Kevin Smith Reveals The Original Plot For Clerks III Involved A Hurricane and More

In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter at the premiere of Clerks III, writer and director Kevin Smith detailed his original plans for the film and how they changed. Here are highlights:

On the original story for Clerks III: “It opened on the evening of Hurricane Sandy. Dante and Randal were locked in a jail because the original version of Clerks III was the opening of Jay and Silent Bob Reboot where the cops come in and bust Jay and Silent Bob. All of them were arrested and there’s an interrogation scene and somebody comes in and says, ‘We gotta get ‘em out and put them in cells because it’s coming.’ And [the guys] are like, ‘What’s coming?’ ‘They’re calling it Sandy.’ They were locked in a cell all night long and they get out in the morning to find that the Quick Stop was destroyed by a flood.”

On what happened next: “Like a weird movement. A village sprouts up in the parking lot of the movie theater. Randal builds a lean-to version of Quick Stop, like a bodega-shanty version, and becomes the unofficial mayor of this town. It was a movie about dealing with grief.”

On why the story changed: “It was so far-flung from Clerks. Mercifully, we never made it. And then suddenly, I had the heart attack and was like, oh, that would be a good backbone for this movie.”