Kevin Smith, the director of Clerks, Chasing Amy and last year's Zack and Miri make a Porno, is planning to fund his next movie through donations from fans after failing to secure financing from more usual sources. Smith says he is looking into the possibility of setting up a website allowing members of the public to contribute towards the budget for Red State, a low budget horror flick about a group of misfits who encounter extreme fundamentalism in Middle America. Smith has said it is inspired by Fred Phelps, founder of the controversial militant anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas.

Interviewed on the Cinema Studies Student Union of the University of Toronto blog, Smith said he came up with the revolutionary funding concept following a suggestion from one of his followers on Twitter. "We're kind of creating this website," he said. "We're seeing if it works to set up and collect donations. It becomes a weird tax nightmare, though…

"It sounded like such an easy thing online… but now there's lots of checks and balances to make sure we can do it, but if that's the case, I would be into it, and I'll match it. Whatever you raise online, like fuck it, you put it up, I'll put it up."

Smith added: "God bless them. Motherfuckers want to see the movie so badly that they're willing to pay for it with their own money? Absolutely, put their name in the credits and that movie will be a reality."

All of Smith's previous films, bar 1995's Mallrats, have been financed by the producers Bob and Harvey Weinstein, either via their former firm Miramax or current studio The Weinstein Company. But Smith said in October 2007 that the brothers had passed on Red State, which appears to be a dramatic departure from the writer-director's usual milieu.

Smith also recently completed his first studio film, Cop Out, starring Bruce Willis and Seann William Scott, a comedy about two detectives whose adventures include locating a stolen baseball card, rescuing a woman, and dealing with gangsters and their laundered money. It marks the first occasion that Smith has directed a film for which he has not written the screenplay himself.

The director appears to have undergone something of an epiphany in favour of a more commercial approach to future film-making following the relative critical and box-office failure of his last outing, the comedy Zack and Miri Make a Porno. "I had a huge emotional breakdown when Zack and Miri came out, because I was expecting Zack and Miri to do closer to Forgetting Sarah Marshall business," he told CINSSU. "We didn't do Sarah Marshall business, we wound up doing Kevin Smith business.

"[I said to myself:] 'I'm spinning my wheels here. I'm telling the same stories, apparently. Nobody cares anymore …' and I went and shut myself up in the library and started smoking lots of weed."

So far Smith's funding plan for Red State has not met with a particularly positive response in the blogosphere. "He wants you to hand him money so he can make a movie, and then if it actually makes any money, you know … keep it," wrote Steve Anderson of Screenhead.com.