Kevin Smith begins filming Jay and Silent Bob Reboot on anniversary of near-fatal heart attack
It was exactly one year ago on Monday that Kevin Smith nearly passed away from a heart attack. That fact was hardly lost on the veteran filmmaker, who marked the occasion by starting production on his much-hyped Jay and Silent Bob Reboot.
As he’s wont to do, Smith celebrated with one of his trademark selfies, only he wasn’t alone. Joining him was fellow co-star Jason Mewes, who plays Jay to his Silent Bob, and, even better, Jason Lee who will reprise his Mallrats slacker hero Brodie Bruce.
Ever the loquacious one, despite his on-screen persona, Smith shared an emotional and heartfelt statement in which he admitted, “I couldn’t help but feel relief when the ‘In Memoriam’ montage ended and I wasn’t in it,” referring to Sunday night’s Oscars.
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“We picked 2/25 as the Reboot start date *intentionally*, to celebrate the fact that I did not become Silent Bob forever 365 days ago,” Smith added. “But after a blissful couple hours of making pretend with my friends on the set of my 14th film, I’m starting to think I *did* die in that operating room after all. Because what could be more Heavenly than this?”
Read the full statement below via Smith’s Instagram below, which also confirms that, yes, Brodie is back on the escalator again. Based on the threads he’s wearing in the photo, Brodie fortunately never became a regular at Fashionable Male. Thank god.
A post shared by Kevin Smith (@thatkevinsmith) on Feb 25, 2019 at 12:01pm PST
Speaking last year, Smith explained how Jay and Silent Bob Reboot isn’t really really a reboot, but instead features a reboot as part of its plot as means to send up Hollywood’s current obsession with reboots and remakes. As he put it…
“We’re doing a sequel to Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and it’s called Jay and Silent Bob Reboot… It’s us, it’s me and Jay so it’s not really strictly a reboot in the way that people think of a reboot. If you remember Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, it was a movie in which Jay and Silent Bob found out Hollywood was making a movie about them so they went cross country to Hollywood to stop that from happening.
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“Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is completely fucking different. In Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, Jay and Silent Bob find out that Hollywood is making a reboot of that old movie that they had made about them, and they have to go cross the country to Hollywood to stop it all over again. It’s literally the same fucking movie all over again. It’s a movie that makes fun of sequels and remakes and reboots while being all three at the same time.”
Jay and Silent Bob made their first appearance in Smith’s cult classic film 1994’s Clerks, subsequently becoming the connecting thread in the View Askewniverse films like 1995’s Mallrats, 1997’s Chasing Amy, and 1999’s Dogma.
More recently, Smith has focused on his True North Trilogy, which began with 2014’s Tusk and continued with 2016’s Yoga Hosers. The third entry, Moose Jaws, is expected in 2020, and may connect the films to the Askewniverse with an appearance by Jay and Silent Bob.
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