In his 2002 special “An Evening with Kevin Smith,” the filmmaker revealed that he had spent a week interviewing the “Purple Rain” singer for a potential documentary. While the planned concert film the two men were working on never materialized, Smith hopes the footage may soon be repurposed. “Very high,” Smith told The Guardian when asked about the likelihood of his documentary footage seeing the light of day. “The director of ‘OJ: Made in America’ is making a documentary for Netflix and came to the house to interview me. When they went to the vaults after Prince died they found so much unreleased music and so many music videos, but the only footage of him talking was what I shot. It’s extraordinary: he acts differently to how he ever acted in his entire life, and he talks for hours and hours. It looks like it’s finally going to see the light.”
It appears that the footage of Smith interviewing Prince would be included in Ezra Edelman’s upcoming Prince documentary, so fans hoping to see Smith direct a full fledged film about Prince shouldn’t get their hopes up. But Smith certainly isn’t bitter about the experience. When Prince died in 2016, Smith explained that the process of interviewing the singer helped him establish himself as a podcaster. “I told a long story about my week-long experience of working with Prince on the first ‘Evening with Kevin Smith’ DVD – a story that would go on to help solidify my reputation outside of filmmaking as a raconteur,” Smith wrote on Facebook. “So as much as I got from Prince as a fan of good music, he also helped to shape ol’ Silent Bob’s second career as a talker. I cried today because I realized what a role model Prince always was to me: an Artist with a capital A who was not afraid to bite the hand that fed, never hesitated to reinvent himself, and was always entertaining on any stage. Today we lost one of the greatest Artists who ever lived.” Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.
