Smith spills about Bennifer

"The worst piece of advice I ever took?" Film director Kevin Smith leans back against the sofa in a suite at the Dorchester Hotel and mulls it over. "It must have been Ben (Affleck) saying 'Dude, cast my girlfriend in the movie. She'll be awesome.' No, I'm kidding!"

You can't blame the New Jersey auteur for being a little bitter, though. After a decade which saw him shoot to fame on the back of uber-low budget movie Clerks, and carve out a niche in making funny, faintly controversial movies, Smith decided to go mainstream. He'd already tackled Catholicism (1999's Dogma), a lesbian 'going straight' (1997’s Chasing Amy) and become a cult hero as one half of stoner duo Jay and Silent Bob, so making a touching film about a father's relationship with his young daughter should have been a breeze. Right? Wrong — Bennifer hit town.

Casting long-time Smith muse Ben Affleck as Ollie Trinke alongside Jennifer Lopez as his wife — a much smaller role - obviously smacked of box office gold two years ago when the 33-year-old began making Jersey Girl, a love letter to his family. But once tabloid coverage of the Affleck/Lopez union reached critical mass and their disastrous flick Gigli was roundly mauled, it became clear that Jersey Girl would become an undeserved victim of their over-hyped relationship.

A somewhat muted Smith, clad in his typical uniform of outsized sports t-shirt and cropped trousers, has obviously had to explain this story many times before: "A lot of people assume that I cast them and knew they were dating. But they weren't. He called me up and was like, 'I was thinking who would be good to play Gertrude: Jennifer Lopez,' as they'd just wrapped Gigli and got on really well.

"So we put it into motion and got Jennifer Lopez, and it was quite the coup. But it wasn't until he showed up to the set a month before we started shooting I learned they were dating. And I was like, "Ah... no wonder he was so supportive! No wonder he wanted her to play his wife!"

Even though Affleck and Lopez had split up by the time Jersey Girl hit American multiplexes in March, the public had already swallowed the unwarranted 'Gigli 2' tag which attached itself to Jersey Girl. The backlash has obviously stung Smith, although he recognises the point at which it all went wrong.

"Mosier (Scott, Smith’s longtime producer) saw it when Affleck appeared in Jen's music video for Jenny From The Block. He said then that it was bad f****** news. He was like, 'I understand what they're trying to accomplish. The whole story of the video is about tabloid intrusion, but the point is lost and it just makes them look arrogant.' And he was right. People just saw it as them going, 'We're so rich, and so successful, and so pretty - feel bad for us.'

"The moment I knew we were in trouble with their relationship was when we test screened the movie. In the focus group you ask people, 'How would you suggest this movie to a friend?' And one guy said, 'I would tell my friends to go and see it because J.Lo dies.' And it became clear that people just didn't like her, and didn't like the two of them together. It just created this enmity from the people. Weird."

Bearing all this in mind, does Smith regret any of his casting decisions? "I don't really have a regret. I mean, I regret the s***storm that surrounded our poor little movie because of their relationship, but I don't regret their relationship because they were quite a cute couple together, and really into one another. And I don't regret casting either one of them, because them being in the movie made the movie what it is. But having to follow Gigli did wind up affecting us."