Kevin Smith is a director that many people believe peaked on his first film Clerks back in 1994. But while he’s not an A-List star in Hollywood, Smith has legions of fans that put others to shame and he’s not afraid to keep it real despite the fact that he’s largely graduated to big boy filmmaking.

But while he’s ‘gone Hollywood’, Smith isn’t one to try and pretend he’s still an Independent filmmaker like he was back in 1994 when he spent sleepless nights making his local Quick Stop the setting for so much audience joy and pleasure. In speaking to THR’s Kim Masters about the prospect of using the crowd-sourcing site Kickstarter to fund a third Clerks film, Smith said bluntly that he has too many funding opportunities behind him to have to rely on people buying a ticket and paying for the movie as well.

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“It feels like me trying to have a second bite at the apple by going, ‘All right man, now I’m going indie again with this Kickstarter thing.’ Like, the truth of it is, after all this time, 20 years later, I have access to money,” Smith said, via The Hollywood Reporter. “If I don’t use my own money, I can always hit up some of my famous friends.”

The Kickstarter craze is on the rise with people like Zach Braff and other using the site to get public funding for films in order to secure money outside of the studio system to create said film.

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But while Kickstarter is a decent idea, it seems better suited for passion pieces aimed at certain demographics of fans. FOr instance, the Veronica Mars movie is being funded by using Kickstarter and while Clerks 3 could be argued as a film only Kevin Smith fans want to see, he frankly has more fans than Veronica Mars and still carries a lot of weight in Hollywood — no pun intended.

Smith stated as much when he clarified that he’s not bashing Kickstarter or people that use it.

“If our Kickstarter video had been me just walking out in front of a blackboard and writing Clerks and then III after it, without much more than that, we probably would have easily cleared $5 million to $7 million bucks,” Smith said to Kim Masters. “And not because people like me, but they love Clerks, man.”

Braff has raised over $3 million for his next directorial film while the Veronica Mars project has raised over $5.5 million.