The director who proved that you don’t need film school wants to open a film school in his soon-to-be-bought theater.
We kid, of course. Not everyone can have the luck and determination that Kevin Smith had when he shot Clerks as a college dropout on a sleepless, lightless schedule that would make a soldier shudder, so we applaud his effort to ease the journey for aspiring filmmakers. On his FatMan Beyond podcast (as transcribed by ComicBook.com), Smith explained why he chose to host the school in New Jersey’s Atlantic Moviehouse, which he is set to own in mid-September:
“To able to own a movie theater is a cool thing but I always felt like a movie theater during the day rather than show matinees they should rent it to a film school and let a film school just do their classes at it, that’s all . . . When I went to film school it was a movie theater, and what is a classroom except a bunch of chairs a big white board in front, that’s a movie theater right there. So I was always like if I owned a movie theater I’d rent it out to some film school in the first half of the day and then five o’clock at night it would become a movie theater. Well now I’m about to own a movie theater and I’ve got like 30 years experience making Kevin Smith movies.”
He considers the school more like a camp, as it will be held during the summer. However, there will be a fixed schedule and a comprehensive curriculum:
“For the first week and a half you’re in pre-production, you meet all the instructors who go through everything . . . Next week and a half you shoot your short and then the last week and a half you post and then you premiere and stuff so you got a full month five day weeks and at the end of it you got this short that you all share.”
So, after seeing Clerks III in the fall, you might learn how to make Clerks IV in the summer.