Kevin Smith on A Man For All Seasons

How very odd. When called on to choose his favorite film, the potty-mouthed director of rude little movies like CLERKS and DOGMA chooses the story of Saint Thomas More. Well, there are reasons.

This New York Times article by Rick Lyman is the 12th in a series of discussions with noted directors, actors, screenwriters, cinematographers and others in the film industry. In each article, a filmmaker selects and discusses a movie that has personal meaning. Previous articles focused on Quentin Tarantino, Janusz Kaminski, Ron Howard, Curtis Hanson, Kevin Costner, Steven Soderbergh, Ang Lee, Wolfgang Petersen, Harvey Weinstein, Michael Bay and Julianne Moore. The articles have been gathered into a book, "Watching Movies."

WORDS, words, words. They come spilling out of ''A Man for All Seasons'' in great torrents that spin and swell into rapids, a furious river of words. And Paul Scofield wraps his dour face and deep-timbred voice around Robert Bolt's dialogue with such satisfying, calculated calibration.

Kevin Smith laughed and nodded his head. ''This language, it's so great,'' he said, leaning back again in a swivel chair in his baby-blue bungalow on the CBS Studio Center lot, where he is finishing the editing on ''Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back,'' his latest sex-and-drugs comedy.

In one scene, Mr. Scofield, playing the soon-to-be-martyred Sir Thomas More in Henry VIII's England, argues with his sanctimonious son-in-law over the importance of laws. Will Roper, the son-in-law, wants to cut down any laws that get in the way of defeating the devil's work.

''And when the last law was cut down and the devil turned round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast -- man's laws, not God's -- and if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?'' Mr. Scofield pauses for just a beat. ''Yes,'' he continues, ''I give the devil benefit of law for my own safety's sake.''

Mr. Smith's comfortably cluttered bungalow is a stone's throw from Ventura Boulevard and just across a concrete canal from the fenced-in compound where production is under way on the latest installment of the network's ''Big Brother'' reality series. People on the lot have been warned to steer clear of the compound and not tell anyone where it is. It's a big secret.

''The dialogue in this movie -- it pops, you know,'' Mr. Smith said, snapping his fingers. ''Back and forth and back and forth. And let's face it, this is a movie that's pretty much all dialogue.''

To Mr. Smith, that's the greatest pleasure, seeing how dramatic momentum can come not from action but from the interplay of words and ideas. ''Actually, that's what I try to do in my movies,'' he said. ''That's all I'm good at. I don't even think I try to do it; it's just the only thing I can do. I'm terrible at action, but pretty decent at dialogue. And I always thought that this movie had a lot to do with why I write the way I write. Because this is such a definitive film for me. Lord knows, I love popcorn movies as much as the next guy. The 'Star Wars' films were a huge part of my life. But this is one of the first movies that introduced me to the notion of dialogue and character and nothing else really needing to happen.''

Mr. Smith, 30, knows he might seem an uneasy fit for the director Fred Zinnemann's dense drama of ideas and intellectual heroism. Beginning with ''Clerks'' (1994), a witty and ragtag story about young men working dead-end jobs in a New Jersey strip mall, Mr. Smith has earned a reputation for a kind of cheerful, pop-infused vulgarity that snaps with self-deprecating wit. But while he stresses that he does not claim to be the equal of either Zinnemann or Bolt, he does feel a kind of kinship between their work and his quick-bantering comedies of male immaturity, which reside, as he puts it, in a world of jokes about genitalia and flatulence.

'' 'A Man for All Seasons' has some beautiful scenes in it, but it is not a visually stunning film,'' Mr. Smith said. ''I only wish I were talented enough to pull off a really talky film that's not visually stunning but still gets the job done. All the flicks I've done, people are always going, 'Wow, he's not a really good visual stylist -- his films tend to be about dialogue.' Well, this film is all about dialogue, too, but nobody ever calls Zinnemann on the fact that it's not visually popping because he's so skillful that he's able to tell the story in a way that, despite all the dialogue, it doesn't feel static. I wish I could do that.''

Thanks to Sister Theresa

The short, thick, bearded Mr. Smith is familiar to moviegoers for the small parts he plays in his own films. (In his latest one, he is the wordless Silent Bob to his co-star Jason Mewes's motormouth Jay.) And as he moved through the suite of offices and into the editing room to watch ''A Man for All Seasons,'' he looked very much like Silent Bob, right down to the doleful eyes and the backward baseball cap. Once in the editing room, the door closed and the DVD slid into the bank of technical gizmos, he pulled out a pack of cigarettes and began to snap it loudly on his forearm.

''Why this movie?'' he asked as he watched the credits roll. ''It's been a favorite of mine since I was a kid. The first time I saw it was when I was about 13. It would have been 1983. I watched it because I was going to a Catholic school in Jersey at the time, Our Lady of Perpetual Help. I had this teacher, Sister Theresa, who was great, and Thomas More was her favorite saint and she loved this movie. For our eighth-grade production one year, she did an adaptation of Bolt's stage play for us to perform. She chopped out a lot, but we still put it on. I played Cromwell. She picked a guy in the class to play Henry VIII because he had red hair. She was kind of fanatical about the details.''

Sister Theresa encouraged her class to watch the film when it was broadcast on a local television station, to introduce them to the story and prepare for the class production. ''I watched it and I just fell in love with it in general,'' Mr. Smith said. ''Even though it was on television and interrupted by commercials, it knocked me out. I don't know why Sister Theresa loved it so much. I think it had something to do with the integrity of More. He wasn't one of these fanatical kind of martyrs who wanted to die on the sword. He was a lawyer and tried like mad to get out of dying but in the end found no way that didn't involve violating his faith. But for me, I loved it just because it was so well-spoken and yet incredibly spiritual at the same time. Here's a dude who held one of the highest offices in England at the time but was still able to maintain his faith.''

Mr. Smith said his family had just bought its first videocassette recorder, and he made a copy of ''A Man for All Seasons'' and watched it at least 10 more times in the next weeks. ''It got to the point where my parents were, like, 'C'mon, move on, watch something else,' '' Mr. Smith said. ''But I didn't want to. It was the language. It was the story. It was being 13 years old and admiring somebody who was able to go down for God. Maybe I even felt I could identify with Thomas More a bit. I can appreciate the way More's mind worked, how he was able to juggle the two worlds of the spiritual and the everyday. I mean, it's easy to say we don't want to sin, but it's very hard not to sin. Here's a dude who found a way to do it, to walk the line.''

Since then, Mr. Smith said, he has watched the film frequently, often pressing it on some of his young friends. ''I must have seen 'A Man for All Seasons' 50 times, literally,'' he said. ''Probably more than any other movie. When 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' came out, I saw it 25 times in the theaters. I just kept going and going. But this movie I've seen at least twice as many times. This movie is like porn for somebody who loves language.''

When he is asked, as he often is by young fans, to name his favorite films, Mr. Smith says he always cites the same five: Steven Spielberg's ''Jaws,'' Martin Scorsese's ''Last Temptation of Christ,'' Oliver Stone's ''J.F.K.,'' Spike Lee's ''Do the Right Thing'' and ''A Man for All Seasons.'' For this article, he said, he chose to watch the Zinnemann film both because of its profound impact on him and because he thinks it is the least seen and least remembered of his favorites.

Six Academy Awards

''Nobody ever talks about it anymore, and it's such a great movie,'' he continued. ''Very few people even seem to know what this movie is about. You say the title and people go, 'What's that about?' Yet it won six Academy Awards, including best picture, best director and best actor. I guess it's just not sexy enough to be remembered fondly.''

During a trip to England, Mr. Smith said, he took time out to visit all the sites related to Thomas More, from the Tower of London to Hampton Court and More's own estate in Chelsea. He wishes someone would write a book about the making of the film, but he's not hopeful. In a way, the movie has become too obscure to generate such treatment.

''Are there really any good men anymore?'' Mr. Smith asked. ''When you hold somebody like Thomas More up, I don't know, 9 times out of 10, maybe 9 1/2 times out of 10, people will always take the easier route. And Thomas More didn't. Partly, it was an issue of faith, but it was also an issue of character. In terms of films, there are very few characters like Thomas More anymore. Everyone is an antihero now.''

Verbal Jousting Matches

The story of Sir Thomas More's battle to satisfy the desires of his petulant king without betraying the demands of his own faith is played, in ''A Man for All Seasons,'' as a kind of grand verbal jousting match. Mr. Scofield's More is so deeply intelligent and nimble that he seems, at first, to be more than a match for the self-serving careerists and aristocratic pragmatists who surround him.

''Absolutely, it's about smart people playing mind games with each other, but it's never obviously or overtly clever, like in an Aaron Sorkin TV show,'' Mr. Smith said. ''If you watch something like 'West Wing,' everyone is so smart, so incredibly clever, it seems like they're all trying so hard. Here, it seems so effortless, so much more natural.''

The crisis comes when More is appointed chancellor and asked by the king to acquiesce in the separation of the English church from Rome. The king wants his first marriage declared null, largely because it has produced no male heir, but more immediately because he wants to marry Anne Boleyn. The pope has refused to grant a divorce or annul the marriage, so Henry wants to be declared the supreme authority over the church in England so he can overrule the pontiff. More's faith does not allow him to go along, even though almost everyone around him, including his best friend, the Duke of Norfolk (Nigel Davenport), and his beloved daughter, Meg (Susannah York), urge him simply to hold his nose and go along. Why not? Everyone else is. Why lose your position, your fortune and your life over such a thing?

In the end, More devises an ingenious strategy. Under English law, he cannot be convicted of treason if he simply remains silent on the subject. In the end, the only way the king's prosecutor, Cromwell, can snare More is by having another witness, an ambitious snipe named Richard Rich (John Hurt), lie under oath that More has uttered treasonous statements. ''I am a dead man,'' More tells the church tribunal. ''You have your will of me.'' And he goes under the ax.

Mr. Smith is the kind of film enthusiast who likes to pepper his ordinary conversation with quotations from his favorite movies. Usually, he said, since many of his favorite films are also well known, people get the references and laugh along with him. '' 'A Man for All Seasons' is a movie that I quote incessantly, but unfortunately, not many people have seen it, so most of my quotes fall on deaf ears,'' he said.

Nor does he see it getting any more popular. ''You try to get a teenager to sit down and watch this movie,'' Mr. Smith said. ''I've tried. It's not easy.''

He tried showing it to Mr. Mewes, his frequent co-star. ''That was catastrophic,'' Mr. Smith said. Even Mr. Smith's wife, Jennifer Schwalbach, who is also an actress, had trouble understanding More's dilemma. ''She's, like, 'What an idiot More was, to die for that,' '' Mr. Smith said.

He partly attributes this attitude to the world's loss of tolerance for the lone, principled stand -- especially when it involves an issue of faith. An audience weaned on prime-time fare has little appetite for More's brand of moral rigidity.

''I think we predominantly have a filmgoing audience that was raised on television,'' Mr. Smith said. ''We like our stuff quick and poppy. We have such a short attention span -- very MTV. Today, if this film were even made, it would clearly be an independent film. It would clearly appeal to a small, select audience.''

Mr. Smith kept up a fairly steady stream of comments as the film unfolded. Sometimes, it was little more than a word. ''Wonderful,'' he'd say after a particularly compelling moment, or ''Look at that.'' The one word he used most often was genius, after a particularly sublime acting moment, either from Mr. Scofield or from Robert Shaw, who plays the king.

''Paul Scofield is just so amazing in this movie,'' he said. ''He's one of those actors who makes me wish I was a more serious filmmaker so I could work with him. But I don't really have a lot of parts for Paul Scofield.''

Not Much Scenery-Gnawing
Mr. Scofield's performance in ''A Man for All Seasons'' stands out for several reasons, Mr. Smith said. One is the overplaying by some of the other performers. Compared with Orson Welles's scenery-chewing as Cardinal Wolsey or Wendy Hiller's pickle-faced turn as More's wife, Mr. Scofield's lead performance is a masterpiece of quiet, thoughtful, underplayed eloquence.

''He is so subtle,'' Mr. Smith said. ''He can communicate such disdain without ever uttering a cross word or going over the top. For instance, he never says outright that he hates Cromwell. But it's always in his voice. You can hear it back there.''

By the time Mr. Smith first saw ''A Man for All Seasons,'' he already knew Robert Shaw, largely for playing Quint in ''Jaws.'' It was a revelation to hear him tear into Bolt's dialogue and to preen his way through this short but decisive role. ''It was kind of, 'Oh, my God, it's Captain Quint as Henry VIII,' '' he said.

Shaw's performance, which played the king as a kind of gleefully self-satisfied adolescent, has more than a little ham in it, too. But in his case, at least, it fits the part, Mr. Smith said. ''It chews the scenery in a different way than Welles did because he's playing a far more colorful character, so it fits,'' he said. ''Look how he paces back and forth as he talks. It's what children do when they're being petulant. You know it's a great performance because he comes into the movie for one major scene, steals the movie for about 10 minutes, and then he's gone. But he's so good that he kind of hangs over the rest of the movie. In a way, he's like the shark in 'Jaws.' People talk about him long before he shows up and then, boom, there's Henry.''

Beating Actors to the Punch
While watching the film, Mr. Smith frequently anticipates his favorite bits of dialogue. Often, he would say the line aloud just before the actor. ''You're very free with my daughter's hand, Roper,'' Mr. Smith would say, just moments before Mr. Scofield utters the line. Or, ''I trust I make myself obscure,'' just moments before More uses the line to explain his strategy to Norfolk.

Most of the time, though, Mr. Smith was content simply to issue an alert. ''Here comes a good line,'' he'd say. And then he'd glance over to gauge the reaction to it.

When Mr. Smith notes something in Zinnemann's direction, it usually involves either some subtle editing choice or the lack of visual razzle-dazzle. (''There are a lot of highs and wides in this movie, but there are no big pullbacks or big directing moments. It's way too understated for that.'')

In the crucial scene between More and the king, for instance, long portions of the sequence are played entirely on Shaw's face, even while Mr. Scofield is speaking -- partly because it is his big scene, but also because it's a kind of visual echo of the way everyone responds to the king's presence. He immediately becomes the center of attention.

When Meg approaches her father and says she is worried he will be imprisoned for his stance, More grabs his own cloak and responds, ''This is not the stuff of which martyrs are made.'' Mr. Smith laughed out loud, but a little sadly. ''Oh, you are so wrong, Thomas,'' he said. ''Probably the only time he really was wrong.''

In Shaw's second and final scene in the film, he is singing to his new beloved, Anne Boleyn (played by a bright-eyed and flirtatious Vanessa Redgrave). He spots a figure across the room that looks to him, and to us, like Thomas More, and hopes that it is indeed his chancellor returned to announce a change of heart. ''Thomas! Thomas!'' the king cries as he strides across the room.

''Watch this,'' Mr. Smith said. ''This is such an interesting choice. Look how long Zinnemann waited to play the reveal.''

We see the other man begin to turn, but the camera cuts back to the king's face before we know whether the other man is actually More. By the time we cut back to him, he has bowed low and his face is hidden. He begins to rise, but the camera cuts again just before his face is revealed, and we watch Shaw's reaction -- delight melting into disappointment as the man turns out to be someone other than More.

''Zinnemann holds out so we get the reveal after the turn and the bow, so basically you see it on Henry's face,'' Mr. Smith said. ''Such an interesting choice. This way, it really becomes so much more about Shaw's performance. My guess is that it was an editing decision, like somebody in that editing room really dug Shaw's performance and realized that if they cut it this way that his performance would become the punch line.''

'A Weird Choice'
Only once does Mr. Smith have a quibble with Zinnemann's direction. It comes in a scene in which More is awakened in his prison cell by a guard carrying a torch. The camera shows the sleeping More's face, then cuts to show the torch approaching. The flickering light is out of focus, as if seen through sleepy eyes. The camera then cuts back to Mr. Scofield, whose eyes open, and back again to the torch, which gradually comes into focus.

''I always thought this was a weird choice,'' Mr. Smith said. ''They do that first point-of-view shot of the torch, like it's More looking at it as he wakes up, but then they cut back to him and his eyes are still closed. The sequence is wrong. How can you have a point-of-view shot of More looking at the torch if he hasn't opened his eyes yet? It doesn't feel right. But it's a minor quibble in an otherwise flawless film.''

As surprised as he is that so few people have seen ''A Man for All Seasons,'' Mr. Smith is just as surprised that Zinnemann rarely turns up on the lists of the top directors.

''He's not one of these directors who you drop his name and people go, oh, that's so Zinnemann-esque,'' he said. ''He's wonderful, and this movie is proof positive, but he doesn't have the enduring reputation that he deserves.''

For Mr. Smith, Zinnemann's delicate touch is best exemplified in the crucial scene between More and the king. ''Just watch this, where they're sitting on a bench and talking,'' Mr. Smith said. ''There's a lot of tension in the scene because we know that the king wants More to go along with his new marriage and we know that More won't. But mostly, it's just these two guys talking to one another for 10 minutes. And as they sit on the bench, there is the slowest of slow dolly movements as the camera gradually moves closer to them. You have to watch the edges of the frame to even see it, it's so gradual. There, can you see it? Wow. It's so slow. But somehow, because of it, the scene does not feel in the least bit static. Genius.''

In the climactic scene of More's trial before an ecclesiastical tribunal, Mr. Smith notes again and again the director's restrained approach. More is frequently shot from behind, often little more than a small figure in the middle distance. For historical accuracy, Zinnemann also places neither the king nor More's family in the courtroom with him.

''Imagine how much drama you could cull from cutting to them in any given scene,'' Mr. Smith said. ''I always thought that was really brave. It would have been so easy to play the family card and have these reaction shots of his wife and daughter, tearful and worried. That's how they do it in most courtroom scenes, right? But Zinnemann doesn't do it at all. It's just More and the court, that's it. It's so powerful and restrained. It's all about the language and the arguments.''

Different Things to Die For

Mr. Smith draws a distinction in his mind between ''A Man for All Seasons'' and another film based on a play, Arthur Miller's ''Crucible.'' Both are about people who lose their lives over a matter of principle, but it is the issue of religion and faith that sets More's story apart for Mr. Smith.

''My feeling is that there are two kinds of people in the world, 'Man for All Seasons' people and 'Crucible' people, and the difference is what they are willing to die for,'' Mr. Smith said. ''In 'The Crucible,' John Proctor gives his life because he doesn't want to stain his name; he doesn't want to be known as a witch, which is just a handle that someone wants to hang on him. So his martyrdom doesn't really impress me. It's never as dramatically interesting as Thomas More, who lays down his life for his soul. It's not about his identity; it's about his soul. Even Norfolk and Meg tell him: 'Just sign the oath, what difference does it make? Say it with your mouth but renounce it in your head.' That's when More gives that great speech about how you are holding your soul in your hands like sand, and if you begin to open your fingers, even just a little bit, it all begins to spill out.''

In fact, Mr. Smith said, he's not sure that people without faith are really able to appreciate ''A Man for All Seasons'' as deeply as he does.

''It's such an inaccessible movie, in one sense, for people who don't believe in God,'' he said. ''Because the whole time they're watching it, they're thinking More is an idiot. Just take the oath. Why not? But everything comes back to God with Thomas More. He could easily take the oath, but he won't because he feels it would violate his relationship to his God. His vision of himself is based on that relationship. That's so different from John Proctor. In this day and age, try to make a movie about a guy who stands up for what he believes based on his relationship to God. I'm telling you, very few people will turn out.''

He added, ''I speak from experience.''

Mr. Smith is talking about ''Dogma,'' the comedy he made in 1999 with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck as a pair of renegade angels in New Jersey. It was the director's first real attempt to deal with some of the issues of faith that followed him from his Catholic upbringing, and it caused a brief furor when some religious groups criticized it during its production and just before its release. Once those groups saw that he was attempting to be thoughtful about the subject, the furor subsided, Mr. Smith said.

Has Mr. Smith ever thought of embracing Thomas More head on, eschewing the comedy and doing a flat-out drama?

''You know, there's always the temptation,'' he said. ''But I think I'm too young and insecure at this point to give it a shot. Because if you're not 100 percent sure of yourself, you end up making something like 'Interiors' -- you know, that Woody Allen movie? And it has a lot to do about perception. People perceive you as one thing. But believe me, there is many a time I have thought about doing something dramatic. Something with some humor in it, but not jokes. I always thought if I did it, it would be a courtroom drama. I love courtroom drama. But there it is; it's language again. What's a courtroom, after all, but a bunch of people standing around talking?''