1994’s Clerks was made for just $28k and shot in the stores Kevin Smith actually worked at. The witty pop-culture literate movie went on to be a smash hit and established Smith as a name to watch. Now, almost thirty years after he began work on that, he’s finishing up Clerks III.
Principal photography wrapped at the end of August and since then Smith has been busy editing it together. Now he’s confirmed he’s bringing back the cast for some pick-ups and reshoots. He discussed the current status in his latest Fatman Beyond podcast, saying:
“More or less I’m done cutting it. December 7th we’re going to do in Glendale a day of pickups. There’s a sequence in the movie where in Clerks III the premise is the boys make what is essentially Clerks. So before they do that they have auditions and back East we shot a few people for the auditions but we always had the intention of picking up most of the folks we know back here.
So the backdrop is real simple, it’s just like a black curtain, you set it up that way so that it’s like ‘When we get back home we can just set it up in a place and spend a day running people through.’ All you need is, because it’s rapid fire, everybody does a line…..Everybody does a line from the script. You can get it done in honestly like a two, three hour window usually. It’s a fun sequence. So we’re not technically done with the cut, however I’m showing it tomorrow to the good folks at Lionsgate, to the rest of the people that didn’t see it (before).”
Like the original, Clerks III will loosely mirror Smith’s own life. The film will apparently see Jeff Anderson’s Randal Graves suffering a heart attack and promptly having something of a midlife crisis. Determined to change his ways, he teams up with Brian O’Halloran’s Dante to make a movie, which is a fictionalized version of the 1994 classic.
This maps on to Smith’s 2018 heart attack, which very nearly killed him. Since then, he’s drastically changed his outlook on health, become a strict vegan, and has lost a lot of weight. He now seems more creatively fulfilled than ever before, most recently working on Masters of the Universe: Revelation for Netflix and appearing in the audiobook of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman.
Clerks III will release in mid to late 2022.