Familiar haunts

>> Daniel Clowes's Ghost World comic comes to life at Fantasia

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

 Those of you who are into the comics of Daniel Clowes, a leading light of modern alternative "sequential art," can skip this intro. You know all about the bitterly funny and resonantly real Ghost World story, which first ran in Clowes's Eightball anthology series. You know all about Enid Coleslaw and Rebecca Doppelmeyer--acerbic yet fragile teen misfits who love pop trash as much as they hate it, always to be found lurking in tacky diners, record shops and porn boutiques, in search of unwitting targets for their cutting quips.

 Enid in particular has struck a chord on the heartstrings of teenage girls, awkward geek guys and dirty old men everywhere. One such dirty old man is Terry Zwigoff, whose last film was the hit documentary about cartoonist Robert Crumb. Shifting to fiction, he's brought Enid, Rebecca and all the satellite freaks in their world to (reel) life, with Clowes himself involved every step of the way.

 Ghost World, the movie, makes its Montreal debut at the Fantasia festival this week, which was just the excuse the Mirror needed to hassle Clowes at his home in Oakland, CA.

 Mirror: A couple of months ago, I ran into a friend who had just returned from Cannes. He'd seen Ghost World there, and was telling me how brilliant it was. I naturally asked how it compared to the original comics, and he confessed that hadn't read them. I see this as an indication of how well the film stands on its own.

 Daniel Clowes: I actually think that people who haven't read the comics might appreciate the film more than those who have. I'm the same way--if I read a book and then go see the film, I'm just sort of waiting to see these moments brought to life. This film is very different from the comic. It's really expanded, and kind of takes a tangential detour through all these things that are very minor in the comic and sort of exploded in the film. It's a very different thing. It certainly didn't make sense to make a film that required you to read a book that only 20,000 people have read. I felt like I'd already done the comic, I'd just finished it and felt very satisfied that it was a completed effort, good or bad. I wanted the film to have a new challenge, to be a new story to grapple with. It was great because I love those characters so much, and I could work with them again, do something new, take a different route through their summer--it's still the same time- frame as in the book, it's just a different way they could have lived out their summer. I think it captures the tone of the book, the dark sense of humour and the sadness of that time--without repeating itself. That was our goal.

 STRIP MINING

 M: It's not only a revision of the Ghost World story, in the sense that you've gone right back to the start and reconstructed it, but it also draws on ideas from other, shorter strips you've done, going as far back as "Art School Confidential."

 DC: Yeah, we wanted to give Enid some sort of task to do all summer, so we decided she had to take a summer-school art class to get her diploma. So she's in an art class with this failed-artist woman, played by Illeana Douglas, who's just perfect. She's your typical failed artist, a 45-year-old woman who makes experimental films, which we get to see a bit of. She's basically a caricature of all the teachers I had in art school, who looked down on things like cartoons and actual drawing and were into whatever the buzzwords of the current art scene were. We see Enid learning how to manipulate her. They're just brief, little vignettes but I think they're pretty funny. I wound up doing a bunch of the art for the class, so it's funny to see what my drawings of sensitive horses and things look like.

 M: What about Steve Buscemi's character, who I understand is a cross between "the bearded windbreaker guy" and Josh, the record collector, from the comic?

 DC: Yeah, that's about right. I mean, Josh is actually in the movie, but Terry had this idea of somehow introducing this character Seymour that he'd created separately from this film. He just thought he'd somehow fit into these girls' world, and that it would be interesting to see how they'd react to someone like him. Seymour's basically a version of Terry Zwigoff himself and all his friends, these guys who collect old 78 records. Sort of like the way Robert Crumb is, they're not happy with the modern world and tend to have a similar aesthetic, a similar sensibility. You just felt he knew this character very well because he'd sorta lived with him his entire life.

 ZWIGOFF, ENIGMA

 M: Tell me a bit about Terry Zwigoff. He's a bit of an enigma to me.

 DC: (laughs) He's an enigmatic guy. He's only made two films prior to this in his life, one of which he had to do everything including hold the lights on. It was called Louie Bluie, made with maybe three people on his crew at the most. That's the film that sold me on the idea that he could make this one because it's got such a good sense of humour. The way he deals with the main subject, this old blues musician named Howard Armstrong, is almost as an actor, rather than a documentary subject. He puts him up to all these situations and gets him to do interesting stuff, so I could tell he had a knack for getting performances out of people--which he does in Crumb, too. Robert Crumb puts on a really good performance in that film!

 M: What was it about Ghost World that attracted him? Obviously he was fond of your work--

 DC: I think it was just the two girls. He thought they were really good characters, and he liked the idea of these two girls up against the world. I think he related to that. There was some spark there. It's nothing he thought about too much in terms of actually analyzing it. I think it just hit him as something he couldn't shake.

 M: That leads me to the character of Enid, who is this smart but angry and maladjusted young female. This is a very rare creature, be it in comics, film, TV or pop music. Very under-represented, but a resonant personality that people connect with. Judging by your reader mail and critical reviews, would you say I'm on the right track with that?

 DC: Yeah, definitely. People have tried to do that character, and it's never very good. It's half-assed or lame or they come across as just obnoxious and annoying. I think Enid has this real vivacity to her, she's very real. She's sort of angry, flippant and funny in one way, but also has this sadness and depth to her. That's what I was most worried about in making the film, was finding an actress who could understand all that and encompass the huge range of emotions needed to make that character work. Luckily Thora Birch was able to do it far beyond anything I'd ever even imagined. It's astounding.

 HOORAY FOR HOLLYWOOD

 M: I would see one of the most difficult aspects of the transition from comics to film being the translation of the language of comics, one of frozen moments, to the language of film, that of fluid motion.

 DC: I think the mistake is to try to translate comics to film, visually. It seems so clear cut, it seems like you've got a storyboard right there, ready to go. It really isn't the same, though--you can take certain angles and looks and so on from the comic, but really, we had to start from scratch and learn how to tell it in a filmic way. It's not like The Matrix or anything, 500 camera moves for every 30 seconds of film. It's a very still kind of film, very unobtrusive. After a while, you forget you're watching a film. It's all in the background, the technique stuff, which is what we wanted from the very beginning. But it's a completely different way of telling a story. You can't build a rhythm in the same way.

 M: So this was your first effort in film. You started work on it in, what, '97? Five years ago?

 DC: '95, actually, which makes it seven. I was a young man then. It's been forever.

 M: I guess you didn't expect it to take so long.

 DC: If you'd told me the amount of work I was going to put into this and how long it was going to take, I would never have gotten involved! I'm sure if I figured out how many hours I put in and how much I'm getting paid, it would be way less than minimum wage. If I'd worked at McDonald's for the last seven years, I'd be doing a lot better (laughs).

 M: The issue of Eightball in which Ghost World began also had that strip of your nightmare vision of what the film world would be, if they adapted your earlier work, Like a Velvet Glove. I understand that it didn't turn out that way for you.

 DC: No, I almost feel like that was some sort of voodoo that held it off. If I'd gone into it naively expecting everything to work out as well as it did, there's no way it would have actually happened. It's kind of miraculous how well it worked out.

 M: There must have been hassles along the way.

 DC: Oh, there were thousands and thousands of horrible problems, many times when it looked like it wouldn't get made, or we couldn't get the actors we wanted. All kinds of miserable things. But then you forget about all that when you finish the film and it comes out the way you want, which I think is probably very rare.

 M: So it seems you're starting to get a lot of attention for this.

 DC: I think we're right in the middle of a summer of 50 no-good blockbusters. I think nobody's liking any of these films that are coming out all summer, and here's something that doesn't try to dazzle you with special effects. It's actually entertaining on its own, without trying to shock you or take you on a roller-coaster ride that you wish you could forget about the minute you leave the theatre. It's a different kind of film--we're obviously not looking at other films and trying to copy them, we're trying to make our own vision, very carefully, and that's not something you see a lot of. :

 Ghost World screens at Fantasia, at the Cinema Imperial, on Saturday, July 14, 9:45pm