By Ron Weiskind, Post-Gazette Movie Editor

Jason Lee might still be touring on the professional skateboarding circuit if not for Kevin Smith, the filmmaker who gave Lee his first movie role in "Mallrats" and hired him again for "Chasing Amy."

Smith's latest movie, "Dogma," completes the hat trick for Lee. He plays Azrael, a smirking demon who tries to help fallen angels Matt Damon and Ben Affleck return to heaven, thus destroying all existence. His rationale: Even annihilation is preferable to spending any more time in Hell.

So how, as an actor, do you relate to a creature who sprouts horns and rides with the devil?

"He's somewhere he doesn't want to be, and he'll do anything to get out of it. I can pretty much relate to that," says Lee over the telephone.

So what places did he want to escape from?

"One of them would be high school -- every day being woken up by mother and having to walk to high school and having to walk home. It was an absolute nightmare. It's just that feeling of knowing you have to be there and you can't do anything about it."

He'd have rather been skateboarding. As a teen-ager, he started entering amateur competitions, attracted a sponsor and ultimately turned pro.

"You have sponsors and you have products with your name on them. You do a lot of touring around America, you enter competitions for prize money all around the world. There are European tours, American tours. It's a really cool profession.

"I grew up in Huntington Beach [Calif.], going to public high school and skateboarding and not really knowing anything about anything else. When I became a professional skateboarder I went off to Sweden and Japan and all over Europe and I got to see other things. That was amazing, being like 19 years old and skating in my first competition as a pro in Hawaii."

But somewhere along the line, the acting bug bit.

"Years ago I would go out on auditions here and there for commercials or little TV shows, but I wasn't really into it and I wasn't really good. I just sort of forgot about it. And then I got this idea I wanted to try and pursue movie acting. I was intrigued by this whole process I didn't know anything about."

So he started looking around and a few months later, he got in to see Don Phillips, who was casting "Mallrats." He got to read for the lead role in front of director Smith, "and I read horribly, I might add." But Smith gave him another shot, at the supporting role of Brodie, and it worked out.

Now 29, Lee has worked his way up from the low budgets of Kevin Smith movies to the free spending of action films like the Will Smith-Gene Hackman thriller "Enemy of the State." He also appeared in Lawrence Kasdan's comedy "Mumford" and recently finished his role in the new movie by Cameron Crowe ("Jerry McGuire"), about a teen-age boy in 1973 who gets to write a magazine story about an up-and-coming rock band called Stillwater. Lee plays the band's lead singer.

But the actor says that the key for him is not the budget so much as the director -- especially if, like Kevin Smith, he writes his own screenplays.

Life on Smith's sets, he says, features "a lot of laughing, a lot of joking, a lot of people relating because he uses a lot of the same actors and actresses. There's comfort and security, because you trust Kevin. He writes his own material and he knows exactly what he wants. He's never stressed out, he's never worried, he's never affected by anything. He sits back, lights a cigarette and directs the scene. It usually goes exactly like it did in rehearsal."

He had to trust Smith in another way. "Dogma" is filled with often technical references to Catholicism and Lee says he had no real religious upbringing -- just skateboarding and the beach.

"This is an area he knows more about than I do. I'm hired as an actor. I want to work with Kevin, so I try to come to understand as much as I can. It's a matter of trust."

He found the same confidence in Kasdan and Crowe, who also wrote their own screenplays.

"When I worked with Cameron Crowe, he never got upset, he never raised his voice. Same with Lawrence Kasdan, same with Kevin Smith."

He also got a kick out of working with Tony Scott on "Enemy of the State," even though someone else wrote the screenplay.

"That was a trip. I'm just doing a lot of running in the movie and Tony Scott would have like seven camera setups. He wants to be able to get it from all angles.

"I was amazed. It was such a huge movie. He was as calm as could be, cracking jokes right before takes. He was so nice to all of us younger, up-and-coming actors. We weren't like the little guys on the side next to Gene Hackman and Will Smith. When he was working with us, he would give us his time.

"I don't see how somebody could handle that. He had city blocks in Washington, D.C., shut down. He had helicopters in the sky, one with a film camera shooting another that's in the scene, people running below, video cameras up in trees, seven cameras hidden and spread out. And he's in the middle of it all, smoking a cigar and laughing. That's a $90 million Jerry Bruckheimer movie that took eight months to shoot, and he's just having the time of his life."

And so is Jason Lee as he learns how to act by doing it.

"You get better with each film you do, really. You set out to do something, you do it, you feel good about it, and you go on to the next with even more confidence. And then of course there's the fun of making movies."

Sure beats high school -- and maybe even skateboarding.