One of the most enduring lines from 1994’s Clerks is the incessant lament of Dante the convenience store clock puncher as he spirals down his own private circle of minimum wage hell: “I’m not even supposed to be here today!” Nearly three decades later, writer-director Kevin Smith is bringing a bittersweet new perspective to that notion. His new film in the series, Clerks III, is about what happens when these guys realize that someday, maybe soon, they won’t be here it all. 

Back in the ’90s that line struck a nerve as Gen X shorthand for never getting a break, having to fix problems that weren’t your fault, and showing up and doing your best (or, uh, the bare minimum) while collecting little to no reward. The poster for the original movie featured the snarling cast under the slogan: “Just because they serve you doesn’t mean they like you.” Over the past 27 years, circumstances in real life haven’t improved much for the generations that followed. In the new movie things have barely changed at all for Dante (Brian O’Halloran) and his foul-mouthed best friend and fellow counter jockey, Randal (Jeff Anderson). 

This first-look image from Clerks III shows they’re still selling cigarettes, slushies, and skin mags while serving their life sentences at the Quick Stop. Nowadays the pair own the store. They’re joined by Dante’s wife, Becky (Rosario Dawson), and the formerly upbeat, formerly teenage Elias (Trevor Fehrman), who were drawn into the not-so-dynamic duo’s slacker vortex in 2006’s Clerks II. Time has taken a toll on them, as it has in real life for Smith, 51—whose decision to return to Clerks came by way of a severe heart attack three years ago. “The film is predicated on the idea that Randal survives a heart attack, a massive heart attack, quite like I did, and then winds up, you know, deciding that he’s wasted his life,” Smith tells Vanity Fair. “But before he dies he wants to memorialize himself. He wants to make a movie. So our boys essentially wind up making Clerks.”

Clerks III, which will be released by Lionsgate, is currently shooting in Leonardo, New Jersey, at the same locations as the original. Unlike that first movie, this one will be in color. But the home movie the pair make will be in black and white, like the classic. “That allows us to reshoot so many of the key moments from Clerks in their movie. Randal’s movie is called Inconvenience,” Smith says. Smith is eager to see the internet mash up the old versions of those shots with the new ones.

Clerks has never really stopped finding new fans, but Smith says this movie is aimed at moviegoers who were there at the start. “I know we’ve got fans who age with us…and it’s going to hit in a lot of personal places. I don’t think the 20-somethings are going to be like, ‘He’s still the voice of a generation!’ They’re going to be like, ‘Well, he’s the voice of middle age, if anything, at this point.’ I hope young people will find something to enjoy about it, but it’s definitely a movie about people who try to be young while being old.”

That means not trying to hide the fact that his leads aren’t kids anymore.  “All of us are in our late 40s, if not 50s…and you’ll see the progression,” Smith says. “We don’t hide the age. We don’t Hollywood it up. We all look as old as we look. Um, except…”

Rosario.

“Yeah, she never ages, man. She’s preserved in amber.”

The let’s-make-a-movie plot of Clerks III is a meta way to close the circle with Smith’s own origin story. He came to the same realization when he was a 24-year-old New Jersey nobody, working at the same convenience store featured in the films. Like his characters, Smith was a pop-culture junkie; he maxed out multiple credit cards and sold off much of his beloved comic book collection to scrape together the approximately $27,500 necessary to rent some filmmaking equipment and shoot a movie of his own. 

Clerks debuted at the Sundance Film Festival and became a phenomenon, shocking laughter out of its viewers with its ridiculously raunchy dialogue while simultaneously capturing the frustrations and cynicism of a generation of young adults facing much bleaker futures than those of their parents and grandparents. Clerks was only a modest box office hit, grossing about $3 million in theaters, but somehow everybody saw it. Smith went on to make Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma, Red State, and more, while becoming a hit podcaster and public speaker. His unconventional start inspired countless others who had no connections and no money to pick up cameras and tell their own stories.

Clerks still means something to people, even after all this time. Maybe especially after all this time, which is what makes Clerks III such a gamble. Clerks II returned them to where they started, and the new movie will reveal that this isn’t exactly where they still want to be all these years later.

“In the last movie we gave them autonomy,” Smith says. “Like, ‘Hey, man, we can buy the store and shit.’ We gave them a way to live so they didn’t have to work for somebody else. And now this time we give them their hearts’ deepest desires. We take Randal, a motherfucker who wears cynicism on his sleeve, and we turn him into a dreamer.”

Clerks II’s ending may be more somber than fans remember. “In the last shot they’re in the store that they now own, masters of their own destiny, and as we pull back, it goes from color back to black and white because, you know, you have to be careful what you wish for. Those dudes are like, ‘Yeah, man, now we own the store!’ But they’re still at the store. And when we pick up 15 years later, they’re still at the store…. It’s all disrupted with the heart attack.”

While the original was more focused on Dante, Clerks III makes Randal the main figure. “Suddenly, you know, Peter Pan realizes that he ain’t gonna live forever,” Smith says. “Life is short, and time is short, and he’s not guaranteed much of that anymore.”

These same thoughts hit Smith when he suffered his own near-death experience, which prompted him to lose weight, eat healthier, and be more conscious of the time he has left. “You can’t slack after a heart attack. It’s that simple,” he says. “That being the motivating factor in our story just gives us a way to leap off into the theme of: There is less time ahead of us than there is behind us at this point. When we made Clerks, our whole lives were ahead of us. Now I know for a fact, a medical fact, I ain’t going to live another 51 years. So that means that there is less time ahead of me…. I can get as healthy as possible, but I’m dealing with genetics, and those genetics have a ticking clock on them.”

He greets his own mortality with equanimity. He has been married to wife Jennifer Schwalbach Smith since 1999, and their 22-year-old daughter, Harley Quinn Smith, who started out by acting in her dad’s films, has established a career on her own, recently costarring in the series Cruel Summer and Once Upon a Time … In Hollywood. “My personal life has been one that’s very fulfilled, so much so that even when I was dying from a heart attack on the table, I was like, You know what? If I die tonight, no complaints,” the filmmaker says. “I got to make movies and tell stories. People pretended that I mattered. This is a great way to chill out. Don’t be that last guy at the party that's like, ‘Hey, man, you got any more beer?’ Go home at a good time.”

When he did get a second chance, he wanted to give one to the guys who made that life possible.

If Smith has a professional regret, it’s that he neglected Dante and Randal for so long. Pothead pair Jay and Silent Bob (played by Jason Mewes and Smith himself) will also return in Clerks III, but they’ve never really been gone, appearing in almost all of his films—most recently 2019’s Jay and Silent Bob Reboot. “I spread them around like so much cheap peanut butter,” Smith says. Dante and Randal have turned up much more sparingly. Smith has mixed feelings about that now that they are back at center stage.

“I wish this was Clerks 19. I wish I’d been doing this the whole fucking time, man,” he says. “These characters are so close to my heart, and finally letting them take the journey that they sent me on is a big deal for me. Without Dante and Randal, I’m not where I am.”

Smith did try to get a different version of Clerks III off the ground several years ago, but couldn’t secure enough financing to pay his actors sufficiently. “We’re all adults,” he says. “And some people were like, ‘Look, I’ve got to pay my bills, and if we’re doing a movie with a number in it, shouldn’t we be rewarded? Shouldn’t we be paid more? Somebody’s going to make money from this; why isn’t it the cast?’ And they’re absolutely right.”

But that meant the movie didn’t happen at all. Creatively speaking, this might have been for the best. Smith’s complicated feelings about revisiting Dante and Randal also extend to Clerks II. That film saw Dante and Randal leave the small-time world of their convenience store and the video shop to toil under the even more grueling corporate heel of a fast-food mega-chain.

“I love it so much, but the problem with Clerks II is it’s pure artifice to a large degree,” Smith says. “Clerks was based solely on reality. I woke up, I went to that store; crazy people came in; kids hung out outside and sold drugs; I had a friend who worked next door. All of it was very autobiographical. Clerks II is completely fabricated, right down to the fact that I never even worked in fast food.” The new version of Clerks III, he promises, “is this bizarre return to form.”

After that false start Smith’s priority was making sure all of his talent got paid appropriately. After all, the fictional characters didn’t give him his breakthrough—the actors who brought his characters to life did that. “I started working passionately, making sure that everyone involved knew they would be handsomely compensated,” he says. “As we go try this for a third time, that means shit we never thought about on the first movie. For example: your face on a T-shirt. That makes money; you get money. Stuff like that. Now we know that aside from making a movie, we’re also making something that will generate lots of souvenirs for the fanbase. That’s a large part of what we do, so now we get to include everybody and compensate them as well.”

This is part of staying true to the spirit of the original, since exploitation was a major undercurrent in Clerks. Maybe in real life those who work behind the counter would serve us and like us better if we paid them a living minimum wage. 

Clerks showed us the human beings behind the name tags. It made hardscrabble heroes of hourly workers. It showed us they were essential long before the pandemic made that painfully obvious. For all of Clerks III’s talk of far-flung dreams, the film’s theme is not necessarily that such work doesn’t matter, or that it’s only drudgery that must be escaped at all costs. Smith is just giving the viewers a dose of yearning, of thinking bigger and aspiring to more, like a lotto scratcher thrown into the bag with your purchase.

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