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Kevin Smith, at this exact moment in time, knows exactly what he’d change about Dogma. His fourth film, following the critically acclaimed Chasing Amy, found the filmmaker exploring faith and religion through his signature lens, leading to plenty of explicit language, violence, and sexual content.
Now celebrating its 25th anniversary, Smith has been on tour with the movie for the past month (“minimum two shows a night in 20 different cities”), not to mention a recent encore screening at Cannes. Which means Smith’s “been watching the hell outta Dogma,” an experience which has highlighted what he sees as flaws.
Despite the absence of cell phones, he thinks, “it plays pretty current.” However, there are two specific moments where he feels like the movie has really shown its age: One being a shot from later in the film, when Ben Affleck in angel form descends in front of the church. “It’s some of the earliest CGI, so it looks it.”
That’s just one shot, though. Where the movie really shows its age, Smith feels, is a scene later in the movie when George Carlin’s Cardinal Glick refuses to call off a ceremony, saying that “The Catholic Church does not make mistakes.”
In the scene, characters played by Chris Rock and Linda Fiorentino immediately point out two glaring examples of Glick being wrong: “What about the church’s silent consent to the slave trade?” and “And its platform of non-involvement during the Holocaust?” Says Glick, “All right, mistakes were made.”
Smith says that during the tour, “Every night when I watched that movie from the back of the theater, I was like, ‘Look, those two examples are absolutely horrible, but where’s that third even more heinous example?’ To me it feels like, well, either the filmmaker is being obtuse and not recognizing the rampant sexual abuse in the Catholic Church that we’ve learned about over the last 25 years, or wasn’t aware of it when they wrote the movie.”
In Smith’s case, to be clear, it was the latter: “The first draft of this movie was written even before [his 1994 debut] Clerks — 1991, 1992,” he says. “And by the time we went into production, it was like ’98.” The Boston Globe’s breakthrough reporting on the Church covering up child abuse, meanwhile, wasn’t published until January 2002.
But despite him having a very reasonable excuse for not acknowledging that in Dogma, “every night when I hear that, that’s what’s glaringly missing to me,” Smith says. “So that’s honestly the one thing I would add, if I could George Lucas it and go add a thing.”
The movie’s depiction of Catholicism, at the time of its release, was controversial enough to attract a lot of negative attention, which led to Smith writing an extended disclaimer to open the movie — multiple cards of text, asking the audience that “before you think about hurting someone over this trifle of a film, remember: even God has a sense of humor. Just look at the Platypus.”
“It’s crazy being on tour with it,” Smith says of the opening. “I had to sit through that in 20 cities and whatnot and as a filmmaker now, it would be anathema for me to put up that much writing on screen and slow the start of the movie.”
However, he adds, “It still plays. Every night, when it started, I would yell out from the back, ‘Sorry kids, this is called reading. We did this in the ’90s.’ And I would say, ‘Since you guys paid $50 to see this, I should read it to you.’ So I would actually read it out loud at every screening.”
At the time, the need for a disclaimer felt pretty real to Smith: “It literally came from a place of like, we were getting death threats. 400,000 pieces of hate mail, three death threats. They had to install metal detectors in the Palais at Cannes and shit.”
Originally, Smith wanted to open the movie with the epigram “‘Men go crazy in congregations. They only get better one by one.’ And then the quote would be attributed to a Gordon Sumner, and then in parentheses it would say Sting, because that was the thing he said in a song.” Instead, the studio pushed him to “let that Sting quote go and say something about ‘let’s not get killed over this movie.’ So I took my inspiration from Monty Python and the Holy Grail — so I was able to be like, all right, there’s a model.”
The opening, as long as it is, did give Smith the ability to “put the pin in the balloon, because people going to see that movie in 1999 are like, ‘Are we going to get killed? I’ve heard things.’ But right away we put the audience at ease, going like, ‘Hey man, just think of the platypus.'”
Adds Smith, “It’s crazy how well that joke still plays today. Like, going on tour with it, I was like, ‘Oh, I gotta sit through that cringey platypus joke.’ Still works. People do giggle when they think of the platypus. There’s still a bit of innocence out there.”
Following its multi-city tour, Dogma will be re-released in US and Canadian movie theaters beginning June 5th. According to Smith, a sequel is in the works.
English (US) · 