How Kevin Smith's Chasing Amy saved a queer filmmaker's life

In December 2018, a young Kansas-raised filmmaker named Sav Rodgers delivered a TED Talk titled "The rom-com that saved my life." This lecture by Rodgers, who identifies as queer, concerned writer-director Kevin Smith's 1997 film Chasing Amy, about the romance which develops between Ben Affleck's straight character Holden and Joey Lauren Adams' lesbian Alyssa.

In the TED Talk, Rodgers described how he watched Chasing Amy when he was just 12 years old, how it was the first film he ever saw which featured LGBTQ characters, and how Smith's movie proved a source of comfort when he became the victim of homophobic bullying at high school.

"The spirit of Chasing Amy kept me alive for years to come despite the suicidal thoughts that began to permeate from the trauma that I was continuously experiencing at school," he said in the TED Talk. "No matter what I was dealing with, I had this one movie to bring me solace." Rodgers concluded by revealing that he was now "directing a project about the legacy of Chasing Amy as an LGBTQ film."

After the TED Talk posted online in April 2019, both Affleck and Adams reached out on Twitter to congratulate Rodgers. The filmmaker was also contacted by a fellow director who said he had been moved to tears by Rodgers' words and offered to help with the documentary, as he knew "a couple of people who worked on Chasing Amy." His name? Kevin Smith. "He was like, 'Hey, let me know what you need,' " Rodgers, 29, tells EW today. "I said, 'An interview, please.' It really just kickstarted from there."

Bill Winters Kevin Smith and Sav Rodgers

Four years on, Rodgers' documentary is about to receive its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City. Titled Chasing Chasing Amy, the film features interviews with Smith, Adams, and Chasing Amy co-star Jason Lee, among others. In addition to detailing the film's production, Rodgers' movie dives deep into what many regard as the negative aspects of this love story between a straight man and a lesbian, an early mainstream tale about queerness made by a heterosexual director.

As pop culture commentator Princess Weekes explains in the documentary, "If you've been marginalized by media that says that lesbians can all of a sudden not be lesbians because they find the right man, I totally get why this movie would trigger you."

Smith tells EW he was happy to both speak with Rodgers for the doc and help him secure other interviews despite being aware that the director planned on exploring his movie's problematic nature. "I knew going in that it wasn't going to be a lovefest," says Smith. "Just because Sav had had a positive experience with Chasing Amy didn't mean that everyone the filmmaker talked to was going to be on the same page."

Smith made his name with his directorial debut, 1994's Clerks, which the director shot for just $27,000 at the New Jersey convenience store where he worked. It earned $4 million at the box office. His follow-up, 1995's Mallrats, cost $6 million and proved a box-office disaster despite boasting a cast of up-and-comers, including Affleck, Adams, and Lee.

For his third film, Chasing Amy, Smith went back to his indie roots, writing a small-scale romance which also fulfilled a promise he had made to himself to foreground queer content with appeal for his gay brother Donald. "I remember asking him, 'What about movies?' Like, when you go to the movies, it's always some guy falling in love with some girl," says Smith. "My brother said, 'Well, I can identify with love, obviously, but, yeah, it can be alienating when you don't see yourself or anything about your world up on the screen.' For my brother, I would always try to throw in some gay content. So Chasing Amy has a lot to do with my brother."

The relationship between Affleck and Adams' characters was specifically inspired by the friendship Smith's producer Scott Mosier developed with Guinevere Turner, co-writer of the 1994 lesbian drama Go Fish, which played alongside Clerks at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival. Smith told Mosier that he should make a movie about himself and Turner, but "he didn't know how to approach it, or didn't want to, and I was like, 'Oh, then I'll do it.' "

Miramax Films / Courtesy Everett Collection Joey Lauren Adams and Ben Affleck in 'Chasing Amy'

Made for around $250,000, Chasing Amy grossed $12 million and put Smith's career back on track. While the movie caused little controversy at the time — certainly when compared to Smith's next film, the religious comedy Dogma — Chasing Amy would come under increasing fire as critics took issue with everything from its central romantic relationship to the description of Alyssa as lesbian instead of bisexual.

"This is a flick that was made at a different time," says Smith. "I can't exactly apologize for my complete lack of education. I didn't go to college for liberal arts studies or something like that. I just grew up with a gay brother, and Chasing Amy was kind of a fulfilled promise to my brother."

Sav Rodgers first saw Chasing Amy after watching the 2003 superhero film Daredevil and becoming obsessed with its star, Ben Affleck. "I credit this all to my extremely cool mom who had an affinity for '90s independent filmmakers like Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, and Kevin Smith," says Rodgers. "I was going through this major Ben Affleck phase, and I saw Ben Affleck's face on the Criterion cover of Chasing Amy. I said, 'Hey, can I watch this?' She was like, 'Well, it's rated R, but I don't remember it being that bad. Sure.' "

"I watched the movie and, you know, a fisting joke later, it was a transformative experience," Rodgers recalls. "I felt compelled to continue rewatching it to get more information — to try to understand, even at that age, why I love this so much."

The film gave Rodgers both context for his burgeoning feelings about his own sexuality and inspiration about his professional future. "I was so drawn in by the script and its sense of romanticism," he says. "I was like, 'This could be a job. That's amazing!' My path really started there."

Chasing Chasing Amy Joey Lauren Adams, Sav Rodgers, and Kevin Smith

Rodgers admits that he decided to give a TED Talk about his relationship with the film partly as a way to get the documentary off the ground. "At the time, I was a recent film school grad from the University of Kansas and I knew exactly zero people involved in the making of Chasing Amy," he says. "I was like, this is my chance to make a good impression, to tell my story in an effective way, and to see if anybody would be interested in actually being interviewed for this thing."

For Smith, Rodgers' praise of Chasing Amy stood in stark contrast to the articles he was reading about the film online. "I had been seeing articles pop up where Chasing Amy was being reconsidered as problematic, particularly for a newer generation," he says. "Sav's TED Talk popped for me. I was like, here's somebody saying something nice about Chasing Amy!"

While Rodgers' scheme to attract the attention of Chasing Amy principals with the TED Talk went as planned, the documentary ended up being a very different movie to the one he set out to make. Changes in the director's own life (which are revealed in Chasing Chasing Amy) became as much a part of the story as Smith's film. "I did not set out to be the protagonist of this documentary, but I'm very thankful to have great collaborators around me to say, 'You should do that,' " says the director.

Smith himself says he "absolutely loved" the finished film, which premieres at Tribeca Thursday. "Look, anything that keeps these movies alive for a current generation, I'm all okay with," he insists. "Even if every documentarian wanted to revisit the movies and be like, 'Here's why they're bad,' at least it puts those movies [in front of] a current audience as opposed to racking them with old black-and-whites. For somebody to be like, 'We're going to take a look at your work in the modern era,' it means that, for at least a minute, that movie's relevant again."

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