Now that Kevin Smith’s podcast-inspired walrus flick Tusk is in the rearview mirror, the filmmaker is tackling a number of new projects with a renewed sense of vigor and excitement. In a few days, he’ll finish work on Yoga Hosers, a pseudo-spinoff of Tusk that features two teenage convenience store workers (portrayed by his daughter, Harley Quinn Smith, and Lily Rose Depp, daughter of Johnny Depp) fighting to save Canada from monsters. Yes, we’re serious.
The long-awaited Clerks III should be next on Smith’s schedule, and he’s already talked about the third feature in his “True North Trilogy,” Moose Jaws. But somewhere along the way it seems like Hit Somebody, a hockey story inspired by a Warren Zevon song, managed to get lost in the shuffle. Originally planned as Smith’s final film, the project has gone through several iterations, with the most recent version being a miniseries at an unknown network. But there hasn’t been much news on Hit Somebody for a couple of years – until now.
In an exclusive interview, /Film asked Smith about the status of the project, and he revealed plans to begin shooting late next year, thanks to funding secured via his new relationship with Star Stream Entertainment:
“So we were having this conversation about fake Canada that I keep setting the movies in now for this True North Trilogy. And Kim, her former boss, he used to work tangentially in the world of the NHL (National Hockey League). Howard Baldwin I believe was her former boss. So, you know, she knows a lot about the world of hockey, particularly the WHA (World Hockey Association). And I was like ‘Oh my Lord, I have written this mini-series that we were planning to do with CBC up in Canada. That, you know, I’ve been sitting on for a while.’ I said, ‘You would love to read it, just because it’s set in the world that you know very well.’ And then when I was all over, she was like ‘Wow, we’re making this right now.’ And so we have two meetings and we met with our Canadian counterparts, ’cause we’re gonna shoot up a lot of it up North and then some of it in Michigan as well. But we were able to kind of pull the budget together. So in the fall of 2015, we head up to it looks like Northern Ontario and start shooting Hit Somebody.”
As always, Smith has plenty more to say on the subject. You can head over to /Film to read the rest of his quotes about Hit Somebody.
Yoga Hosers will release sometime in 2015, while a release window for Clerks III hasn’t been nailed down yet.
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