Kevin Smith Spills All the Secrets About His Greatest Cinematic Achievement

25 years ago, Kevin Smith released his most controversial and provocative film. Then, after a solid run in theaters and a robust life on VHS, it disappeared into the ether and has never been available to stream.

Now, as Dogma makes its triumphant return to theaters this weekend, Smith reveals the full story to The Last Laugh podcast of how he got huge stars like Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, George Carlin and others to appear in his audacious satire of the Catholic Church, how he was able “rescue my movie about angels from the devil himself” Harvey Weinstein, how a planned sequel will change now that he has fully lost his own faith, and so much more.

When Smith joins me ahead of Dogma’s long-awaited re-release in theaters, he’s just back from Cannes where he showed the movie for the second time after it first premiered at that international film festival in May of 1999.

Watching it again with an audience there, he says, “What’s abundantly clear is the cat that made that movie believed in everything that he was talking about.”

“This wasn’t a movie that made fun of religion,” he insists now, despite protests at the time by those who deemed the story about two fallen angels who find a loophole to get back into Heaven “anti-Catholic.”

“This movie was written by a kid who was an altar boy, who used to giggle every time the priest said, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord,’” he jokes. “So that was me working out my s--t. But I will say, it’s very hard to hold on to your childhood Catholicism when you’re on set with George Carlin all day long.”

Below are just some of the many revelations Smith shared with The Last Laugh podcast about the making, reception, aftermath, and ultimate resurrection of Dogma.

George Carlin agreed to play Cardinal Glick on one condition.

When Smith told Carlin’s manager that he wanted him to play a Catholic cardinal in Dogma, the response he got was, “Oh, f—, George will love that shit!” Then, shortly before the film was set to start shooting, Carlin’s wife of 36 years died of cancer. Carlin told Smith he was “all in” for the movie, but wasn’t ready to take off his wedding band.

“He goes, ‘It’s just too soon, and I know, playing a Catholic cardinal, I can’t wear my wedding band, they’re married to Jesus, or some s--t,’” Smith recalls Carlin saying at their first meeting. The comedian’s idea was to wear a band-aid around his wedding band. Kevin called Carlin’s sentiment “the most beautiful thing” he’d ever heard and told him, “you can wear as many band-aids as you want.

Ben Affleck wasn’t considered a big enough “movie star” for one of the main roles.

Affleck read the script and wanted to play Bartleby, one of the two fallen angels. “I was like, oh, that’d be awesome, but that’s going to be a movie star,” Smith told him. “That’s the only way this movie gets made.”

(It wasn’t the first time Smith was encouraged to cast bigger stars in his movies. He says Miramax originally wanted Drew Barrymorre, David Schwimmer and Jon Stewart to star in Chasing Amy. And he was urged to replace Jason Mewes as Jay with either Seth Green or Breckin Meyer.)

Between that conversation and the final casting of Dogma, Good Will Hunting came out and turned Affleck and Damon into instant movie stars. “So we went from ‘Miramax can give us four million dollars to make that movie,’ but once the boys won their Academy Award suddenly, it was like we had gold. So they gave us more breathing room. We had $10 million,” Smith says.

In the very first scene they shot in the airport, Smith recalls zooming in on Affleck’s close-up and just before he yelled “action,” Affleck looked into the camera and mouthed the words, “movie star.”

Jason Lee was supposed to play Matt Damon’s role. And Alec Baldwin turned down the demon role that ultimately went to Lee.

Before Good Will Hunting, frequent Smith collaborator Jason Lee (Mallrats, Chasing Amy) was supposed to play Loki, the role that ended up going to Damon. Instead, Lee decided to take a lead role in the since-forgotten film American Cuisine, in which he played an American chef working in France. Dogma’s schedule got pushed, and he came back to Smith and asked if he could still play that part. When he found out Damon had agreed to play it, he told Smith, “Alright, he’s used to standing next to Ben, I guess that makes sense.”

Lee only got the role of the demon Azrael instead after Alec Baldwin turned it down.

The Incredibles’ villain Syndrome was inspired by Jason Lee’s demon character.

But that role of the monologuing villain actually led to one of Lee’s most iconic—and lucrative—gigs as the voice of Syndrome in Pixar’s Incredibles series. Years after Dogma came out, Lee called Smith to thank him for putting him in the part he did. “I just got a role in a Disney movie because the director loved my Dogma performance,” Lee told him, pointing out that if he had gotten Damon’s role, that likely never would have happened.

Alan Rickman was the “fastest yes” Kevin Smith ever got from an actor.

Rickman wanted to work with “whoever made Chasing Amy,” so Smith jumped to offer him the role of the voice of God. “Alan Rickman was the fastest yes I ever got from an actor in my life,” Smith says. “We sent him the script. And within two hours of receiving it, he called me and was like. ‘I’m in.’” The actor, who Smith revered for his role as Hans Gruber in Die Hard, was so good that the director says he would call “cut” and his only note would be, “F---ing thank you.”

Kevin Smith asked Robert Rodriguez to direct Dogma.

One month before Dogma was set to start shooting, Smith worried that the scale of the film would be too big for him to direct. So he called his friend Robert Rodriguez (Desperado, From Dusk Till Dawn) and asked him to take over: “I was like, ‘This script’s too good, dude, I’ll ruin it. I’m not a great director, could you do it?’ And he goes, ‘Kevin, you’ll do absolutely fine. Just don’t shoot anyone against a wall. You always stand two people next to each other, and there’s nothing behind them. Just put a window behind him or or put a background behind them, you just need depth in your movies, that’s all.’ So he talked me off a ledge.”

Alanis Morissette was originally supposed to play the lead.

Before he cast The Last Seduction’s Linda Fiorentino as the protagonist Bethany, Smith pitched the role to Alanis Morissette. “She was just coming off the Jagged Little Pill tour, and said that every night she and the band would go to sleep watching Clerks,” Smith remembers the singer telling him. When he suggested she could play the lead of his next movie, Morissette told him, “I’ve never led a movie, I don’t think I should do that.”

It wasn’t until after her next tour that the movie was finally getting ready to shoot and Smith offered her the role of God. When she asked why he wanted her, Smith said, “‘Because I always thought God would be Canadian,’ and she loved that.”

But Morisstte wasn’t his first choice. God was originally written for Holly Hunter and almost played by Emma Thompson.

“Since God wasn’t going to talk and The Piano had just happened,” Smith immediately thought of Holly Hunter. Also because he’s a “massive Raising Arizona fan.” That’s why the character of Jay says in the film, “What is this s--t, f---ing Piano? Why ain’t this broad talk?” Hunter passed, not because she didn’t want to play another mute character but because she had just played an angel assassin in Danny Boyle’s A Life Less Ordinary and didn’t want to do another “supernatural” part.

So instead, Rickman suggested he ask his “hysterical” friend (and eventual Love, Actually co-star) Emma Thompson, who initially agreed before dropping out due to a scheduling conflict. Only then did Morissette get the part.

Harvey Weinstein suspected Kevin Smith might be a source in The New York Times’ #MeToo takedown.

Days before he was exposed as a sexual predator by The New York Times, Harvey Weinstein called up Smith and asked him if he was interested in revisiting Dogma for a potential sequel. It was only later that Smith realized Weinstein was merely trying to determine if he was a source for the pending takedown.

“You answered the phone, so you weren’t a threat,” Smith recalls a friend explaining to him. “If you hadn’t answered the phone, he would have assumed that you were a source.”

“Of all the egregious things that Harvey Weinstein has done, that doesn’t even make the fucking list, lamenting the fact that he was ultimately forced to send “a very heartfelt letter to a convicted rapist,” begging to buy back the rights to the movie.

Harvey Weinstein only relinquished Dogma because he “needed cash” for legal battles.

According to Smith, Weinstein “needed cash” for his ongoing court cases and finally decided to stop holding Dogma hostage and sell it to a third-party distributor, paving the way for it to arrive in theaters again this week. And that was after Weinstein turned down Smith’s offer of $1 million to buy the movie back.

Among the other movies Weinstein was holding onto until just recently are Larry Clark’s Kids and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.

Kevin Smith is sure he can get Matt Damon and Ben Affleck back for the Dogma sequel.

As long as he’s “not stupid” and doesn’t ask for too much, Smith is confident he can get the now massive movie stars Damon and Affleck back for the Dogma sequel he is currently writing.

“This is a role that f---ing Ben fought for, and I would never step up to the plate with a Dogma sequel unless it was amazing, so I can’t f---ing ruin that,” Smith says. “But I do have a great story. That movie was made by a kid who had all the faith in the world. The new one’s going to be made by somebody who doesn’t have those same beliefs. But he has a lot of good ideas.”

“But yeah, they’ll come back,” he adds. “Obviously Alan Rickman can’t come back, and George Carlin can’t come back. But anybody who’s still alive, man, a seat will be prepared at the table, and they are more than welcome.”