First up, star Brett Harrison answers a Q&A with E! Online’s “Watch with Kristen” that reveals we may see Kevin back with the show in some capacity, which we truly hope can happen this year (though his upcoming film schedule will certainly make it tricky):

Kristen: Tyler Labine is a wack-job (in a fun way) of a best friend for you on the show. How’s he in real life?


Brett Harrison: Actually, right now he’s one of my best friends in real life. I swear, we’re constantly working with each other and coming up with new ways to do things and improvise. “Oh, now, you say this!” We’re not in that weird thing with actors that say, “Listen, man, you’re not the director of the show.” You know, like giving each other notes and stuff. We really are so open to it. We come up with different ways, and I think that’s why the pilot worked so well, because we had Kevin Smith, who is the coolest director to work with.


K: He’s awesome. Is he going to be back with you at all?


BH: You know, I think so. He definitely wants to. There’s schedules. There’s politics. Being the actor, I get to not know all that stuff. Put it this way: He definitely wants to come back, and he’s more behind the show than any celebrity director should be. He did a 7,000-seat panel for Comic-Con, and it was just supposed to be Kevin Smith, because he’s the big comic guy. It wasn’t supposed to be like, “Hey, I just shot the coolest show ever. Let’s put this out in front of 7,000 people.”

We’ve also got a new audio interview with the Reaper creators, Tara Butters and Michelle Fazekas, courtesty of BuddyTV. In the interview, they talk a bit about Kevin got attached to the pilot episode:

Kevin Smith directed the pilot, obviously kind of a big deal. How did that happen, and why’d you think of him in the first place?


Michele: Once the CW bought the script and decided that they were going to produce the pilot, you start making a list of directors. You make your wish list of, “Who do you want to direct here, who would be the most amazing person directing your pilot?” We’d have ridiculous names on the list, like, “Is Steven Spielberg available?” You make your wish list and then the more reasonable list. Kevin was on our wish list, somebody who we’d never thought we’d get, but we’ll send him the script, he’ll pass on it, and we’ll get somebody more realistic, and we never thought we’d hear anything about it. The next thing we hear is, “Kevin read the script, can you go over to his house?” And we’re like, “Yeah, we can do that.” We went to his house, and we thought we had to kind of sell ourselves to him. But he was like, “This is really funny, I want to do it.” It was simply that easy. He wanted to do it, he was interested in directing something that he hadn’t written. He just signed on, he just responded to the material, we were so lucky that happened.

You can of course check out the full text and interview at BuddyTV.