Kevin Smith, director of “Zack and Miri Make a Porno”

The first question for Kevin Smith is: How do you print our conversation without more redactions than Valerie Plame’s memoir?

Since 1994’s “Clerks,” the New Jersey-based director and writer — who also appears in his flicks as “Silent Bob” — has built a reputation on polarizing, raunchy-talking comedies unlikely ever to show up on the Hallmark Channel. His latest, out Friday: “Zack and Miri Make a Porno,” starring Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks as cash-strapped friends who go for a money shot. Smith also works blue as raconteur in “Sold Out: A Threevening With Kevin Smith” (Weinstein Company, unrated), on DVD this week.

After burgers at Dick’s in Wallingford, I offered to turn off the tape recorder for a couple of minutes to get everything out of our systems, but he declined.

Q: Finally a Kevin Smith movie people can take their grandparents to.

A: Yeah, finally. Finally there’s less talking about it and more actually doing it. That’s what I always felt like when going into this flick, like we spent a long time talking about sex and various subjects affiliated with sex but never showed it. And this movie, once you put the term “porno” in the title, you’d better show something.

Q: There hasn’t been much mainstream theatrical precedent for the subject apart from “Boogie Nights” and that awful Jeff Bridges movie, “The Moguls.” So you’re pushing that ball forward.

A: Yeah, I saw one, I didn’t see the other, but we’re also leaving out “The Girl Next Door,” which was kind of set in that world. It’s kind of a tough subject to broach in the mainstream, which I find strange in the 21st century. Like you tell me 15 years ago this is a tough movie to pull off, I go, “I understand, I’m only going to be playing at art house theaters.” But 2008? People still have an issue with a word?

Q: The MPAA gave “Zack and Miri” an NC-17 rating, and you appealed it to get an R. Did you appeal to their sense of proportion and justice?

A: What I did was, now you’re allowed to cite precedent. You don’t appeal to them, right? Like basically the ratings board is the ratings board. They maintained it was NC-17, we went for the appeals process which takes you out of the ratings-board community and puts you into a mixture of just MPAA members, like people who work in the industry, and members of NATO, the National Association of Theater Owners — which sounds way more important. When you say NATO, people go “Get out of here!”

Q: You should have presented it to the other NATO.

A: They might have understood it a little better. But when I presented it to them I said, “Look, you don’t make a movie with ‘porno’ in the title and not expect to come under close scrutiny when it comes time to rate the movie. We went well out of our way to make sure everything fell within the confines of an R-rated — albeit a hard R — comedy. I knew I started to win them over when I said, “Look, if I was 13 years old in 1983 and I saw this in the early days of cable in my community, yes, it would send me to the bathroom. … ” I said, “But we’re living in 2008. No kid is going to watch this movie and get titillated by it when they could just as easily go to the Internet and watch real people having real sex and any number of MPEG clips.”

Q: And yet there are still a number of places refusing to advertise it?

A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’ve run into a little bit of that, which is so strange to me. The weirdest one, I thought, was Philadelphia, they said we couldn’t run the billboards. And I don’t know if you’ve seen the billboards but it’s literally stick figures, not even pictures, and the text is like, “Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks made a movie so outrageous we can only show you these stick drawings.” And then it says “Zack and Miri Make a Porno.” So in Philly they said, “We can’t put that up.” And then the Weinstein Company said, “Well, what if we remove the title and just put zackandmiri.com because that’s the name of the Web site?” And they still said no based on that. We’re like, “We’re stripping the one objectionable term out.” And they’re like, “But everyone’s going to know what it means.” And I was like, “I hope you’re right, I hope everyone knows, but I don’t think you’re right.”

And then just recently in Boston, some child-studies expert kind of jumped up and gave some quotes to the Boston Herald where she talked about the posters which are in bus-stop shelters along their transit-authority line, and she maintained that they should come down because kids who see it, their eyes are drawn to it because of the stick-figure drawings and then they say to their parents, “What’s a porno?” Why’s that a big deal? My kid says to me “What’s a porno?” I go, “It’s a movie not for you.”

Q: Elizabeth Banks plays Miri, and I just watched her as Laura Bush in “W.” Now I can’t think of our first lady without … well, thanks for that.

A: You know, I felt like it was a good year for Elizabeth. She’s regal as the first lady, and then totally believable as the chick who’s like, “Yeah, let’s make a porno.”

Q: With the economy swirling down the toilet, you may be responsible for lots of broke people turning to porn.

A: I gotta be honest with you, when everyone was kind of running around over the last two weeks talking about the economic collapse of our country, I was sitting there going, This just makes our flick more plausible. Like it’s a good time for the movie to come out because now people are facing economic hardship. Will they turn to porn? Doubtfully, sadly. But why not? Wouldn’t it be a better world if they did?

Q: I’ve read that you have a reputation for closely following what critics write about you and sometimes going after them if they dump on you.

A: I used to, yeah, back in the day.

Q: And even barring some from screenings. Is that true?

A: Yes, that has happened. That happened on the last movie, that was the last time I did it. It was a cat who was going to see “Clerks II,” and the last two movies I made he gave me like terrible, terrible reviews, really bad, what I felt were personally offensive reviews. So I’m, like, look, I know the dude’s going to review the movie. I can’t stop that, that’s fine. But I’m not going to let him see it for free. Make him pay to see it. So I asked them to block the dude from the screening. And ironically that dude gave us one of the best reviews of the movie. He was such a good guy, too. I sat down and talked to him, it was totally cool. But I still maintain that in the moment I felt I was just justified. It was like, why give it away to somebody for free when all they’re going to do is (expletive) on it? Like, I just don’t get that. There’s this contract between filmmakers and critics where it’s like we’re going to show you our flick and the critic’s going to write about it, and sometimes it’s negative. And it’s just like if you’re consistently negative, why should I extend you the courtesy to (expletive) on me one more time, this time on my dime?

Q: This interview could have been much more WWE if I’d dumped on “Zack and Miri.”

A: (Laughs.) Absolutely! Well you know what? I would have to go back then and see how many times you did it in the past.

Q: Is it true that you got the movie greenlit on the title alone?

A: Yeah, I told (producer) Harvey Weinstein the title and he said, “Done.” And I said, “Don’t you want to know what it’s about?” And he said, “Is it really about anything more than that title?” And I said, “God I hope so, when all’s said and done.”

Q: I’m guessing “Zack and Miri Make a Gumbo” wouldn’t have done it.

A: Porno definitely put us over the top. But I think the arrangement of all those terms helps. I bet you I could have gotten “Zack and Miri Make a Gumbo” greenlit. I would have let them read a script first. But I think he really liked the names. I mean, his mother’s name was Miriam, so he felt that was close to his mom’s name. Which I was like, “Well, you wouldn’t want her in that title,” but he found it funny for that reason. Those two guys, Bob and Harvey, constantly refer to the movie to me as “Zack and Miriam Make a Porno.”

Q: You have Traci Lords in a supporting role. Did she act as a technical adviser? “No! You do it this way!”

A: I think I know more about porn than she does at this point. She hasn’t made one in 20 years. So her memory of it is during a drug-fueled era of bygones, you know. She can’t tell you what’s going on in porn now, she doesn’t know what’s popular, she doesn’t know any of the actors. Katie Morgan, the other actress in the movie who still works in the adult-film industry, she was absolutely helpful because she could tell you how to shoot a scene to hide the fact that there’s nothing real going on.

Q: The women in your movies talk like dudes, too. Devil’s advocate: Is that because you’re not good at writing female dialogue or is it because they’re fantasy women?

A: I think it’s the reverse. You need to hang out with the women I hang out with because they all talk like that, with the exception of my mother. But I get it. Maybe my circumstance is a little more rare. I implore people for candor. I’m just not about keeping it socially acceptable. And not about, like, let’s push the envelope, but feel free to say what you want to say, kind of thing. So most of the women I hang out with talk like that. There’s no differentiation between men and women in my world. But at the same time, I think Banks was able to feminize that role in such a way that she might have been able to make up for any shortcomings I had as a guy writing for a girl.

Q: You were infamously involved in a Superman movie that didn’t get made. Was casting Brandon Routh as a gay dude in “Zack and Miri” your comment about the one that was made?

A: I think it’s as close to Superman as I’ll get ever as a filmed entertainment. It wasn’t until we were shooting I realized that, Wow, man, all that work I did on Superman has come to this. I have Superman in the movie, and he’s the closeted gay boyfriend.

Q: Have you given up on making a superhero movie?

A: Um, yeah, I mean I was never really trying to make a superhero movie. In the instance of Superman, I’d been hired to write one, I was never going to direct it. More recently, like four years ago, I was working on a Green Hornet movie that I was going to write and direct, and the further I got into it I was like, I’m not ready to pull this movie off. This can’t be me. I tried to bow out of it and Harvey was like, “Why don’t you just write it and see how you feel? Maybe you’ll change your mind by the time you’re done writing it.” I finished writing it and I was like, No, this is not the movie for me to direct. It’s the kind of movie I enjoy watching, not making.

Q: What do you think of Seth Rogen as Green Hornet?

A: I think that’s actually a smart take on it, because you think about Green Hornet’s core audience, they’re like 70 and 80 years old. The heyday of the Green Hornet was in the days of radio. It was created by the same guy who created the Lone Ranger — George Trendle I think his name was. So the key audience for that would never go see any Green Hornet movie, let alone starring and up and coming — not even up and coming — the comedy star of the moment. So I feel like in that instance it’s not like you’re doing a comedic version of Batman where everyone’s like, “Hey, man, Batman’s dark and somber and we all know that.” Most people only know that Green Hornet is, like, “Didn’t he hang out with Kato? Isn’t Bruce Lee the Green Hornet?” And you’re like, “No, Bruce Lee, he’s Kato.” “And they had a car, right?” “Yes, Black Beauty.”

So based on that, where he’s going with it, it just takes it in a commercial direction. Like he could actually make a Green Hornet movie that people might go see, wouldn’t have to be convinced to go see.

Q: Tell me about your next one, “Red State”?

A: “Red State” is like 180 degrees from everything I’ve done so far because it’s a dark, dark, bleak little horror movie with no laughs in it whatsoever. It’s kind of about how this country after September 11th started looking for the enemy without and forgot about the enemy within, like people who live within our own borders who don’t like this country as well. And when I tell people it’s a political horror movie they’re just like, “Well that’s what Stone just directed, it’s W.” But I’m like, “This is a little different.” It’s not a biopic. But it takes place in a world where fundamentalism — both political and religious fundamentalism — have gone awry.

Q: So it’s a documentary.

A: A little bit, a little bit, man. At the end of the day I think some people might not dig it because it is rather close to home. But I think the best thing that could happen with that movie is that people saw it and didn’t believe that I made it. That would be a cool compliment I think.

Mark Rahner: mrahner@seattletimes.com