For me, it was Harold and Maude. Or maybe Star Wars. Or Heathers.

It's tough to think of one film that changed my life, but in a new book 30 well-known directors do just that: Danny Boyle picks Apocalypse Now. Edgar Wright chooses An American Werewolf in London. Peter Bogdanovich goes with Citizen Kane. John Waters talks about The Wizard of Oz.

Below is one of my favorite chapters from The Film That Changed My Life: 30 Directors on Their Epiphanies in the Dark by Robert K. Elder (Chicago Review Press, $16.95). In it, Kevin Smith reveals the flick that made him realize he could make movies for a living: Richard Linklater's Slacker.

"It was the movie that got me off my a--; it was the movie that lit a fire under me, the movie that made me think, 'Hey, I could be a filmmaker,'" Smith says. "And I had never seen a movie like that before ever in my life."

The Film That Changed My Life is on sale now. Other directors who contribute include Michel Gondry, Neil LaBute, Frank Oz, Richard Linklater and John Landis.

EXCERPT:

Kevin Smith, Slacker

For director Kevin Smith, Richard Linklater's Slacker was the spark. Quite simply, seeing Slacker was the encouragement he needed to believe in and pursue his own career as a filmmaker. Smith, of course, would add his own classic to the indie canon with Clerks just three years later.

"I viewed [Slacker] with this mixture of awe and arrogance, where I was amazed at the movie, because I'd never seen anything like it and it was so original," Smith says. "The arrogance comes in when I'm sitting there going, 'Well s--t, if this is a movie, I could make a movie.'"

Kevin Smith, selected filmography:

Clerks (1994)

Mallrats (1995)

Chasing Amy (1997)

Dogma (1999)

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001)

Jersey Girl (2004)

Clerks II (2006)

Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008)

Cop Out (2010)

Slacker

1991

Directed by Richard Linklater

Starring Teresa Taylor, Rudy Basquez, Jean Caffeine, and many more

How would you describe Slacker to someone who has never seen it? Smith: It's kind of a stream-of-consciousness journey through the Austin, Texas, underachieving set.

You saw this film on your twenty-first birthday, right?

Smith: I did.

And how did you find out about it?

Smith: I had gone to a screening of a movie with Judd Nelson and Bill Paxton called The Dark Backward the weekend or two prior to that, at the Angelika Theater up in Manhattan. It was the first time I ever left New Jersey or Monmouth County to go see a movie. It was Vincent Pereira and I. So we trekked up into the city, and we went to this movie chiefly because in the Village Voice an ad said Bill Paxton and Judd Nelson were going to be at the midnight screening of The Dark Backward. And they were offering something called Pig Newtons, which were props in the film, this bizarre alternate-Earth-dimension food that they ate in the movie. So we were like, "Holy s--t, they give out Pig Newtons! Let's take the trip."

Bill Paxton and Judd Nelson introduced the movie, and these theaters, they're no more than 200- maybe 220-seaters, right below Houston Street, and you can hear subways go past periodically. Before the movie began, there were trailers, and one of them was for Slacker, and one of them was for Hal Hartley's Trust. They both kind of struck me because they didn't look like movies I had seen before.

A week or two weeks later, I'm at the Quick Stop reading that week's issue of the Village Voice, and there's a review for Slacker. And I read it and it just sounded cool; the Madonna Pap smear scene sounded pretty funny. [In this scene, an Austin native attempts to sell a sample from Madonna's Pap smear.]

So Vincent and I decided to go see it, and it was my twenty-first birth- day. I had nothing else going on that night, so we headed back into the city again for a midnight show, 'cause that's when the Quick Stop closed, and took in Slacker. It was a pretty full house, and I was enjoying it. And every- body around me was really enjoying it, insanely much, a knee-slapping, gut- busting humor. I didn't quite see the same movie they did. I thought it was very clever, very funny—humorous more than anything else. But I wasn't dumbfounded by the comedy.

And I was sitting there thinking, "God, if they think this is funny, I think I could give them a funny movie." And Slacker, I've always said I viewed it with this mixture of awe and arrogance. I was amazed at the movie, because I'd never seen anything like it and it was so original. What a great idea: a movie that has no plot, just goes from character to character, just drifts for ninety minutes and change. And the arrogance comes in when I'm sitting there going, "Well, s--t, if this is a movie, I could make a movie."

Vincent had always been the one who wanted to be a director, talked about being a director, and so at that point I had never really considered it seriously. I wanted to be a writer, but not necessarily a screenwriter. I wanted to write for Saturday Night Live. But that night on the way home, I started talking about the possibility of making a film and how I could get my head around doing it, and maybe that's what I was meant to do, or give it a shot at least. So from that moment forward, I wanted to be a filmmaker.

And as I talk to more and more filmmakers for this book, the epiphany moments are of two types. The first is, "Wow, that's amazing, I want to make films, but I could never do that." And the second is, "Hey, I can do that!" This sounds like your experience. Were there other films that gave you confidence to think that you could direct?

Smith: Yeah, that would be Trust. A few weeks later I went to see Trust at the Angelika. It was very basically shot, but what really struck me about the movie was the dialogue. The dialogue was very stagey, almost surrealistic dialogue. Very clever, but not very realistic. And I said, "Oh my God, so you can flout convention in films." They don't have to speak like most characters do in the mainstream stuff I've seen or in TV shows or even like people in real life. You can craft the ideal, the way you would want characters to speak.

So that was another linchpin. Off the heels of those movies, I started get- ting knee-deep in indie film and trying to get my hands on anything I could to watch. Back home we had a great video store near us called Choice Video, which carried a lot of tapes. That's where I first found the Jarmusch stuff, which I'd read about in some film book. Watching Stranger Than Paradise, that was the movie that made it seem absolutely possible—"Oh my God, this movie, they just turn on the camera and let things happen in front of it." So when I started shooting Clerks, it was with Stranger Than Paradise in mind, in terms of the mise-en-scène approach.

Circling back to Slacker, one film critic wrote that the film was an "anthology of eccentricities without a guide or even sort of a table of contents." To me, it's one of the few American films that consciously and determinedly has no plot. Linklater doesn't come back to charac- ters, and certain things aren't even explained, like a character's black eye. Were you prepared for this by the review you read? What was that experience like?

Smith: I was used to watching pretty mainstream stuff at that point. So here's a movie, kind of looks like a movie, and we're watching it in a movie theater, and it's populated by nonactors who are acting. I was not prepared going in. It was one of the most wonderful and pure filmgoing experiences I've ever had.

When I was sitting there, I wasn't prepared for it at all. But it was amazing, because it was such an insane, wonderful, and fresh experience. But at the same time, the film was very mundane. It's not like Richard Linklater took us on a journey to space, but he might as well have because the people were very strange. The idea, the whole idea behind the movie, was very strange but insanely liberating for me and very inspiring. Because it was like, "So you can make a movie about anything, apparently." You don't have to adhere to the three-act structure, or it doesn't really have to be a story. When I was writing Clerks, I was very aware of the fact that I didn't need a plot. There is no plot. It's just a series of stuff that kind of happens there, loosely hung on the framework of a dude who doesn't want to be at work.

A lot of the pieces first written about the film tried to describe or define the title—what is a slacker? What did that term mean to you at the time?

Smith: The only other place I had heard it was in Back to the Future, where Marty McFly is referred to as a slacker and his father is referred to as a slacker. And then in Back to the Future, Part II, a teacher fires a shotgun at some off- camera hooligans and screams, "Eat lead, slackers!" So that was the only other place I'd really heard the term before. And then suddenly here it was as a title of a movie. I at least had a working idea of what the term meant.

After the movie, did you glean any deeper meaning of that term, if there is such a thing as a deeper meaning of that word?

Smith: After the movie, I kind of walked away with an excellent understanding of what he was going for. In that film, everyone seemed to have finished college. But Slacker, to me, encapsulated that group of people who knew a lot about useless things that didn't really provide a living. It also kind of encapsulated, for me, the overeducated and idle. Or even the people who are just too smart for their own good, which kind of felt like me a little bit at that point when I was working in the convenience store.

I didn't really go to college at that point. I dropped out—didn't even have enough credits for an associate's degree. I had enough of an education where I shouldn't have been working in a convenience store. It felt like that applied to some degree to the term slacker: to take refuge in not actually joining the workforce, the serious workforce, take refuge in sitting around and bullshit- ting with your friends and talking about, oh, I don't know ... pop culture. There's not a lot going on in Slacker, but there are moments.

It was the movie that got me off my ass; it was the movie that lit a fire under me, the movie that made me think, "Hey, I could be a filmmaker." And I had never seen a movie like that before ever in my life. I mean, you sit there watching Die Hard, it's not like you go, "Man, I wanna make that." Or at least I don't. I'm sure somebody does, but that wasn't me. Some mov- ies are made to solely be watched, and Slacker had the benefit of being one of those movies that you could watch, but it was almost the movie that just kept telling me, as I was watching it: "You can do this. You can do this. Give it a shot." It had possibility written all over it.

As I read all the reviews around Slacker, I was fascinated by how polar- izing it was.

Smith: Really, there were people who didn't like that movie?

Kenneth Turan wrote that Slacker "does not offer much to anyone who likes to stay awake." But the New York Times said, "Slacker is a fourteen-course meal composed entirely of desserts." What do you suppose sparked those diverse emotional responses?

Smith: That film had the possibility layered throughout the movie, that if these dudes in Bumblef--k, Texas—at that point I didn't know Austin was a cultural f--kin' epicenter—could make a movie, I could.

Linklater is one of the few directors who have been able to harvest a local film scene. He's stayed in Austin. When you and I first met and talked years ago, you talked about wanting to do the same thing for New Jersey. But what obstacles exist for directors wanting to film in their home state and nurture a film production industry?

Smith: New Jersey is so close to New York that most people just gravitate there. Who would want to hang out in Red Bank, New Jersey, when an hour away they could just go to Manhattan, where there's a much bigger film center? Also, I was kind of a victim of my own success at a very early age. It was impossible to get people to work for nothing after a certain point, because we were backed by Miramax, and Miramax is backed by Disney. So it was kind of like, "Hey, man, can you come in and pitch in, give it the old college try, put on a show?" And at a certain point, people would just be like, "Dude, you have Miramax money. Clearly you can afford to pay people."

I also didn't live in a college town, so I wasn't surrounded by young ener- getic zeal. Those were the kinds of hurdles for me and my group. Some mov- ies just completely dragged us out of state. Mallrats was cheaper to shoot in Minnesota, so said the studio. So off to Minnesota we went. With Clerks nobody gave a s--t, nobody knew who we were, and Chasing Amy was fol- lowing the failure of Mallrats. So we'd been pretty written off at that point. There was no expectation, and we were so low-budget that we could stay in our hometown and shoot the movie. When we get to Dogma, ten million bucks, suddenly we can't stay in New Jersey because to shoot union would have been more expensive in Jersey. So if we go out to Pittsburgh, or western Pennsylvania, it's not nearly as expensive, and you could shoot nonunion.

Both you and Linklater have used nonprofessional or first-time actors, and for your second films you both worked with professional actors. What are the benefits of both?

Smith: The benefit of nonprofessional actors is that you've got people who are hungry. You can never discount a hungry cast and crew, because, man, they'll fully give it everything they've got. You know, 120 percent, or some other cliche. Because this could be their shot, right? They don't really have much else going on, so they haven't arrived yet. They're working to get to that point, to that arrival point.

When you're working with a professional cast, they've already been to the circus. They've already seen the trapeze act and they're just not as impressed. And just a little bit jaded. So you're pulling more teeth at that point.

So is there something to that adage that great films or great ideas in film are formed against the odds—the odds of a budget—so filmmak- ers are forced to be more creative?

Smith: It certainly seems so, but if you go to like the IFFM [Independent Feature Film Market, an indie talent showcase] every year and see the hun- dreds of movies that aren't gonna go anywhere further than the eyes in front of them, and you know they were all made under duress/stress and under limited budget circumstances and they're not even watchable—it doesn't really apply to every film.

How would your life have been different if you hadn't seen the film? Do you think something like Trust or Stranger Than Paradise eventually would have inspired you?

Smith: I don't think anything else would have done it. Because even Trust looked good. And it's not like Slacker didn't. Slacker had this kind of grainy quality to it. But Trust seemed too accomplished for me. I think it was Slacker or nothing.

When you saw this film on subsequent viewings, how did your rela- tionship with it change?

Smith: It still really takes me right back to that moment, where suddenly I could see myself doing that. I think it's still an insanely original film. It's still very clever; it's still the movie that I recommend to people when I do college Q&As.

I get the next generation saying, "Hey, when I saw Clerks, it's the mov- ie that made me want to get off my ass." And I always hit 'em back with, "Thanks, I appreciate that. But, a movie you gotta watch is Slacker."

When did you first meet Linklater?

Smith: The first time I met him was through John Schloss, my lawyer, who was Rick's lawyer first. And he was going to see a movie, it was the Wim Wenders's follow-up to Wings of Desire—Faraway, So Close! So Schloss is like, "Me and Rick are going to catch this movie. Do you wanna catch it with us?" I really liked Wings of Desire, and of course I wanted to meet Rick, so I was immediately, "Yeah, of course, I would love to."

And so we all went out to eat first, and then we went out to the movie. So we chitchatted in the beginning—he had already seen Clerks at that point through a tape with John. But we didn't really have that much to talk about, oddly enough. He seemed very old to me—not old like, you know, forty, but he's just a much more centered, calm, quiet personality than I am. And so after about ten minutes, we didn't really have much to say.

I remember being a little disappointed, not so much in him, like he let me down, but just like, oh, man, I imagined it would be like a couple of dogs—we would sniff each other's asses and then run and frolic, 'cause we had something in common, we were filmmakers. But it wasn't until years later that I did feel that I was finally on the same level with him to some degree, that I was a peer.

Once you met him and got to know him a little bit, did that make you understand his film differently, or did it make you view that experi- ence differently?

Smith: It kind of made the film make more sense. Because it is kind of Rick's personality. He is kind of whimsical and artistic, and so is that film on many levels. His discussions aren't mired in pop culture and the here and now and humor like my stuff, the way my conversations tend to be. His conversations lean more toward art and concepts and trying new things. When I met him, I was just like, "Yeah, it makes sense that this is the guy that made that movie."

What was your reaction to Waking Life, Slacker's unofficial sequel and sister movie?

Smith: This is horrible: I've never seen it. And part of the reason I've never seen it was, someone was like, "Hey man, it's the perfect companion piece to Slacker." And to me there will never be a perfect companion piece to Slacker. So I almost didn't want to taint the Slacker experience on some level. On the other level, I just found that kind of animation grating and hard to take. Because I watched a five-minute sequence of that stuff, not necessarily from that movie but of that type of animation, and I just found it a little hard to take.

You should give it chance.

Smith: I will totally give it a chance. I also bought Tape; I really wanted to watch Tape and I've never gotten around to watching it. I loved School of Rock, though.

I saw that at a midnight screening, and it was one of the few movies I've seen where people spontaneously applaud. That's when you have something.

Smith: Something special. What was really weird was watching the effect that that film had on the next generation of Smiths. I took my kid to see that movie three times in the theater, and each time the movie got her off her ass, into the aisles of the theater, dancing and pretending to be onstage, pretend- ing to be in the kids' group.

A Linklater movie got her off her ass and really kind of inspired her to do something.

It was weird. I was always kind of charmed by that, 'cause I was like, "Man, like father, like daughter."

Reprinted with permission from The Film That Changed My Life: 30 Directors on Their Epiphanies in the Dark by Robert K. Elder. Text copyright 2011 Chicago Review Press. Published by Chicago Review Press (distributed by IPG). Available in January 2011.