INT: Dante & Randal!

Like
Adam Sandler, Kevin Smith has shown an admirable penchant for hooking up his
buddies with jobs after making it big. Lucky for us Smith isn’t pals with
Rob Schneider or David Spade. For CLERKS
II he brought back a whole host of familiar faces, including Brian
O’Halloran (aka Dante) and Jeff Anderson (aka Randall), the loveable
losers whose irreverent banter helped make the first film so memorable.

The
duo stopped by the Four Seasons last week to talk about reuniting for CLERKS
II. Here are some excerpts.

So
what was it like to see everyone again?

O’Halloran:
The reunion tour. It’s been fun. We’ve been fortunate enough to play
these characters from time to time over the years, so it hasn’t been a
brand-new, fresh, 13-year reunion. It’s great getting together with these
guys from time to time and reliving these characters. We’re fans of the
movies, first off, besides playing these characters, so we’re always
wondering where Kevin is going to take these characters next.

Were
you at all hesitant to come back to it? Does part of you want to move on?

Halloran:
I’ll be real quick. I said yes as soon as Kevin mentioned it to me. We had
just finished working on the 10-year anniversary DVD and he was like,
“I’m thinking about doing a sequel.” “Great. What’s the idea?”
He gave me a quick synopsis of what he had in mind, and I was like,
“Sure.”

Anderson

: I didn’t want to do the
movie. Not so much because I was concerned about any acting career. It just
didn’t make sense to me to go back and shoot a sequel to Clerks. It
wasn’t exactly a movie that was screaming for a sequel. I always
maintained that a lot of the success of the Clerks was due to the backstory.
It was low-budget and came out at a time when independent film was sort of
catching on, and it was sort of this weird black-and-white movie. How are
you going to go back and replicate that? Shoot it in black-and-white and sit
there in the store making fun of people, just a lot older?
It didn’t appeal to me. But Kevin really wanted to do it and
maintained that he had ideas on how to do it. I read the script and liked
the script, but wasn’t wholly convinced. But Kevin’s enthusiasm about
doing it was sort of what got me (into it).

Were
there a lot of script changes?

Anderson:
The script did change after that first one.

O’Halloran:
Not by much.

Anderson:
Not by much. We did the original draft and we got together for a reading
after the original one and sat around for about an hour afterwards and just
talked about it and gave some ideas about what changes we thought should
happen. I think two scripts came after the first one.

O’Halloran:
And then that was it; it was ready for shooting.

Aren’t
we glad they didn’t use the original ending for Clerks?

O’Halloran:
Well, I hated the original ending when I first read that stupid script. I
was just like, “killing him, what?” And I remember jokingly saying to
him back then, “What if we ever wanna do a sequel?” [laughs]
And he was like, “Yeah. Real funny there, boy. Put the sweater on
and get shot.” I was like, “All right.” He [points to Anderson] always
had a problem with the ending, too.

Anderson:
I was fine with the ending, but I always felt they should have pulled back
to reveal Randall did it. Then Clerks II would be a whole different movie.

O’Halloran:
Ten years later, you’ve obviously finished your ten-year sentence. Jersey
only giving ten years for murder.

Anderson:
That’s the way Clerks II opens, with me coming out of prison with the
little box.

O’Halloran:
And ripped. Tattooed.

Do
you guys ever see each other outside of the Clerks world?

Anderson:
The restraining order prevent us.

O’Halloran:
Yeah, the court injunctions are kind of tough to get around. What’s funny
is we do have a country in between us. He’s on the west coast, I’m on
the east coast.

Anderson:
A country?

O’Halloran:
Yeah, it’s an entire country, I think they call it. So we pretty much only
see each other for (Clerks). I mean, I come out here from time to time
we’ll get together. I think that’s kind of a good thing in a way, to
keep the chemistry appearing fresh, because we haven’t hung around for all
these years. We haven’t worn it out or changed the dynamic.

Anderson:
That’s what I keep telling him.

O’Halloran:
That’s what the judge told me to say, sir.

We
know that Kevin’s milked the first film for a lot of DVDs. How many Clerks
II DVDs can we expect to see?

Anderson:
We’re still filming new endings!

O’Halloran:
There’s the director’s cut. There’s the donkey cut. There’s the
ass-to-mouth cut. There’s the pillowpants cut.

Anderson:
And that’s just in the first year. There is a lot of behind-the-scenes
footage. They filmed everything. I think they were there at the original
lunch when Kevin asked me to do it.

O’Halloran:
Yeah.

Anderson:
That film will look like the Blair Witch Project. A lot of shots of me
running!

[laughs]
Naah. He puts out good discs. You could say what you want, but the
discs are good. The Clerks tenth anniversary disc was a good disc. They put
a lot of stuff in it.

If
you said no, would they have just re-cast you?

Anderson:
Anthony Michael Hall. [laughs] They went straight to him and he was busy, so
they came back to me.

Why
do you think Kevin’s films strike such a chord with that certain group…

O’Halloran:
The insane? [laughs] I think it’s because it speaks to them. It’s tough
– these characters are stuck in a situation that they can’t seem to get
out of. When we were in our twenties, a lot of young people felt the same
way. We have this whole life ahead of us. What do we want to do? I don’t
know what I want to do. Ten years go by and they’re stuck with this job
that they were doing because it didn’t interfere with whatever the rest of
their social life is or whatever their college life is.

Even
after college a lot of people were like, “Well, now that I got this
degree, I can’t get a job with the degree I have. What do I go into
next?” Then they’ve gotta pay off like $150,000 in loans. I don’t
know. It’s a weird kind of dynamic. And also, these guys are talking about
subject matter and topics with an unfiltered mouth. There’s nothing going
between the mouth and the brain. It’s like, “Hmmm…anal fissures. What
do you think about that?” There was Kevin on Jay Leno last night talking
about anal fissures. So it’s the type of thing where you get to see these
guys talk about it.

What
was your reaction when you first heard that Rosario Dawson would be cast?

O’Halloran:
It was great, actually. We were kind of nervous in the beginning, because
it’s like, “Really? Rosario Dawson?” Because the list of women that I
think Harvey Weinstein had give to Kevin, he was like, “Look I need a
woman.” Kevin wanted to do the film strictly with the four guys from the
last film and then relative unknowns for the rest of the roles. And Harvey
was like, “Absolutely not. You gotta give me the women at least. I gotta
market this somehow.” And so he gave Kevin a list of women, of which some
of the names were kind of weird, like Rachel Weisz…

Anderson:…Judy
Dench

O’Halloran:
Judy Dench. Ron Howard’s daughter, who – funny enough – was in Lady in
the Water. And Rosario was on that list. I can imagine Rachel Weisz reading
the material and going [mimics Rachel’s English accent] “Are you
serious? A donkey show? Am I being punk’d? What is this?” But Rosario
said yes. We did a reading and Rosario
just got everything.

She’s
from the east coast…

O’Halloran:
Not only that, but she’s an avid comic-book fan. She’s a science fiction
fan. She just has that regular guy type of humor that just made it kind of
cool.

Questions? Comments?
Manifestos? Send them to me at [email protected].