Cop Out

Despite having written and directed eight feature-length movies, including, chasing amy,which won two Independent Spirit Awards and helped launch the careers of Jason Lee, Joey Lauren Adams, and Ben Affleck, Kevin Smith still considers himself very much a man of the people, a Hollywood outsider. So, when Warner Bros. offered him the opportunity to direct his new movie, Cop Out, Smith told Moviehole that he was apprehensive about alienating his loyal fans.

I thought about it going in to it, in terms of trying to make the movie, because I'm like, "Well, I'm gonna take a bunch of sh*t from people that love Chasing Amy and don't see why I would make a movie like this." I don't know what to tell cats like that anymore, it's just like, "I can't make Chasing Amy every time, and you wouldn't want me to because I would be a very unhappy person." And I'm a very happy cat now, you know? I'm married, I've got a kid and if you want me to make another Chasing Amy, start getting my wife to try and cheat on me or something, so I have unrest in my life.

In a previous interview, Smith said that it took him a while to figure out how to work with Bruce Willis on Cop Out because Willis wouldn't take direction and was "very much the author of his own performance." In the Moviehole interview, Smith admitted that part of the difficulty was the fact that he was more than a little starstruck by Willis.

I went in directing [Willis' character] David Addison from Moonlighting, and I wasn't the adult, the 38-year-old Kevin Smith who had made a bunch of movies, I was the 12-year-old who would lay on my parents couch and watch David Addison on Moonlighting on Tuesdays. And Bruce was smart enough and had dealt with that personality before to be like, "If you're like this the whole movie, we're not going to get anything worthwhile accomplished."

Cop Out was written by Mark and Robb Cullen and also stars Tracy Morgan, Seann William Scott, Kevin Pollack, Adam Brody, Michelle Trachtenberg, Jason Lee, and Ana de la Reguera.