10 Iconic Directors Who Lived Their Movies Whilst Making Them

7. Kevin Smith (Worked As A Clerk While Shooting Clerks)

One of the first things any aspiring filmmaker is told is "write/shoot what you know". For one thing, it tends to be cheaper; nobody's going to give a first timer millions of dollars to go make a science fiction epic in the depths of space, but a film about pot smoking film students? That's economically a little more feasible. For another thing, writing what you know tends to avoid the falling into a "Hollywood trap". It's very easy to try (and fail) to be the "next Quentin Tarantino"; you want to carve out a niche, and the easiest way to do that is be truthful to your own experience. When he decided to write Clerks, Kevin Smith was possibly the least likely person to make a successful film: a college drop out who had accomplished little with his life other than collecting comic books, watching Star Wars and working at the local Quick Stop. Undeterred, Smith decided to make a movie exactly about those things - reading comic books, watching (and over analyzing) Star Wars, and being bored shitless while working at the Quick Stop. His movie gave voice to an entire generation of disaffected slackers. Clerks - shot for something like $30,000 that Smith raised almost entirely by maxing out credit cards - was cheap, crass, and better written than it had any right to be. Blue as the dialogue was, it had the ring of truth, probably in part because Smith was living the movie as he was shooting it. The Quick Stop featured in the film was the actual Quick Stop where Smith was working; while he was shooting Clerks, Smith would work all day, close the store, and then shoot all night...wash, rinse, repeat for a month. The experience was by all accounts an exhausting one (Smith was literally so tired by the end of the shoot that he fell asleep during filming of the final scenes), but considering he's basically gotten a career out of being himself from it, I'd say it worked out alright...