For Kevin Smith, making “Dogma” was the ultimate expression of his own waning religiosity, filtered through the verbose, irreverent, and crude humor that made him one of the most revered filmmakers of the ’90s indie boom. The kernel of the script predates his microbudget hit debut “Clerks,” having begun as a script called “God” that allowed him to express his doubts as a flagging Catholic growing up in New Jersey. But in 1998, after making waves at Sundance with “Clerks,” striking out with his failed studio comedy “Mallrats,” and bouncing back with Miramax relationship dramedy “Chasing Amy,” Smith finally had the cachet—and the budget—to tackle headier subjects.

There are still dick and fart jokes, a Biblical poop monster called the Golgotha, and of course, his trusty Greek chorus, Jay (Jason Mewes, honestly never better) and Silent Bob (Smith). George Carlin plays an irreverent cardinal looking to jazz up Catholicism with a smiling, encouraging sigil called the “Buddy Christ,” and Chris Rock, in a suitably Mel Brooks-ian touch, plays the secret Black 13th apostle, Rufus.

But what charms about “Dogma,” even twenty-five years later, is its relative sincerity in grappling with issues of religious belief in an increasingly jaded postmodern world, centering on a jaded, reluctant Last Scion (Linda Fiorentino) tasked with preventing a couple of fallen angels (Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, fresh off their “Good Will Hunting” win) from inadvertently erasing existence by contradicting Catholic dogma.

It took an almost religious level of faith to believe that “Dogma” would succeed; indeed, upon release, the film was plagued by delays and protests for its alleged blasphemy. And for a while now, it had been the rare Smith film unavailable to stream or purchase anywhere, as Harvey and Bob Weinstein personally held the rights and had let them lapse without renewal. However, in an event befitting a miracle, Smith managed to regain the rights to “Dogma,” restored it in 4K with the help of cinematographer Robert Yeoman, and is releasing it in theaters for its 25th anniversary on June 5th.

Smith sat down with RogerEbert.com days after its screening at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival to talk about Ebert’s influence on him as a film fan and filmmaker, as well as the long road to recovering “Dogma” from the ashes of Harvey Weinstein’s reputation.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

It’s a pleasure to talk to you specifically for RogerEbert.com; I know Roger was a devotee of your work from the early goes. I’d love to hear more about your relationship with Roger in your work, especially around the time of “Dogma.”

You gotta remember, that was the gold standard in the day. Of course, you had Pauline Kael, later on Janet Maslin, before that Vincent Canby and stuff like that. But Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, I grew up watching on PBS when it was “Sneak Previews,” long before it became “Siskel and Ebert at the Movies.” There was no Internet back then, kids. So if you wanted to interact with movie clips, you’d hope to see a review on the nightly news or maybe the network news.

But Siskel and Ebert were reliable, man; they’d have two movie clips per review. And whether you agreed with their review or not, that was also part of the fun. Because, in a proto-Internet-type fashion, you’re like, “What? Those guys don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about!” It created teams instantly. But you got to watch them bicker about the movie, which in the ’70s and ’80s was rare. Nowadays, you jump on Letterboxd or a chat site or comment section that has nothing to do with film whatsoever and get into a film conversation. The world is pretty film-literate now, particularly the Internet. But back then, not at all.

I remember getting a Betamax in 1983 and recording the reviews. It wasn’t so much to keep the reviews as it was to keep the clips of the movies. So Siskel and Ebert were a huge part of my childhood. And when I became a filmmaker, naturally, I was like, “What do they think? Thumbs up or thumbs down?” Both Ebert and Siskel loved “Clerks,” gave it a thumbs up. So that kicked off my career very well. I remember them reviewing it on the show, and my mind melting after years of watching them review other people’s movies, only to hear him talk about me. Roger was like, “In movies, jobs are, ‘you’re a cop’ or ‘you’re a king.’ You never see somebody just working a job, and in this movie, you get to see that.”

Roger was not a fan of “Mallrats.” He hated it and didn’t give it a good review. When I was onstage at the Indie Spirit Awards in 1996, I was presenting with Laura Dern. Before we even say a word, I get up there and say, “Hey man, while I’m up here, I just want to take this opportunity to apologize for ‘Mallrats.’ I don’t know what I was thinking.” Roger, in his review of “Chasing Amy,” wrote, “Kevin Smith made a movie so bad that he apologized for it. But this year, he’s back with the incredible ‘Chasing Amy’.” He wrote a wonderful review of that film, and he did for “Dogma.” “Dogma,” he was on board with. He said, “Look, you may need a catechism to understand most of this movie.” But having him talk about my work was tremendous.

I worked with, or rather for, him at one point: When he was getting sick, they had people filling in on the show, so I got to sit down with [Richard] Roeper and review in the style I’d grown up watching Roger and Gene do. Of all the things I’ve gotten to do in my career, that was one of those side hustles that left me awestruck. I’m gonna meet Eborsisk, you know? From “Willow.”

Roger was a big figure in my life, and I was bummed like everybody when he passed far too early. Because he gave me a lot of joy. He didn’t make the movies, but he was a conduit to the earliest movie discussions I could get into via the mainstream. You could watch him with your family, your parents, your brother or sister, and get into conversations about whether he was right or wrong. It’s what we do almost every day on the Internet now, but you didn’t need the interconnectivity with everyone else.

Unlike the Kaels and the Canbys of the day, Roger was a very working-class critic, too; if there ever was a mainstream critic who could enjoy dick and fart jokes, it was the screenwriter of “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.”

Absolutely, hands down. It’s a good thing that Roger didn’t review for The New York Times or The Washington Post. It might have made him a little stuffier. But the fact he was a Chicago kid, you felt like he was identifiable. I also always think about his controlled passion while he was on the show. He would rarely lose it; no “Fuck you Gene!” He would be like, “You just don’t understand what it’s doing! You just don’t get it.” He was very passionate, but measured in his facial expressions.

Let’s talk about “Dogma” a little bit; I feel like it was a crazy road getting it back into your hands from Harvey Weinstein’s ownership. Tell me that story.

A few years ago, I tried to get this movie back, because back in the day when we made it in 1998, it was under the aegis of Miramax, which was a Disney company at that point. Once it was done, it was a polemic; people were upset about it even though they’d never seen it. So Disney told Miramax, “Get rid of this movie.” Clench your assholes, kids, here comes the name: Harvey Weinstein personally (supposedly, allegedly) bought the movie and distributed through a young Canadian company at the time called Lionsgate, which hadn’t done anything that wide release at that point. Then Columbia Tristar got it for home video and had it for ten, fifteen years. Those deals lapsed, and I started getting people blowing me up online, saying, “I can’t buy ‘Dogma’ anymore unless I buy it on eBay for 100 bucks. What gives?”

I’d left the Weinstein Company in 2008 after “Zack and Miri Make a Porno,” before the 10th anniversary of “Dogma.” So I started sending emails. Nothing, silence. Didn’t hear anything for nine years. Then one day I get a phone call; this is after Weinstein Company is back on top with “The Artist” and shit. He could give a fuck about an old movie. But they’re like “Hold for Harvey Weinstein.” He goes, “Kevin, it’s Harvey. I’ve just realized I’ve got ‘Dogma’ and we’re not doing anything with it. We could probably make a sequel, or a streaming series.’ I was like, “Yes, it can, man!” He says we’ll get into it next week. I was so happy to hear from him about this forgotten movie. Fuck, there’s a future for “Dogma.”

Three days later, the New York Times piece runs, and we found out who Harvey fucking was. I remember feeling scared because I thought, “That guy just called me.” So I spoke to [producer] Jonathan Gordon, who hadn’t been there in years, and told him Harvey had called me and talked about making a “Dogma” sequel. Jon goes, “Kevin. He was never gonna make a ‘Dogma’ sequel. He was just calling to see if you were one of the sources of the New York Times piece. The fact that you answered the phone told him that you weren’t.” ‘Dogma’ was just a way to have a conversation with me.

In terms of the egregious things Harvey Weinstein’s done? Not even on the fucking list. But it was out of my hands. I was never gonna have this movie back.

Then this woman, Alessandra Williams, who grew up in the same neck of the woods as me in central Jersey, saw me telling that story, and thought, “Somebody should help him.” She literally got involved and did what I couldn’t. I tried to buy the movie back three times and got no answer from anybody. She bought a tranche of movies from Harvey, because I guess he’s in court again now facing new charges; he needed legal defense funds, so he sold off what he personally owned. There were a couple karate movies, “Dogma,” Larry Clark’s first movie, “Kids,” and “Fahrenheit 9/11,” Michael Moore’s movie. She bought all those movies, sold off the rest, and held onto “Dogma.” She came to me and asked, “What do you want to do with it?”

We’re now releasing it on 2,000 screens on June 5th. It’s gonna be on more screens than when the movie came out in 1999. Now we’re a summer movie. I tried to make all this happen for years, and I couldn’t. Alessandra pulled it off. It was absolutely amazing. What an incredible manifester. She rescued my movie about angels from the devil himself.

I’ll leave you with one last question: How do you think [George Carlin’s] Cardinal Glick would have done in the Conclave?

You know, Cardinal Glick’s chances during “Conclave” would not have been high. Having watched the movie, I can’t see him doing well in this crowd. They seem very stuffy. He was a visionary, you know? A marketeer. He’s the guy behind the guy, if anything. I assume he was the guy pushing for the first Pope from the United States. How do we not vote in that direction?

And now we’ve got a Chicago Pope.

Exactly!

Nina Conti is a real-life ventriloquist and comedian. In her first narrative feature, she plays a woman who spends almost all of the film inside the kind of monkey costume a team mascot might wear. It also closely resembles the puppet Conti uses in her live performances. Conti’s co-screenwriter, Shenoah Allen, plays Roy, a man who is rescued by Monkey (as the character is called) after a suicide attempt, and who ends up driving through the desert with Monkey, having conversations and adventures.

In an interview with RogerEbert.com, Conti and Shenoah discussed improvising for (and as) their characters and why stories about journeys are so meaningful.

Watching this film made me think about how a movie is a form of ventriloquism, with characters saying dialogue created by screenwriters.

Shenoah Allen: We lived in this world for so long, and we developed a lot of the scenes and the script through improvising together. We really got to know these characters, and you start to be able to hear the characters in your head; either you’re saying it spontaneously on your feet or when you’re writing as the characters. So, in a way, I don’t know who was the ventriloquist—us or the characters.

Nina Conti: Yes, in a way we were providing voices for the characters, or they were doing the work for us. I think it’s the second one.

The conversations the two characters had seemed so spontaneous, a lot of riffing back and forth, that it felt improvised. How did that evolve from what you had written?

NC: Right from the beginning, Shenoah would come around to my house early in the morning. We’d go to a cafe around the corner called Chez Nous, which was the place where a lot of the magic happened. He would go there from maybe sometimes like 6 a.m. early till kind of 9, and then he’d come over with some scenes. And then we’d read them and we’d workshop them. We’d film them on my laptop. I’d be in a full monkey suit. We really entered this land of make-believe every day.

It always felt like a method of perfecting a scene would be to do it loosely, find what felt real. And that carried on right up until the shooting. even though we had a script. In the van, no one’s going to stop either of us if we go off script. We’re just going to follow it. And it was a great truth barometer. Because it’s hard to improvise fake. It’s like you’re suddenly walking through treacle.

One of the most enduring themes for movies or indeed any story is a journey. Why does that resonate so powerfully? 

SA: I guess because when you’re on a journey, you always want to know what’s around the next bend, which is a real tricky thing when it comes to writing a screenplay. With a journey, you have a destination. For so long we didn’t; it was just like, “Okay, we wake up in the desert, we’re going somewhere, we don’t know where we’re going,” and that seemed fine for the characters just to live in the present tense of the unknown. But the journey ended up needing to be a little bit clearer for people to take the bait. Even if it was abstract as “We’re going to the lake,” it still provided um this ancient story structure of the quest.

I love the way both characters really have nothing left but the truth for each other. There’s no pretense. And they immediately connect. That creates such an intimacy in their conversations. They get right to it. And they appreciate that in each other.

NC: Having that mouthpiece [in the monkey mask] all the while, that barrier to reality, actually makes it tell the truth. I always find it a struggle to be myself, and I’ve taken the scenic route to that by this little character. You feel a lot less accountable when you’re in character, and so my character’s in character, and the gloves are off. That’s a really confused metaphor—the mask is on!

SA: It’s really funny when characters just say what’s on their mind. And that also provided a lot of challenges because you think, “All right, let’s build up to this and the scene will have this natural escalation that gets us from here to there in the story.” But when you’re dealing with the monkey that immediately says exactly the thing we expect at the end of the scene as the first line of the scene, we write from there. Instead of going from A to B, Monkey starts with B.  

There’s a very significant shift at one point in the film where we’re literally seeing, if not through monkey’s eyes, through monkey’s eye holes. 

NC: It seemed like the way to disappear fully. She’s stayed in it longer and longer. Her commitment to the monkey has become somewhat superstitious at that point, because she prefers it to herself. But then she’s kind of passed the point of no return. And it was also…a very handy way to shoot the car crash with a low budget.

It must have been unbearably hot in the monkey suit.

NC: Yes, and it was sometimes dangerous, I’m sure. It was such an obstacle in itself. And taking the head off to review footage on a monitor always seemed, for a short shoot, you know, where every minute counted, it always seemed like that’s going to be a waste of time. Instead of checking the shot, we’d just do another one. And so, what we got there was just like more performance hours, which I am grateful for because if we stopped, we wouldn’t have done the fun one that came next. There were gifts in the impediment all the way along.

Recently restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, Marva Nabili’s austere drama “The Sealed Soil,” the earliest extant feature film directed by a woman from Iran, is a marvel. Shot on location in the remote village of Ghalleh Noo-Asgar, the film explores the life of a young woman, Rooy-Bekheir (Flora Shabavis), who, like her country, finds herself amid a fitful transition between the world of traditions and modernity. 

Eighteen and unmarried, she is considered an old maid. Early in the film, she rejects yet another suitor. Stuck in a daily routine of chores, she finds freedom only when she is alone in nature. She watches as the younger kids of the village go to school across the way at a new, modern settlement. They get a taste of a country on the brink of change, a world Rooy-Bekheir both longs for and is frightened by. When her parents present her with yet another suitor, a nervous breakdown is misinterpreted as demonic possession, forcing Rooy-Bekheir to face her future once and for all. 

Although the film has never played in Iran, upon its release in 1977, it screened at festivals around the world, garnering comparisons to Chantal Akerman’s “Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “Gertrud.” Praising the film’s external and internal examination of this young woman’s life, film scholar B. Ruby Rich wrote that the film shows “how desperate a thing a woman’s self-consciousness can be when neither the old ways nor the new offer her any escape from bondage.”

Born in Iran in 1941, Marva Nabili studied painting at the University of Decorative Arts in Tehran, where she met filmmaker Fereydoun Rahnema. She later starred in his film “Siavash at Persepolis,” which won the Jean Epstein Award at the Locarno Film Festival. Encouraged by Rahnema, Nabili moved to London and later New York City, studying filmmaking at City University of New York and Goddard College. 

Her debut feature film “The Sealed Soil” was named Outstanding Film of the Year at the London Film Festival, and Nabili received the Best New Director Award at Mostra Internazionale del Film d’Autore, Sanremo. Her film “Nightsongs,” which chronicles the lives of a Chinese immigrant family living in New York City, was one of the first screenplays developed through Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute and was later produced by the PBS series American Playhouse. 

For this month’s Female Filmmakers in Focus column, RogerEbert.com spoke to Nabili over the phone about bringing a Brechtian view to cinema, capturing the verve of life in remote villages before the Iranian Revolution, and stories that take place in transitional spaces.

The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

At what point when you were developing the story for this film did you realize you wanted to set it in the village?

My sister lived in the area. She had a house that was about a half-hour drive to this village. So I was looking around for some locations, and I found this village, and I fell in love with it.

What was it about the village that drew you to it?

It was what we call in Persian a castle, but it’s not really a castle. It’s a village surrounded by walls. So the little rooms that you see in the film are all inside this big wall. I had never seen anything like that. So I went there, and I looked at the villages, and I really liked them very much, and I thought that would be a good location.

Did you know right away you wanted to make a film about this generation of girls who are in this transitional space?

Yes, because I, as a young girl, was also refusing anyone who wanted to marry me, because I had just graduated and I was interested in finding out other people who felt like that. When I went to this village, there really was a girl who refused to get married, so I knew this was a good subject. I wrote my screenplay, and then I went there with Flora Shabavis, who was the only actress in the film.

And the rest of the characters are all played by the villagers who actually lived in the village?

Yes, everyone else, whatever they were doing in the film, that’s what they do. They just went about their day. 

Obviously, chickens play a really big role in this film, but without spoiling it for readers, I imagine the chickens were also part of the village’s daily life.

Yes, that’s what they had there. It was basically the only meat that they would eat. They worked on a farm, but the farm didn’t have any place for selling meat and all that. So they’ve raised a lot of chickens.

The way you lay out the scenes is almost painterly, yet you have these chickens that add to those layers. I imagine the chickens just sort of did what they wanted, or were you trying to sort of move the chickens into the frame?

No, no, I had no control over those chickens. It was fine with me. It was fun because that was part of the life of the people who lived in the village.

I had read that you studied miniature painting. 

Actually, I didn’t. I was fascinated by miniature painting, but I didn’t study it. I went to the university to study painting, but not miniature painting. So I graduated from the university, and then I was always fascinated by miniature painting because it was one of the major arts in Iran for a long time, and it still goes on. I thought this location looked like a little village in a miniature painting.

As you were placing your camera, were you thinking about trying to visually recreate that feeling of looking at a miniature painting?

No, not really. I studied Bertolt Brecht and was very influenced by his method, so I thought I’d have a Brechtian view of this whole place.

Many of these shots are incredibly long. Would you use an entire reel for one shot?

I shot on 16mm, so it wasn’t that hard. This wasn’t like 35mm, where you have to keep changing the reels. The length of the shots was really inspired by the pace of the village. That’s how they lived. I didn’t tell anyone what to do, except for Flora, so they were all doing what they always do. 

I love the contrast you create between her in the village walls and her going out to collect wood, her being by the water, and her taking her hair down, surrounded by that beautiful green grass. What were you hoping to evoke with that contrast?

Well, this was where she went to collect wood, and for her, it was like living in the woods, which were very green. She felt very free there. She wasn’t pressured by her parents or the villagers about not getting married, so it wasn’t a corner that she went to every day just to sit there and contemplate. She was very comfortable there.

Do you think that at that time, women had many spaces where they could be comfortable like that?

Well, this was out in the desert. What happened was that the Shah had recently built a village on the other side of this area where her parents live, and the kids, if you notice from the movie, go over to the other side to go to school because that was something new for the town that the Shah had built. Basically, they developed there so these people could move over there, but most of them didn’t want to move.

I thought it was really interesting the way you brought economics into that decision, like how they will have to start buying their groceries from the town store. It was almost as if, by moving to modern conveniences, they were giving up some of their own autonomy.

In most of the villages, everyone sat around and discussed whether they wanted to move over there. They were all thinking about that, but not my character. She wasn’t interested in the new village. But, at the end of the film, when you see her for the first time with the pot on her head, and she stands there because she’s gonna go to the other side for the first time. She somehow had to give up in order to start this new way of living. 

I love that a lot of the film is about these transitional spaces. She’s a girl going through transition to womanhood. The town is in transition. The country is in transition. What were you hoping to show about all these transitional states?

Everything around the country was becoming like that. They were trying to modernize. Because of the oil situation, the Shah was trying to improve the country, villages, and everything else, and bring modernity.

Do you feel like your film sort of still has something to say to modern times in Iran?

Well, I made this film in 1976, and I left Iran when we finished. I smuggled the film out because I didn’t know if the people who worked at the airport wanted to see something like that, and introduce an idea like that to the outside world. I smuggled the film out because Iran was changing, but not fast enough.

Have you been able to show the film in Iran yet? 

No. 

So it’s been over 50 years, and it still hasn’t screened there?

I left Iran and haven’t gone back since the Revolution. So I have not shown it there. I don’t know what their expectations are.

When you watch your film, can you travel back a bit to your country?

Yeah, I mean, I love it. That’s why I went to this village, because I love that kind of setup. And the people were very nice. They’re not nasty or anything like that. I just didn’t want to go there after the Revolution. Things had changed a lot. 

When the film was first released, you discussed in interviews how difficult it was for a woman to make films in Iran, but now, obviously, there are a lot of difficulties, I think for a lot of filmmakers in the country.

We used to have a very good film industry there. Very broad-minded and really nice filmmakers were there, because there was freedom. Also, the Shah wanted to modernize cities and wanted Iranian people to be modernized, not like the rulers that are there now. After the Revolution, it totally changed. What the filmmakers did then was very modern, but I don’t know what’s happening now.

What do you hope audiences today will take from your film?  

Well, I want them to know about this social problem that women had. In the villages at that time, women had to get married when they were very young, sometimes twelve or thirteen. But there were women who refused. That was my whole purpose: to show that things were changing.

Are there any filmmakers who influenced you or that you think people should seek out?

I got interested in becoming a filmmaker after Fereydoun Rahnema, my professor at university, who had made a documentary about Persepolis, decided to make a feature film called “Siavash at Persepolis.” Siavash is the name of a man who was a prince. Je asked me to play the role of the wife. So we shot that film in the ruins of Persepolis, and I became very fascinated by the process because it was a modern film. It wasn’t an old-fashioned kind of film. He had studied cinema in France. It encouraged me, and he continued to encourage me to leave Iran and study cinema. So I dedicated my film to him.