the fault of Jason Mewes, the Laurel to his Hardy, and the vulgar, weedy Jay to Smith’s thoughtful, speechless Silent Bob in basically all of his films. “I fell so deeply in love with Jason’s performance in Dogma that he just became the instrument I needed for everything I did. From that moment forward, I was like… I’m gonna only make movies with him for the rest of my life.” So, to match their inspiration, the movies got a little more janky, a little more inward-looking.
Most people get over guilt and move the f*** on in life, but because I was raised Catholic, there will always be a part of me that’s like… ugh, Harvey Weinstein was involved in my movies
But for those who fell in love with Smith as a stoner auteur with grander things on his mind, we’ll always at least have Dogma. It retains its unusual power, its sense of a man riffing on faith and atonement and spiritual inspiration, and putting those words into the mouths of broad caricatures: Alan Rickman’s fantastically withering angel Metatron; Chris Rock’s Rufus, the 13th Apostle never mentioned in the scriptures because he’s Black; Salma Hayek’s muse Serendipity, who declares she has inspired nine out of the 10 highest grossing movies of all time – the 10th, Home Alone, being the product of a deal with the Devil. The film still feels like a Clerks-ian hang-out, only with demons and faeces and Alanis Morissette playing God.
Smith was raised Catholic, and was devoutly Catholic when he made Dogma. “The guy that wrote that movie wasn’t being satirical; he was a guy celebrating his faith,” he says. “So it’s bittersweet when I watch it now, because the kid who wrote it doesn’t exist anymore.” He says he “clung on” to his faith until at least a decade after Dogma was released, when a conversation on his official podcast – called SModcast, and releasing episodes since 2007 – altered his perspective. His co-host, film producer Scott Mosier, began asking about the existence of Heaven, and the “arrogance” of thinking there’s a place that exists after we die.
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“He’s like, ‘imagine you’re a laptop – eventually a laptop dies down, and what happens to all the information that was on that laptop? It’s there, and then it’s not’. That analogy hit me hard. Seriously hard. If I’d heard it earlier, I might have been disabused of my faith a lot earlier. But considering I got to hold onto it until I was almost 30, I think that’s pretty impressive.”
Ironically, considering Smith’s then very present faith, Dogma was loudly condemned by the conservative group The Catholic League upon release, helping it become one of the most controversial films of 1999. Smith received death threats, and Disney – which owned Miramax, the studio behind the movie – ordered Harvey Weinstein to drop the film from release. It was subsequently distributed by a different company, all the while Weinstein owned the rights to the film.
“To be clear, the actual Catholic Church never said s*** about Dogma,” Smith says. “Still hasn’t to this day. Because while the Catholic Church is many things to many people, they’re smart enough not to call attention to something they don’t want anybody to notice.” The Catholic League, though, went to town on it. “Those cats came after us, and then once the movie came out suddenly stopped coming after us. Because you can make a lot of hay out of something when nobody’s seen it. Once you see Dogma, though, it’s tough to say it’s blasphemous. It’s certainly offensive, but mocking, scoffing or blasphemous? Hell f***ing no!”
Despite the controversy, the film earned strong reviews and became, to date, Smith’s most successful film at the box office that isn’t Cop Out. Which made it even stranger when Dogma became increasingly hard to see. Thanks to being tied up in legal issues with Weinstein, who more or less held the rights to the film hostage for two decades, Dogma went out of print on DVD and Blu-ray, and was historically impossible to stream or own as a digital copy. That was until, in need of a quick cash injection to cover legal fees from his various sexual misconduct lawsuits, Weinstein sold his rights to a number of Miramax’s films in 2018 – Dogma among them. The buyer of said films, producer Alessandra Williams, then partnered with Smith to re-release his movie.
It was a bittersweet victory, of course. Smith got his film back, but the entire saga also reminded him of how much Weinstein was wrapped up in his early success. “He wasn’t my bestie, you know? I saw him once, maybe twice a year,” Smith says. “But he was the guy who bought Clerks… At the end of the day, my good fortune of having my first movie picked up will always be tainted now.” Weinstein’s name no longer appears on the credits of the re-released Dogma. “Most people get over guilt and move the f*** on in life, but because I was raised Catholic, there will always be a part of me that’s like… ugh, that guy was involved in my movies. I carry this s*** like a f***ing cross.”
He says there’s been something healing about touring with the film, and watching it be appraised once again. It’s also led him to try to make a Dogma sequel, which he is in the process of writing. “Whereas the first movie was written by somebody who believed in everything, this one is written by somebody who really doesn’t have that same faith structure – but that’s good for the plot, to be honest with you.” He intends for Affleck and Damon to come back, promises more Jay and Silent Bob in it, and hopes to woo Fiorentino too. I perk up a little at this: Fiorentino, so good in the neo-noir The Last Seduction (1994) and the first Men in Black (1997), hasn’t made a film since 2002 and has entirely dropped out of the public eye. Rumours persisted for years that she and Smith were combative on the Dogma set, but he has since said the stories were exaggerated. He’s also apologised for once saying that he should have cast a different actor in her role.
“I appreciate her performance now so much more than I did,” he says. “I remember, when we were making the movie, worrying that she was underplaying it, just because everyone else in Dogma is larger than life. But now I see what she was doing, her subtlety, and how importantly she grounds the movie. I love her in it.”
Smith says they’ve been in touch over the years. “I’ve spoken to her a couple times on Facebook,” he laughs. “I don’t know why she stopped acting. She had said in her post she was, like, dealing with ‘real world stuff’. Maybe she just got tired of it all?” There’s a part for her in Dogma 2, though, if she’s open to it. “Linda plays a pretty integral part in the third act. So I’m hoping she comes back.”
If it happens, Dogma 2 could mark the very first public Linda Fiorentino sighting in nearly two decades. Talk about a miracle.
‘Dogma’ is re-released in cinemas on 7 November
