“December right now is wide open, and that’s when I’m going to sit down and start writing and I’ve got pages and pages of notes, I already wrote the last 10 pages of the script which is weird, I went to the end and started, but it’s ready … it’s just fucking poised to go,” Smith told us in September.

Smith was upfront with the financial uncertainty that would come with bringing “The Hockey Song” to the big screen.

“I don’t know if anybody’s going to want to do the hockey movie, because name one hockey movie that people made money off of in its theatrical release; it’s tough,” he said. “Look, the sport doesn’t have a massive following, how the fuck is a film about the sport also going to have a massive following? So, you go in with tailored expectations, you know you’re kind of dealing to a very specific audience, dealing with a specific audience, so you know, we’ll probably make it on the inexpensive side, I can’t imagine spending more than $25 million on a movie like that.”

However, Smith is convinced of the power of his project. “When all is said and done, when that movie’s done, I guarantee you it’s gonna impact, it’s gonna hit people, even if you don’t like hockey it’s gonna hit you in a very personal place,” he said. “The movie I see in my head, and more than that the movie I feel in my heart, oh God, it’s gonna be good.”

We’re betting Kevin’s going to be surprised to find cast lining up for “Hit Somebody” — Going out on a limb here to predict the biggest and best ensemble yet.

“I don’t know if there’ll be any more movies. I did two with Kevin Smith, Dogma in ‘99 and Jersey Girl in ‘04, where he wrote me a great part as Ben Affleck’s dad. I like working with Kevin: there’s alot of great counterpunching and the catholic thing is a strong bond. Acting is fun to do, a worthy fraternity and a great tradition to have had a tiny speck of a part of.”

Very brief, but you definitely get the impression that Carlin enjoyed his time in front of the camera while working with Kevin. Great book also, well worth checking out if you’d like some new winter reading material.

“…After Zack & Miri I was like ‘oh my god, Zack & Miri didn’t do well’. And then I thought it was a mid-life crisis. But then a mid-life crisis is generally for people who have not achieved their hopes and dreams.

I was so young and my life was in front of me and what am I doing wasting my time. I had goal and I achieved it when I was like 23. And all of a sudden people were like okay, in order to keep yourself entertained, create new fucking goals, dude! And I didn’t create big ones for myself. I know me, I create little challenges! I want to step over things, I don’t want to climb mountains!

So I set myself little challenges, and I accomplished them, and felt very accomplished and whatnot. But then you get to that point, man, where it’s just like I’ve been doing it a bunch, it’s now what I do for a living, so I can’t just walk away from it. Particularly because I enjoy it. I enjoy doing it for a living and the lifestyle it affords. I like that my job is to make pretend, and somebody pays me. And I’m like I can’t give that up, that’s awesome.

But the mid-life thing for me, it was like everything I ever wanted came true. So I feel like it wasn’t mid-life, maybe it is what Stephen Fry is talking about, where it’s like wow, it’s been 15-16 years straight of a really successful run. And I’m not ambitious enough. It’s not like I’ve done it all. I’m not Alexander, and I’ve reached the end of the world and there’s nothing left to conquer. But, I mean, for me, I’m just I can’t retread the same territory anymore, because number one, I can’t do it, and number two, it’s just like leave it alone, it speaks for itself.

So I reach a point now where it’s like well, now I’ve got to find a different thing that fuels me as an artist, or something I want to express without expressing it the way I’ve expressed it through my characters for all these years.

Thing was with Clerks, that was a way in, that was a way to start a conversation with the world at large. It wasn’t so much a film as an ice breaker. It was like ‘hi, I’m Kevin Smith and I would like to talk to you for the next 30 years, 40 years. However long you want to speak to me’ or something like that.

Now with the SModcast, with the Q&As, with Twitter, any number of other things, I could exercise and I can reach out and touch and get instant gratification. I can throw out something funny, ‘hey, that’s funny’, ‘thank you very much’. Everything really kind of on a much quicker basis. Compact. You don’t have to spend a year and a half of your life building it and constructing it.

Because that’s what the movies are. You get an idea and then it takes a year and a half to hear a response when all’s said and done. With SModcast, we put it up that night, we hear from people that’s funny, thumbs up, and there it is. So I can do those things or talk about weird things that I would use to fuse into the flicks in any of those formats, and I’m like ‘alright, let me figure out what I want to do with film for the next few years’.

I know it ain’t going to be what I do for the rest of my life, because apparently View Askew wasn’t what I was going to do for the rest of my life. So I figure if that’s one chapter, maybe this is chapter two, or maybe it’s the end of the book. Who knows what’s in the cards?

But I feel like I’m closing View Askew for the time being, and now I’m opening a new book and I’ll see for a while if I can be this filmmaker where I don’t write everything that I direct, or create everything that I direct.

Like in the case of the hockey movie [that Smith is currently working on], Hit Somebody. It’s based on a Warren Zevon song that Mitch Albom wrote the lyrics for. So in that instance, that’s almost in my world that Story By credit goes to somebody else, and I would get Screenplay credit. That’s where the passion is. The story or that character is something I identity with, and I can infuse it with my own experience. It’s not strictly my story. But essentially it is. “