Watch Kevin Smith And Seth Rogen Make A Porno

/Film reader Mallrat sent in this first bit of behind the scenes footage from Kevin Smith's upcoming film Zack and Miri Make a Porno (don't worry Kevin, it's completely spoiler free from what I can tell). What at first appears just to be a shot of Seth Rogen riding an escalator in Pittsburgh's Monroeville Mall, actually comes with a much longer story. Smith explains on his insanely entertaining weekly podcast the story of how everything went wrong on the first day of shooting.

"It was the first day of the shoot, we were outside the Monroeville Mall, and we had this whole sequence we were supposed to do outside. We started with cloud cover, which is perfect for what we were doing, then all of a sudden the sun came out, and that kind of f***ed us for doing the remainder of the shots of that scene because it wouldn't match at all... So when that happened, we had to abandon what we were doing and then go to a cover set which mercifully was right inside the mall."

Producer Scott Moiser's back up plan went into effect, and the crew moved indoors, to the Black Friday mall setting.

"Problem is, nobody really thought about moving inside, that the cover set means that we're working in a open mall. It's not like Mallrats where we're shooting in a pretty much a closed mall – we did a lot of nights and stuff like that. Some days we worked and it was wide open but not a lot of traffic in that mall. But we're shooting in the Monroeville Mall after school hours, like after three, four, five o'clock. It's just a sea of f***ing teenagers. And we have Seth Rogen from knocked up and SuperBad, who all these teenagers have seen over the summer. So it's just a sea of cell phone cameras." Everyone has a camera now. Shooting away, snapping away, walking up to him, snapping pictures, shooting from above and what not. And we're shooting the scene which is a walk and talk with Seth and Craig Robinson, the dude from The Office. And people are shooting the scene a long with us on phones and shit. So much so that if our footage was f***ed, we could find one of these people and ask if we could use the footage, because we lost the footage."

Smith explains that shooting in public makes him nervous and somewhat self conscious.

"I hate shooting in public. I hate directing in public. It's just tough. There are just more elements. It's like there are people watching. Are they hearing the dialogue? Are they going to go spoil it online? Is that dude looking in the f***ing camera? Are we catching that dude in the shot? Yelling during the shoot... there are just all these factors that makes it a pain in the ass. And I just hate directing in public because it's just like – it's such a stupid job. People see you doing your job and they are like 'that's it? he just sits there in a chair and walks over and says a few things?' I don't know, it just feels like a fake job to me."

You can hear more about the string of bad luck which continued on into the second day of shooting in Episode 44 of the Smodcast.

Disclaimer: It should be noted that we can only assume that the mall sequence shown in the video above coincided with the first day of shooting, as it very well could have been a later shoot. But for the purposes of reprinting Smith's story, we made the connection.

Photo thanks to Chris DiSabato of Gateway Associated Photographers via News Askew.