Ever since I saw An Evening With Kevin Smith it’s been my mission to see one of his legendary Q&As, but his trips to the UK don’t happen too often. On every previous occasion I didn’t find out in time, so this one must have been kismet as I fired up my RSS reader for the first time in ages, just in time to be informed that it was happening.

So that was where I was last night, and I ended up learning some interesting stuff from the great raconteur.

1. If Kevin Smith had to pick a man to have sex with, it’d be his friend Bryan Johnson.
2. Kevin Smith’s next comedy, which he has just about finished writing but won’t be made until after his planned horror movie (inspired by Race with the Devil), will apparently have the most self-explanatory title ever, on the same level as Snakes on a Plane. Unsurprisingly, he wouldn’t tell us the title.
3. Kevin Smith is currently a fan of (NSFW!) SexyLabia.com. I dread to think how much comment spam posting that link will bring in.
4. Kevin recently bought a miniature dachshund because he and his daughter thought they were funny. Despite the age difference (eight years next to less than a year, or 56 and 6 using that seven-dog-years-to-one-human-year thing), his labrador Mulder may have gotten the weiner dog pregnant.
5. Jeremy London is the only actor that Kevin regrets casting. Despite the fact that Jason Lee was far better, Jeremy gave him notes on how to improve his performance.
6. Kevin finds the idea of black pudding abhorrent. As do I, to be fair. He also finds British cuisine’s obsession with pigs weird.
7. Harvey Weinstein wanted them to show Clerks 2’s pussy troll on screen. Kevin and Scott Mosier didn’t want to, so set out to make it unusable by either making the depiction far too offensive (getting John Kricfalusi to animate something obscene that wouldn’t make it past the MPAA) or too lame (Jason Mewes dressed up as a troll doll inside a giant wooden pussy). Despite Mewes’ enthusiasm – he’d get to keep the wooden pussy, you see – the idea thankfully passed.
8. Kevin ended up rewriting his whole scene in Die Hard 4.0, giving himself a huge speech. The studio was unsure about it because it turned a humourous scene into one with a ton of exposition, but Bruce Willis had Kevin’s back (“let me ask you this: who’s your second choice to play John McClane?”).
9. Kevin Smith can use the word ‘tchotchke’ in a sentence. I still struggle to pronounce it.
10. Lucas and Steven Spielberg are huge nerds: they like to compare websites and look at pictures of women in lingerie together. And Lucas liked the Death Star contractors idea in Clerks.

My photos are up on Flickr here.

And, one thing I learnt in London itself: some people shouldn’t be allowed to drive. This is aimed at the cunt that almost took us all out on the zebra crossing in Richmond.