‘We shot it after hours in the store where I worked, filming from 11pm to 6am with the shutters closed. Everyone assumed we were making a porno’

Kevin Smith, director

I worked in six convenience stores in New Jersey from 1989 to 1993, which is where Clerks came from. It was an appealing, easy job, like being a bartender: it puts you nominally in charge and people have to socialise with you.

Seeing Richard Linklater’s Slacker on my 21st birthday showed me that movies didn’t have to blow up the Death Star – they could just be a snapshot of where you were in life. Clerks came out of a demand for representation: there was a time when that world of dead-end jobs didn’t exist in the movies, when pop culture wasn’t the culture, when you didn’t see people who talked in movie quotes.

The main character – Dante, the slacker who is trapped but thinks he’s meant for something else – was based on me. Randal was Bryan Johnson, my friend who worked with me at Quick Stop Groceries and RST Video, where we shot the film. He didn’t give a fuck about what anyone thought. He would fight with people, make fun of them to their face. He was the guy I secretly wished to be. I was going to play Randal, then I realised I couldn’t memorise dialogue. So I took the role that had none – Silent Bob – and Brian O’Halloran played Dante.

The film was mostly funded on credit cards. Before Clerks was a gleam in my eye, Bryan and I had started a contest to see who could get the most cards. I was ahead – 12 to his five – but I never did anything with them because my Irish Catholic family thought they were the devil’s work. They sat in a box in my underwear drawer, but I remembered them when we started Clerks.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘What have I done?’ … Kevin Smith. Photograph: Martyn Goodacre/Getty

I wrote that Dante can’t open the shutters at the start of the film so we could shoot the whole thing at night. We filmed for 21 nights straight. I closed the store at 10.30pm, we would start shooting by 11 and continue until 6am. Everyone assumed I was making a porno. At 6, the store would open, and I’d go back to work until 11am. When the next shift came in, I would go up to New York to drop off the footage, or home to sleep, because I had to go back to work at 3pm. But I was never tired – I could’ve done it for another 21 days.

When we screened it at the American Film Market, hardly anyone was there, and I watched my $27,575 playing up on the screen. That first 15 minutes was the only time I was worried, sad, broken, thinking: “What have I done?” Then I relaxed and thought: “You saw Slacker here in this same movie theatre. In a little over two years, you’ve gone from watching someone else’s movie to watching your own.”

Luckily, one of the few people in the room not connected to the film was Bob Hawk, who worked with the selection committee at Sundance. He only went to see it because it had a crappy picture in the catalogue and he felt sorry for us. But he thought it was fantastic, and recommended we submit it to Sundance in 1994, where it was a breakout hit and Miramax bought it for $227,000. I can’t believe it has lasted for 25 years. A lot of YouTube creators , the next generation, have said to me: “It’s because I saw Clerks that I realised I could do that.” It’s the movie that launched a thousand ships.

Brian O’Halloran, actor

I auditioned with an extract from Wait Until Dark, an old Alan Arkin film. I was absolutely dreadful, but good enough to get a callback. A few days later, Kevin and I read the scene where Dante and Randal discuss the Death Star and the independent contractors who built it. I still thought I was reading for a bit part, that maybe this was a scene where the main characters walk into a convenience store. Then he told me they were the lead characters and offered me the role of Dante. I was psyched.

Kevin thought that, being a stage actor, I would be able to handle the dialogue. The first scene I shot was the one with Dante’s ex-girlfriend, discussing her marriage. It was a seven-minute take, with no cutaways.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest O’Halloran with Rosario Dawson in the 2006 sequel, Clerks II. Photograph: MGM/Sportsphoto/Allstar

The sexually explicit dialogue definitely pushed the envelope. Jeff Anderson, who played Randall, had some objections to the long list of porno titles he had to read off. He said: “I don’t want to do it, my mom’s going to see this film.” So Kevin added four more titles and said: “Read it. I don’t want to hear you moaning.”

We shot a lot of pages every night. While Kevin was putting the equipment away in the morning, we had the till slightly open so I could give change if people came in wanting cigarettes or a paper. I’d bring in the paper and the bread deliveries, then drive to my job at a barware factory.

Kevin Smith and the triumph of commerce over art Read more

I was not a fan of the original ending, in which Dante is shot dead when the store is held up. Luckily, the producers told Kevin to keep it a straight comedy. A lot of convenience stores are automated now, but the film is still relevant – even if you haven’t worked a shitty customer service job, you’ve been in an establishment with shitty service, or with staff who are overeducated and underemployed.

Kevin Smith’s podcast Hollywood Babble-On tours the UK 11-15 May. Brian O’Halloran is at MCM Comic Con, London, 24-26 May.