Speaking with MTV, director Kevin Smith has revealed his ambitions to make a sports film with “Tuesdays With Morrie” author and former Detroit Free Press sports writer, Mitch Albom.
“I want to make this hockey movie,” Smith confessed. “It’s based on this Warren Zevon song, “Hit Somebody (The Hockey Song),” written by Warren Zevon and Mitch Albom…it’s about a goon, a hockey goon. It’s this very wonderful, soaring, moving story that’s also bittersweet and very, very funny, about a hockey player who just wants to play hockey, who loves hockey so much, but just sucks at it. The only thing he can do to be on a team is just be the enforcer, just be the guy who goes out there and beats the shit out of people…it takes place during the last gasp of the goon era of hockey when it was all about fighting.”
Smith is currently filming for his buddy-cop film “A Couple Of Dicks” with Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan but is holding high hopes to be able to move onto this project “a year from now or two years from now.”
He further noted: “The song’s been one of my favorites since I heard it and I’ve always seen this whole movie behind and I got in touch with Mitch because Warren Zevon has passed on and we started talking about it and he was into it and into what I was kind of pitching.”
Smith’s enthusiasm for the project was personified though by his feelings regarding the film’s prospects: “I never once thought about winning awards or anything but [this] movie I think that can do it…if I play my cards right and we get the right people in it, it could be an award-type movie.”
Hmm, this could very well be something totally different from everything we’ve ever seen from Smith. Surely he knows that the pornographic jokes aren’t going to cut it with the Academy and isn’t claiming award-winning quality to this project on a limb. Add to that the involvement of a respected journalist like Albom. Nevertheless, Smith’s passion for the project sounds very promising and it’ll be fascinating to see him truly combine hockey and cinema, two of his great loves.