Kevin Smith says Clerks 3 plot was inspired by his own heart attack

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Kevin Smith announced earlier this month that CLERKS 3 was officially moving forward, teasing that it would be a film about how a "decades-spanning friendship finally confronts the future" and how you're "never too old to completely change your life." While speaking with The Wrap, Smith dropped a few more details on the project, including revealing how his own real-life heart attack served as a major source of inspiration.

Randal has a heart attack, decides that he came so close to death, and his life has meant nothing, there’s nobody to memorialize him, he has no family or anything like that. And in the recovery, while under fentanyl, he comes to the conclusion at mid-life, having almost died, having worked in a movie store his whole life and watched other people’s movies, he tells Dante, I think we need to make a movie. So Dante and Randal make ‘Clerks.’ That’s the story of Clerks 3.

This idea is quite different from Kevin Smith's original plan for CLERKS 3, which received a live-reading this summer, but everything changed with Smith's heart attack and after he patched things up with Jeff Anderson (Randal). "That was a movie that was written by a guy who was obsessed with middle-aged and dying, and it was all about death. And that was before I almost died," Smith explained. "Then I almost died, and now I don’t really want to talk about that s—. I’ve been too close. Now I just want to do life affirming things. The tone is going to shift completely. I owe those guys, those characters, Dante and Randal, a lot more than the kind of doom and gloom I was about to put them through. I loved that script, and I loved reading it, but there wasn’t a dry eye in the house for the last 15 pages… It’s a f—ing tearjerker. It’s like the ‘King Lear’ of ‘Clerks’ movies. It’s really unbelievably moving and sad, but it’s not what I want to do with those guys for this. You would’ve seen the old ‘Clerks 3’ and been like, did the guy who made ‘Clerks’ forget that ‘Clerks’ was a comedy?"

The new CLERKS 3 story will bring Kevin Smith back to where it all started, an indie movie filmed in black and white because that's all they could afford. Much like the original CLERKS, the movie-within-a-movie in CLERKS 3 will also be in black and white. "I’m going to bring my boys right back to where they brought me. I’m writing it, it writes itself because I f—ing lived it 25 years ago," Smith said. "It’s just warm and f—ing wonderful. They’re figuring it out the same way I figured it out, but I have the benefit of being able to cherry pick all my favorite stories and moments of making ‘Clerks’ and putting it right back into their hands." Before CLERKS 3, Kevin Smith will be bringing us JAY AND SILENT BOB REBOOT, which will open in theaters via Fathom Events on October 15th & 17th, followed by a traveling road-tour.