Independent Reviews Site -Dan Clowes Interview, Page 2

DC: Well, even as a writer and even a cartoonist, I get letters from people who want stuff everyday. It's like, can you read my script and give me some pointers.

CA: And what do you tell them?

DC: I throw them in the garbage, you know, it's like, what, do I have enough leisure time to do your work.

CA: Fame is something, aside from the interview process where I call you up and ask you personal questions, that people assume they know you. Is that odd to you when people know more about you than you know about them in letters or if they meet you on the street?

DC: Well, in my case I've done a few extremely personal comics, so I can't blame people. They actually do know more about me than I know about myself, cause I don't read my own comics after they're done. You know I don't remember things I've admitted in my comics that I think nobody knows about. I go back to thinking they're secrets after a few years cause everybody's too embarrassed to discuss it with me. It's a weird feeling. Very easily someone could come up to me and know about everything in my life, practically, so it is uncomfortable cause I don't know anything about them. I'm at a big disadvantage and I have to trust my instincts as to whether they're crazy or my beloved readers that I want to meet, you know there's a fine line.

CA: You've been writing since you were very young and knew what you wanted to do. Have you ever considered any other job opportunities? Or do you have any horror job stories not associated with comic writing.

DC: Not really.

CA: That's amazing, how does that feel. I mean you've always, basically, been a comic artist.

DC: I guess, yeah. It was so long before I actually made a dollar at it that it didn't seem like it. I was just sort of spinning my wheels. But when I finally made a living at it was sort of exciting. I was like wow, somebody actually liked it enough to pay me $300.

CA: That's just fascinating. I interviewed this guitarist, Derek Trucks, and he got his first paying gig when he was nine and went on to play with the Allman Brothers by the time he was 20. People like you are amazing, you knew what you wanted to do and you just did it.

DC: Yeah, it's weird. You see cartoons when you're a kid and you see all these characters who are obsessed with something. One character is obsessed with trains, all he talks about is trains, and I think, was I one of those kids, just an obsessive compulsive?

CA: Or was it a loop where comics made you the obsessive compulsive?

DC: It becomes like a voice, it's like a speaking a language. I'm one of the few people who can speak this language so it's like I have this way I can communicate for me that is very clear and specific for me that I don't feel like I'm leaving anything out or that I'm presenting my information in a way that people won't understand it. I'm very fluent in this language, so I'm more comfortable speaking through it.

CA: Was the script writing process very different for you from the comic writing process?

DC: It's telling a story through moving visuals in a movie and telling a story through still visuals are so unbelievably different. You really have to rethink everything, and you have to start from scratch. It's very confusing to try to take a still image from a comic and put motion to it and bring it to life. It's much easier to start with a film idea and just work on that from the beginning. That was what sort of threw me off in the beginning I was just trying to adapt the comic book directly. I wound up after a couple of months of just realizing it wasn't working and just starting over, and writing a film. You know, taking the same characters from the comic and doing a sort of story art and just starting over with new characters and new settings and stuff like that. And then it became exciting, like, oh boy I get to work with these characters again, but I don't have to be stuck or beholden to this other world I created that's not necessarily what I need to be in. That made it a lot more fun and all of a sudden it became much easier. I mean writing a screenplay is really like drawing a comic because it's all about the dialogue and that's the only thing that's really etched in stone, and then all the descriptions are very quick and compact, because you don't want to use up a lot of space. It's just little gestures of what the room will look like or what the character's wearing. And that's kind of how the process is, it's all about the dialogue and the way the pacing is set up.

CA: Was there anything you changed from the comic to the movie that you really enjoyed changing?

DC: Well the movie is about a 270 page comic and the comic is a 72 page comic. It would have taken me until I was 56 to do the movie as a comic, so I really just got to expand a lot of things. There's a lot of things in the comic where you have to build up the pattern of repetition to get across certain points, cause that's just the way people read comics, but in a movie you can have a character give just one glance, one little gesture and it says what would be written on thirty pages of script and then you can cut out all the dialogue cause you've gotten it across in one little gesture and you can't really predict when that's going to happen an actor just does that sometimes and it's very memorable and everything they say after that becomes very superfluous. It's kind of a magical thing.

CA: So Illeanna Douglas as the wacky art school teacher, did you base her on someone in particular or was she just an amalgam of horrible art teachers you've had?

DC: It's funny cause I wrote a story called Art School Confidential about my experiences in art school and Terry's always says Dan based that character on his going to art school, actually it was based on an art teacher I had in eighth grade sort of at the end of the hippie era...

CA: Oh, yeah, she was right on for my junior high art teacher.

DC: Well, yeah, everybody had one. In my case she was really sort of a bad person, she was not really helpful, I was like the one...you know, when you have a student who is going to grow up to be an artist, that's the one you should be focusing on or interested in and she was so disinterested in everything I did. I wasn't quiet following the rules. So I've had this lifelong dislike of her.

CA: Well, I think you've suitably punished her.

DC: I got this letter from this guy I haven't talked to in years, from that class, who I actually sort of based the stupid guy from the class who draws the character from the video game, and he said he felt like he had just stepped back into 1974 into art class.

CA: You use a lot of stuff about advertising and the middle class. I think that advertising by itself is very funny, I could sit and laugh at it all day. What draws you to it?

DC: The stuff in the movie, we wanted to use real movie trailers and commercials, but then people got the script and read it, people from Chevron and stuff and thought, well, we think they're making fun of us so we don't want to let them use anything. We didn't get the rights to anything real at all. So we got a week in a sound studio where we got to make up our own movie trailers and our own TV commercials, and it turned out to be so much better. We actually got the guys who did the real movie trailers to do voice-overs for the commercials. It added this air of sinister world in the background.

CA: I think it did. I think making up the commercials was better because you're never quiet sure if it's this world or another world the whole time and the commercials added to that feeling a lot.

DC: In retrospect, I can't imagine that we thought otherwise. I guess we just never thought we could match them. And there's something that's always funny about advertising that's about five years out of date where it loses it's coolness and appeal. The curtain is pulled up and it reveals the pathetic scam it always was. I think that all the ads for the Army are the weirdest to look at because it's like this cool video game.

CA: I've always thought it would be cool to have a reel of all the Army ads from the beginning to see how they progressed in weirdness.

DC: That is interesting. They actually tried to cut an MTV style trailer for Ghost World, and there's actually no film with less camera movement in the history of the world. They had to do all these tricks, all these optical trips, it was hopeless. I wanted the to do a trailer where it was the opposite of that where there's no movement and the voice over goes, "In a world of fast cars..." and Seymour's car sputters by.

CA: I love that scene where they're in the car and he yells, "have another baby"

DC: That was the best.

CA: Now the ending, which is where I think you lose anybody over the mental age of fifty, where do you think Enid is going? What is that to you.

DC: I always think she's moving on to something else. She's grown from this experience and she's moving on to someplace where she's more comfortable being by herself, but beyond that...I mean I have my own ideas, but I don't want to color it.

CA: I love ambiguous endings.

DC: It's not the kind of film where there could be a non-ambigious ending. You wouldn't want to just cut to Enid working in a shoe story or getting married to Seymour in a double wedding.

CA: Although there is some charm to the idea of Enid and Seymour going on as the worlds weirdest couple.

DC: That was the point where we wrote it very organically. We said, now should they stay together? It just seemed not right for either. It seemed unhealthy. It seemed to go against the whole gist of the film, them coming to terms with what is unhealthy.

CA: So what movies did you like this year.

DC: Well, I was going to make a top ten list, then I realized I'd only seen three or four.

CA: Do you not get out a lot to movies?

DC: To me seeing a bad movie is like eating a bad meal. It's something that really sticks with me, and I'd just rather not do it. I can usually tell and I hate myself when I go to a bad movie. I think, I knew this was going to be this bad. I've actually been going. Now that I'm in the writer's guild, I get to see movies for free. So I've gotten to see a bunch.

CA: So, have you seen Lord of the Rings

DC: I just saw it Saturday

CA: What did you think?

DC: Well, you know I've never read those books, I tried when I was a kid, but I don't really like elves and faries and stuff like that, it just sort of creeps me out a little bit. I just couldn't get into them, so when the movie came to the end and there was no ending, I was just utterly outraged. And everybody was like, that's the way the books are, and I said but this is building up to this big thing and then it doesn't happen. I was just shocked. I've sat here for three hours waiting for some big finale, and it never happens.

CA: Wait a minute, you were just responsible for a film that some people think had no ending.

DC: I disagree. I strongly disagree. I felt it had a resolution and I was very happy with the ending of the film.

CA: I totally agree, but for a lot of people there was no resolution.

DC: Yeah, for a lot of people...but in the Lord of the Rings, there was inarguably no resolution.

CA: But there's two more Rings films coming and there's not two more Ghost World's coming.

DC: But that's not fair, that's not fair to wait for two more films.

CA: Do you want me to tell you the ending?

DC: No, I can guess, I mean you know that the main character is not going to die. The whole movie had that feeling of watching a cowboy movie when I was a kid and there's five guys and like nine thousand Indians and the five guys mow down the nine thousand Indians and they're all still alive in the end. That bothered me when I was five and it still bothers me now.

CA: Well they throw you a bone with Borimir dying.

DC: Yeah, but they set him up to be the weak one. It was a children's film and I was surprised at the reviews it was getting. It was a really well-made children's action film. I didn't see any depth to it at all.

CA: That's interesting, cause most of the children I've seen in theaters at screenings are frightened of it.

DC: It's too much for children, it's scary, the kid in front of me was totally terrified.

CA: Same with Harry Potter, there were scary things in it. I went to see Dinosaur, the Disney film, just to see the live action mixed with animation. The whole thing is, it opens with this meteor shower that's like the beginning of the end for the dinosaurs, so you're getting attached to all these dinosaurs and they're going to die. It's like, does a five year old really need to know about extinction?

DC: (laughs) Exactly, like they'd make a film about their grandfather dying...

CA: I know...it freaked me out. I was thinking, oh my god we're all going to die.

DC: That's a very tough line. I couldn't tell watching Lord of the Rings, I thought are kids so hardened to violence that this is palatable? If I were six watching that movie I would have been so traumatized for the rest of my life. I just felt too old for it. I was trying to relive that experience, like when you were a kid and you see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and you're just totally swept up in it, and I was not swept into it. I was totally distanced by it. I thought the effects were totally amazing, but for me that's kind of distracting too, when I watch a movie that has effects like that, I think, oh my god, that took so much work to do that and I'm totally out of the film.

CA: That's interesting I have a passing acquaintance with one of the actors from the Lord of the Rings, he's around the same arts community I am, and it was really had to lose myself in the film because I kept thinking, there he is.

DC: All of Ghost World was like that for me. I don't even see them as acting after a while, when people say what good actors they are, I think well, that's good.

CA: That's also interesting, about the kid's view, because a lot of people see comics as a kid's thing and can't get into them.

DC: It's had to blame them because they go to a comic book store and 98% of what they see would be that. It would be stuff that I would never ever read or recommend myself. So it's hard to blame a public for judging an entire medium by the vast preponderance of the material. So all we can do is continue to do good stuff and try to get some kind of attention for it, and slowly build an audience of adventurous people who will actually read these things.

CA: So do you see comic art as adult entertainment?

DC: Well it's a combination of words and pictures, which is basically what film it. It has the same potential content that any other form has. It's a neutral art form, it's not just for children. It's not like the subject matter has to be for children. It's just that's the way that the medium developed in this country. In other countries it developed as an adult medium, and you'd go on the bus and you'd see guys in tweed coats reading comic books. It's just a whole different culture.

CA: Is that the way it's always been in America?

DC: It started in the 1900s and it was the most popular form of entertainment until the movies came along. Comic artists were making about a million dollars a year. It was unbelievable, they were the celebrities of America until about 1930 and then movies took over, and then comics tried to imitate the movies, which I think was there big mistake and so they sort of became proxy movies on paper and they degenerated and no one really explored the full potential of the medium until around the 60s or 70s. A whole lot of people like Robert Crumb started doing comics kind of just for their own reasons, not to get into some kind of pre-niche market place. They sort of took it into the new direction that is just now getting to where there's a few cartoonist worth reading.

CA: It seems like Crumb and the artist in his range were using the medium as a way to express themselves, where before the medium was a way to sell material.

DC: It's always been simplified images to sell stuff to children and idiots, basically.

CA: Do you watch TV, cartoons....

DC: Not really

CA: I'm a huge fan of the PPGs, don't think less of me...I've always thought of Buttercup as the baby Enid and she lost her powers, like Peter Pan, and forgot, and that's why she's really bitter, but she doesn't know why.

DC: I like them too, I like the way they look.

CA: I love the earlier episodes, it's kind of gone downhill.

DC: I think it's...anybody I've ever known who works it animation...it's like the most hateful business where they take people who are really smart and have really good ideas and just screw them for everything, so they end up not really working on the shows. All the smart people are dismissed from the show and they of course go downhill.

CA: That especially happened with Ren & Stimpy when Nick took it over.

DC: I knew that guy, John Kay, they took it away from him and it was just the most ridiculous idea in the world.

CA: I don't understand why they buy something because it's doing really well and then they change everything and run it into the ground.

DC: They have a total contempt for their audience and they think they're idiots and that they won't notice the difference. The reason the Simpsons is good and is still on TV fifteen years later is because they never fired the writers and they have the best writing staff in Hollywood. It's better than any movie writing staff, it's like the top ten of writing and they pay them more money every year. And it pays off.

CA: So you're not a big moving visual arts person.

DC: I don't watch a lot of stuff, but I do like movies. I have to say, I saw Mulholland Drive three times in the theater which I haven't seen a movie more than once in a long time. When people ask what's the best film of the year, I say Mulholland Drive with Ghost World slightly after it. I just thought it was a masterpiece. I couldn't decide whether I liked the movie or not, but three days later when I just hadn't slept it was the only thing I was thinking about and I thought, yeah, I guess I did like that film.

CA: There's the whole idea in Ghost World of culture fading into a black and white strip mall. I have a friend who says no one loves nostalgia like an American. Do you think you're just falling victim to nostalgia or are we really losing a culture.

DC: I hope it's tempered with the awareness that that was the trap. That's sort of the whole point of the Seymour character in a way, to show that there are penalties to be paid for ignoring the past, but there are also penalties to be paid for ignoring the present. You have to combine the two the same way.

CA: Do you think that's some of the source of Enid's discomfort with the world? She's trying to combine the culture of the past with the world she is being given.

DC: I think she's looking for something authentic and the things she seems to be responding to are getting buried, sort of hidden under the strip mall. It makes her feel justified in her feelings that there's some kind of lost world she's missing out on.

CA: And do you have any plans to let us know what happened to Enid?

DC: I might do something with Enid some day. I just felt it was unfair to her. It's like, that part of her life ends. We don't need to pry into her after that.

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