FRANCE: KEVIN SMITH'S CONTROVERSIAL FILM "DOGMA " RECEIVES CANNES FILM FESTIVAL PREMIERE

Record ID: 388501

  • Title: FRANCE: KEVIN SMITH'S CONTROVERSIAL FILM "DOGMA " RECEIVES CANNES FILM FESTIVAL PREMIERE
  • Date: 29th May 1999
  • Summary: (RTV - ACCESS ALL) (SOUNDBITE) (English) AFFLECK SAYING: "I see it as entertainment as something that was really fun and original and in a sense has much more in common with Batman than Priest but what it had that Batman didn't have or at least so explicitly was a sense of also conjuring up questions about the real world in the viewer's mind. I guess the question of relig
  • Embargoed: 13th June 1999 13:00
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  • Location: CANNES, FRANCE
  • Country: France
  • Reuters ID: LVAE5WI4G40DCS2EI7W5GQZME3YH
  • Story Text: Despite being absent from competition at this year's Film Festival, director Kevin Smith's new controversial film, "Dogma" was unveiled in Cannes on Friday (May 21).
    Supported by the cast including Ben Affleck, Alan Rickman, Salma Hayek and Linda Fiorentino, Smith attended the film's screening at the Palais des Festivals.
    Smith's comic "Dogma" explores the latest battle between good and evil in New Jersey at the end of the 20th century, where angels, demons, apostles and prophets walk among the cynics and innocents of America.
    Introducing Catholicism as a backdrop, Smith's original comical fantasy begins with two renegade fallen angels, Bartleby (Ben Affleck) and Loki, the exiled angel of death (Matt Damon), on a fighting spree on earth in their quest for a ticket back to their eternal paradise, heaven.
    Linda Fiorentino, the femme fatale in "The Last Seduction"
    has turned heroine with the role of Bethany (direct descendant of Mary and Joseph) who despite experiencing a loss in faith, is hired by the Voice of God, Metatron.Played by Rickman, Metatron commands Bethany to save the human race by going on a pilgrimage to New Jersey to stop Bartleby and Loki from ending all existence.
    Metatron, also turns to Serendipity (Salma Hayek), the heavenly muse who inspires passion, poetry and art (when the mood takes her) and two New Jersey prophets, Jay (Jason Mews) and his habitually mute sidekick, Silent Bob (Kevin Smith) for assistance.
    Smith explained that the inspiration for "Dogma" was as a result of a personal moment of doubt: "I was in confession and I was telling a priest 'I don't know where I am with this stuff anymore, like I just don't know if it makes anymore sense'.I was telling him that I used to believe so much when I was a kid and wholeheartedly and now it's just difficult.He was telling me that when you're a kid you're like a shot glass, he was breaking it down into beer-drinking terms and he was saying ' you're like a shot glass and it's easy to fill a shot glass with a certain amount of liquid but the older you get the bigger the glass gets and the same amount of liquid that filled the shot glass can't fill a tumbler say, so it's your job to fill it up, we can only go so far, you have to bring something to the table' which I really liked.It was like don't look to me, he was like 'I'm the minister, a comissiary, a go-between you and God but faith is your business and you have to build upon it and we give you a ground-work and you've got to go out and do something with it and that was great because I did.I went out there and thought a lot of things out for myself and came up with version of Catholicism."
    Undeterred by the themes explored in the film, the role of Bethany came at an appropriate time for Fiorentino.
    "A new thing had happened after "The Last Seduction", people knew who I was, it was like a fame thing and I had led a relatively obscure life up until then so I was questioning what I would do with my life and so the role came at a time where I had a loss of faith in my life and so I needed the struggle of the film making process again just to see if I could do it.And so I thought there can't possibly be anything left to learn and I learned so much just by the fact that I thought there wasn't anything left to learn and I found that there is always something to learn, so long as you're alive,"
    she said.
    Having already worked with Smith on two of his films, "Chasing Amy" and "Mallrats", Affleck was already a convert and when the part in "Dogma" was on the cards, Affleck had no doubts.
    "I just loved it immediately and as soon as I read it even though we were shooting "Chasing Amy" all I could think of was that I should be good in these scenes so that Kevin will cast me in "Dogma".It's really it's something that I've wanted to do since then, it's been a long time coming and I think I would have burned his house down if he hadn't put me in the movie.So I think for both of our sakes, it was good that he did.It's just such a, I think, an original, fresh screenplay.
    I know that there's something when I really really like when I'm jealous that I haven't written it myself and I was green with envy and hatred for Kevin for having written something that was so unusual and so funny and so remarkable," he said.
    Although release dates for "Dogma" have not yet been disclosed, the film has been eagerly snatched up by global distributors inspite of the controversy surrounding it.
    However in America, Smith's home turf, the film which is reported to have offended the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights with its toilet humour and its vulgar language has still to secure a deal.
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