'Dogma is offensive, but blasphemous? Hell no!'

Kevin Smith, the nerd king behind 'Clerks', is re-releasing his controversial 1999 masterpiece. He tells Adam White about how he lost his faith, and the possibility of a sequel

- Adam White

For Kevin Smith, it’s the parish priests who take him most by surprise.

Nice, Smith thinks. “Of course, they never mention the anal jokes.” Dogma, Smith's potty-mouthed Jesus comedy from 1999, remains his masterpiece: a thoughtfully profane and profanely thoughtful exercise in asking all of the big questions, with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon as fallen angels pulling apart the rules of Catholicism amid a killing spree. Nineties stalwart Linda Fiorentino is the jaded abortion clinic worker recruited by God to take them down. It's being re-released in UK cinemas this week, in celebration of Smith winning back the rights to the film from its disgraced producer, Harvey Weinstein, and on the heels of a very successful cross-country tour of the film in the US. Smith, surrounded in his LA office by merchandise from the Sixties cartoon Rocky and Bullwinkle (“I think I’m trying to recapture my childhood,” he sighs), tells me he’s spent the last year watching Dogma over and over again. He has some thoughts.

“I think it’s probably the best I can be,” he says – and not sadly or solemnly, but in the same rat-a-tat register of all his declarations. Chasing Amy, his 1997 romcom about a straight man in love with a lesbian, used to be his “umbrella film”, he thinks, meaning the movie that will always get him kudos and respect regardless of where the rest of his career goes. “But it’s aged differently,” he continues. “For some people, who weren’t around when it came out, it’s offensive. Dogma, I think, has taken its place – as ‘the best this idiot can be’, ‘before he tumbled down the hill’, ‘up his own asshole’, or whatever the fuck they think...”