Trivia / Red State

• Approval of God: While the actual Westboro Baptist Church members told Kevin Smith to his face (rather politely, mind you) that they didn't like the movie, Shirley Phelps' niece and son, both of whom had defected years earlier, called it a very realistic depiction of religious fundamentalism.
• Awesome, Dear Boy: Kevin Smith had been blown away by Michael Parks' brief performance in From Dusk Till Dawn, which he attended a preview screening of in the 90s, and cast him as Rev. Cooper just so he could see Parks give another awesome performance.
• Career Resurrection: This film saw the beginning of Kevin Smith's new series of self-financed road show films, allowing him to continue to make films exactly the way he wants to. He also claimed that working with Michael Parks made him fall in love with filmmaking again after Cop Out made him start to hate it.
• The Cast Show Off: Prior to casting, Kevin Smith was unaware of Michael Parks' previous career as a country western singer, and wrote in scenes where Parks was allowed to sing. Parks later recorded a tie-in EP of gospel songs titled The Red State Sessions.
• Creator Breakdown: This film was rather infamous for Smith delivering a "The Reason You Suck" Speech to all those attending its rights auction. He later confessed that he had fallen out with Harvey Weinstein for good minutes prior.
• Dawson Casting: Travis, Jared, Billy Ray and Cheyenne are all teenagers, however, they're all played by people in their mid-twenties.
• Enforced Method Acting: While filming the scene where his character is tied to a cross, Kyle Gollner (Jared) had a genuine panic attack. Nobody found out until the scene cut. They all just thought he was acting.
• Irony as She Is Cast: LA radio DJ Ralph Garmin plays a mute.
  • Casting Gag: Usually, it's his Hollywood Babble-on co-host who plays a mute character in the director's movies.
• Playing Against Type: Kevin Smith deliberately wanted to make a film that was nothing like his previous ones in any way, shape or form, partially because his repeated attempts to make a "Kevin Smith movie" had been hugely unsuccessful.
• Real-Life Relative: Jennifer Schwalbach Smith turns in her usual appearance in her husband's film. Also, Michael Parks and James Parks: father and son in real life and in the film.
• Throw It In!
  • Stephen Root actually stumbled and fell in the scene where Keenan (John Goodman) yells at him to get back to the car. He was genuinely startled by Goodman's bombastic reading.
  • During the scene where Cheyenne tells the three girls to go hide in the attic, the baby that one of them is holding (DP David Klein's daughter Ivy) starts screaming. It wasn't in the script and, in fact, careful preparation had been taken to ensure that she wouldn't. Both Smith and Klein agreed that it worked and, with Klein's permission, it was left in (Smith and several other cast members still felt so guilty about making a child cry that they all gave Klein some money to take Ivy to the toy store afterwards).
  • Michael Parks came up with the last line of the movie being Cooper's neighboring cellmate yelling at him to "Shut the fuck up!", and that Kevin Smith himself should say it. Smith agreed, but only on the condition that he would't be seen, lest it be too distracting.
• What Could Have Been:
  • While the role of Abin Cooper was conceived for Michael Parks, Kevin Smith also considered George Carlin for the part, but Carlin died before the film was green-lit.
  • Smith originally pitched it to Miramax, then to The Weinstein Company. Both times, the Weinsteins turned it down for it's bleak subject matter.
  • The Five Points' prisoner who is executed during the service was originally supposed to have a ram's head on top of his own when he gets shot, but it would have cost the production it's entire special effects budget. They went with mummifying him in cellophane instead because it made clean up especially easy.
  • Then, there's the ending of the movie:
    • Smith also wanted to the original ending to follow through with the Biblical prophecies. In the original ending, everyone dies and while they're dying, the ground shakes and splits open. Keenan manages to survive his injury just long enough to see a giant Angel with a sword fly away, followed by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse descending from the clouds.
    • Another variant of the unused ending featured everyone except for Keenan surviving his injury and seeing the giant angel with the sword over the body of one of the ATF who sees him and wordlessly shushes him, ending the film. The angel is Loki from Dogma.
    • How genuine the intention behind writing these endings was is up to debate, as Kevin revealed during his Burn in Hell Q&A show that these ideas came from an exchange with Malcolm Ingram while he was writing the movie, with Malcolm daring him to end the movie with the Rapture, but considering how the budget for shooting such a scene would dwarf that of the rest of the movie, Smith never seriously considered going through with the idea.
• Word of God: Kevin Smith claims that the film is divided up into "the three topics you're not supposed to talk about": sex, religion and politics. These are listed as such in the cast credits.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: In Burn in Hell, Smith told that his writing process for Red State was pretty much this: aware of how predictable usual tropes can be, he made it a point to jump to a different plotline and a different set of characters every time he felt he knew where the story was going. That led him to write himself into a corner during the confrontation between Cooper and Keenan, he didn't know where to go from there, and decided to have fun with it by writing in the Rapture (see What Could Have Been above).