Much of the biographical saga known as "The Dan Clowes Story" was covered in Gary Groth's essential interview with him published in 1993 (TCJ #154). I wanted to avoid obvious redundancy by focusing on work produced since that interview, picking up where The Comics Journal last left off: at the final issue of A Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, a comic that bridges the artistic divide between Clowes's fledgling Lloyd Llewellyn, and the more sophisticated Ghost World and David Boring. Clowes's reticence to discuss Velvet Glove, as well as other questions on critical interpretation of his work, was not merely the result of the "memory loss" he cites, but out of his stated desire to avoid the "crippling" and disruptive effects such discussion would have on his approach to his art, which remains dependent on his penchant for a surrealistic tone and a mercurial dialogue with the subconscious.

I was particularly curious to hear about Clowes's Hollywood experiences working on the film adaptation of Ghost World with Crumb director Terry Zwigoff. Clowes's premonitory Velvet Glove film-adaptation parody (from Eightball #11) seemed to promise that such a foray into showbiz would provide some exciting "grist for the mill." Yet according to his testimony here, the experience was (sadly) almost entirely positive, despite a few instances of embarrassing studio suggestions; for example, imagine Ghost World starring Freddie Prinze, Jr. and Jennifer Love Hewitt. The discussion on this topic instead ventured into the more rewarding territory of the role certain genres of cinema have played in his approach to comics, and the effects this filmmaking experience has had on his artistic process.

Surprisingly, Clowes did not share my views on the evolution of comics as an art form and the apparent influence of the historical and cultural context. What I perceive as a marked difference in style and content between today's alternative comics from its direct underground antecedent of the late 1960s can be traced back to the social, cultural and economic environment in which the works were made. For example, an angry, sexualized late-1960s rant from Crumb's id, replete with misogynist imagery and cartoony violence, might be seen as passé in today's sensationalized cultural wasteland, but at a time when the driving and defining (and necessary) national anthems of the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement and the increasing popularity of feminism assaulted the popular consciousness with a didactic fist, a personal screed from the subconscious that resisted easy political appropriation was culturally, politically and artistically apt. Yet Clowes, even with his cultivated interest in the aesthetics of discriminating antiquity, doesn't see it that way, insisting that the difference between the works of the preceding generations is negligible: he cites a subtextual anger running through contemporary alternative comics that is similar to the works of the previous generation, and he contends that the popular culture has not changed in the manner I asserted.

In other words, I had a blast: the interview was a wild hoot, almost on par with a new issue of Eightball. I'm only sorry that it had to end. (An editorial aside: a few years ago I had the opportunity to work for Fantagraphics, which allowed me to personally get to know Clowes and many of the cartoonists discussed here in the capacity of a daily grind, a familiarity apparent in this interview.)

On the Transition from Velvet Glove to Ghost World

SILVIE: So... when are you going to start drawing Spider-Man?

CLOWES: Did you know Peter Bagge is going to be writing Spider-Man?

SILVIE: Are you joking?

CLOWES: No. The funny thing is he actually did ask me to draw Spider-Man.

SILVIE: Wow.

CLOWES: It was hard for me to turn it down.

SILVIE: Is that just a joke?

CLOWES: I swear to God. Marvel Comics are at the end of their rope trying to figure out "What's hip and now?" so they're approaching guys like Pete Bagge, who they probably imagine sell hundreds of thousands of copies. Of course Bagge had literally never read a single Spider-Man comic in his life, much to his credit. He wants to do it like, "Joe Matt gets super powers," basically [laughs]. My guess is that it'll never... that once they see what he's going to do, they'll panic. I know he actually asked Crumb to do it.

SILVIE: Of course Crumb said "No?"

CLOWES: Crumb really considered it.

SILVIE: Seriously?

CLOWES: I guess so.

SILVIE: Jesus!

CLOWES: And so did I. I thought it was a good idea [laughs].

SILVIE: It would be really funny if this were just a malicious prank on your part.

CLOWES: No, I wouldn't do that to you.

SILVIE: I would.

I guess we should pick up where the last big marathon interview you had with the Journal left off, way back in 1993. It was done before you completed the last issue of Velvet Glove. You were predicting what your response was going to be to it. I'd like to pick up there. I know it's been eight years, but looking back, if you can remember what was going through your mind while you were doing the last issue of Velvet Glove, and how you now feel about how it wrapped up.

CLOWES: Oh boy. I have no recollection of that at all. [Laughs.] I guess by then I had the whole thing in mind. I knew what was going to happen. To me, it all made perfect sense. There were a few things I made sort of subtle that I thought, "Oh everybody will understand this." Looking back on it I realize it was kind of an insane ending.

SILVIE: What sort of subtle things are you talking about?

CLOWES: That's a story that when I finished it, I got it out of my system, and have never really revisited it. It's the kind of story that's very personal, and it's not pleasant for me to delve into again. I don't know. Everything, every part of it, was in my head very clearly, and I'm not sure I developed everything enough to communicate what I wanted to the world. Although people still seem to like the story, so who knows.

SILVIE: Looking back on it from now, how do you think it plays in your oeuvre?

CLOWES: I don't know. It was a bold experiment for me at the time. It just pains me so much that I can't go back and fix everything.

SILVIE: You mentioned that in your interview, that you couldn't read the previous issues. That you were too embarrassed or too nervous about seeing --

CLOWES: It's just crushing. It's soul-crushing to know that you can't fix all the millions of now-obvious mistakes. If you're a writer you can do so many more revisions, and you can really just polish and polish your writing forever. I know, working on that screenplay, I spent hours and hours and hours going over every little comma.

SILVIE: The Ghost World screenplay, obviously.

CLOWES: Yeah. You can move things around so easily. And when you do comics like that Velvet Glove story, you put so much effort in to your drawings, and it's such a struggle to get it all done, that once you finish it, you don't have the energy to rework anything, it's just sort of out of your system, and then you look back and think, "Oh boy, if I could only have done this..."

SILVIE: It seemed like the first installment of Ghost World could have been a one-shot. I remember while reading that first story, I couldn't tell it was going to become a series. In part because I think the other stories that it was with were "The Party," and "The Fairy Frog," which was the retelling of that Irish myth, a parody of a Velvet Glove movie...

CLOWES: It was sort of a hodgepodge.

SILVIE: It was one of the most diverse issues of Eightball.

CLOWES: [Laughs.] One of the most incoherent issues. It's funny because the response to that Ghost World story wasn't really that good. Most people liked "The Party" the best out of that issue, I think.

SILVIE: They were all pretty strong. You had "Why I Hate Christians" in there, you had "The Happy Fisherman." [Clowes laughs.] All this classic stuff. What made that first Ghost World seem more like a one-shot was because the focus wasn't so much on Becky and Enid as characters in themselves as it was on them as the focal point for people like John Ellis and Bob Skeetes --

CLOWES: - And how they relate to those kinds of characters.

SILVIE: Right. We were seeing through them rather than looking at them. The subsequent issues seemed to look more at them.

CLOWES: Right. After I finished that story I just couldn't get them out of my head. I almost wanted to have them be the focus of the whole magazine but then I was afraid I would get sick of them too quickly.

On the Making of Ghost World the Movie

SILVIE: How did the Ghost World movie come about? Did you approach Terry Zwigoff, or did Terry approach you? Or was there any approaching involved?

CLOWES: He one day called me up and said "You know, I know you're a cartoonist and I just did this documentary about Robert Crumb and I'd like you to take a look at it and give me some feedback on it."

SILVIE: Was this back in 1995 before Crumb was released?

CLOWES: Yeah, it must have been 1995, because it hadn't played in any of the festivals or anything. And I remember thinking like "Gosh, what an honor that he wants me to give him feedback on his film." I was actually expecting it to be pretty terrible. I figured anything that somebody's best friend made about him was going to be really candy-coated and stuff. When I saw it, I thought "Jesus! What a great film!" and I also thought, "Boy, nobody is ever going to see this. It will never get released. It's way too downbeat and who else besides me would care about an underground cartoonist."

I truly thought he had no prayer of anything happening with this thing. I thought this guy had wasted ten years of his life working on this great film that nobody will ever see. I gave him all my feedback, which was basically, "make it longer." [Laughs.]

A couple of years later he told me that he had no intention of listening to a word I said and that the film was completely locked and there was nothing he could have changed at that point, even if he had wanted to. It was just his excuse to meet me because he wanted to possibly work on something at some point after that. So it was basically a big scam. But it was great to see it. The weird experience was then going to the theater and seeing it because, after I saw it, I told all my friends, "Yeah, the version I saw had like twenty more minutes and it was really different." And then of course it turned out it was exactly the same and I just imagined all of it [laughs].

SILVIE: Did you see any of Terry's earlier stuff?

CLOWES: I hadn't at that point, but after I had been working with him for about a year, they finally showed his film Louie Bluie in Berkeley. It's a really entertaining film. I could tell he had a real knack for comedy. He later told me that he had to set up and create most of the situations in the movie, which is something that documentary purists really look down on. It was like he was directing a narrative, with actors and sets and stuff, but all the actors were playing themselves. But I could tell he had this real knack for that kind of thing. It's about this guy named Howard Armstrong who was this jazz musician in the 1920s who, when Terry found him, was living in a housing project in Detroit. He was this amazing artist: an amazing visual artist, and a great musician, just rotting away in obscurity.

SILVIE: So the real person starred in the movie or did it have actors?

CLOWES: No, it's the real guy. It sort of follows him on a reunion tour, playing music for old fogey record collectors, going back to some of the places he lived when he was a kid. Terry had this whole other notion of the film when he first met the guy. He found him sort of living in obscurity. He really wanted to capture the horrible mundane reality of his daily life, but apparently he couldn't get access to shoot in the Detroit Housing projects, so he had to come up with a whole new plan.

SILVIE: At what point did you guys agree to work on Ghost World?

CLOWES: I probably had only done the third or fourth episode by the time we first started talking. He was sort of interested in Ghost World and he had some of his own ideas. And he kept sort of encouraging me to try to combine my ideas with his ideas which, I was really resistant to at first. When we finally figured out a way to make it work, it all of the sudden seemed like the greatest idea in the world. But that's kind of how he is, he's sort of stubborn and relentless. After a while either he realizes he's wrong and gives up or, if he's sure he's right, he just never gives in and everybody else gets worn down and lets him have his way. [Laughs.] It's a really good quality to have when you're a movie director.

SILVIE: I heard that the screenplay combines Ghost World with "Art School Confidential" and other Eightball stories.

CLOWES: It has a few nods to "Art School Confidential." Enid's in a summer school art class, and there are a couple of references to little moments in that story.

SILVIE: With Illeana Douglas as the art teacher?

CLOWES: Yeah.

SILVIE: Is she a contemptible, "Art School Confidential"-type art teacher, or is she even much of a big character in the movie?

CLOWES: She's a pretty big character. I mean she's a type, but a very specific sort of failed-artist type.

SILVIE: Would it be annoying to go through an inventory of all the Eightball stories that went in to the script? I heard it had Dan Pussey in it too.

CLOWES: Hmm... really? Maybe. It's hard for me to remember what goes where, what was in my comics and what was in the movie. I can't really think of a Dan Pussey moment.

SILVIE: There's no comics industry anything in there?

CLOWES: No, there's not. Enid is sort of a cartoonist, she has a little sketchbook diary. We got Sophie Crumb to do the drawings. She has a sketchbook that's similar to Crumb's sketchbook with little notations of her day-to-day life. But she doesn't really refer to herself as a cartoonist.

SILVIE: Steve Buscemi plays Bob Skeetes, right?

CLOWES: No, no. Bob Skeetes is actually not in the film. No, if you read stuff on the Internet about who plays who, there's all kinds of baffling misinformation. I can't figure out where any of this stuff is coming from. Even on the Internet Movie Database, which is the most exhaustive resource for every possible bit of information you would ever want to know about movies, it's completely wrong. They list actors that I have never even heard as having played characters that aren't even in the film. For a while, they even had me as an actor in the film. I could look myself up and I actually had an actor's biography on the site because I was supposedly in this film. I could probably get a SAG card [laughs].

SILVIE: [Laughs.] You would go far with that SAG card.

CLOWES: Yes I would. If anybody can spot my one appearance in this film I will be very impressed [laughs].

SILVIE: You make a Hitchcockian cameo?

CLOWES: Yes, a part of me does [laughs]. Don't ask. It's in the X-rated DVD version.

SILVIE: I also heard that Steve Buscemi plays a record collector who develops some sort of relationship with Enid. He was loosely based on the "bearded windbreaker" character?

CLOWES: Plot-wise he's based on that character. I didn't really have a back-story for that character [laughs] when I did the comic. I didn't really figure out his entire history. But, it happens at the same point in the story, and the story takes off on a different tangent from there, where they sort of follow that character.

SILVIE: So how long did it take to make this script and what was that process like? Would you write a scene, and then Terry would come in...

CLOWES: It took forever for us to get a structure that we really liked. I was at first hell bent on trying to keep the episodic structure and I thought "Oh, this could be really great, and we could have little blackouts when we start a new part of the story," and all that. And then we realized that that would never work [laughs], and it has probably never worked in a film. I can't think of a way to make that work.

Once we gave up on that, it still took us forever to get something we were really happy with. We just worked and worked and worked for probably about a year before we got even a basic structure that we liked. Even after we started writing we ended up fine-tuning a lot. But basically every Sunday I'd go to this coffee shop and sit down and write five scenes and then go home and write them out by hand and then on Tuesday, Terry and I would meet in his dark little office in San Francisco. And we would sit there for hours while he slowly typed out all the new dialogue. He didn't have any script software so every time a character would speak, he would just space it fifteen times till we got to somewhere in the middle of the page. It was the most ludicrously slow process, but somehow it was very soothing or something. After we would get a few scenes written we would go back and rewrite and rewrite. He wrote a certain amount of scenes, and then I would rewrite his scenes and he would work on my scenes. It got very complicated.

SILVIE: Is the basic thrust of the film the same as the comic, that Enid and Becky's insular friendship implodes or does it assume a different theme?

CLOWES: No, I think the theme is the same, and the overall structure is the same: they graduate high school and they spend this last summer together and then sort of drift apart; that's all still there, but it's just sort of expanded. It's more focused on Enid, and Becky is a little bit more a supporting character, at least in the second half.

SILVIE: I guess a few questions ago when I asked you to give an inventory of every Eightball story that went into it is because I think somebody who read the screenplay told me it was like an apotheosis of every single Eightball story.

CLOWES: That might be wishful thinking. It has a bit from the "Gynecology" story. A lot of it is just this sort of added veneer of - not necessarily social commentary - but just sort of a treatment of the modern world that's in the background, that's sort of alluded to in the story but is a little more pronounced in the film.

SILVIE: So it has the stylized worldview of Eightball...

CLOWES: Yeah. I think that anybody who's read my comics will see a lot of visual parallels and references.

SILVIE: How long did the production of the film last?

CLOWES: The pre-production was about six weeks, which was really short. They're usually much longer, I think. The production was, I think we had 39 or 40 days of actual shooting. Which is, you know, short.

Something like The Grinch, or something like that, would have 200 shooting days. They would just go on forever and ever. You know, a Hal Hartley movie, or a Todd Solondz movie, has thirty days maybe. So forty days is luxurious on a low budget, but it's the kind of the thing where you don't have much leeway at all. You can't go back and correct things or anything like that. For the post-production, I guess we had six months or so.

SILVIE: So you were involved in every level of production....

CLOWES: Yeah, yeah. It was kind of endless. I thought, "Well, it will be a couple of months out of my life and then I will get back to the drawing board." And then it just kind of never ended. I finished David Boring literally a week before pre-production began. It was kind of amazing.

SILVIE: You mean you finished the third installment?

CLOWES: I finished issue #21 the day before pre-production began. I sent that off to the printer and had like eight hours to relax and then I had to move to LA [laughs]. From Feb. 1 through June. Then I had to come home and immediately do the book cover and all the stuff for the Pantheon book, which was very late at that point.

SILVIE: How difficult or interesting was it to try to, say, look for locations, and approve costuming.... How different was it to go from all that total control you have in comics to turning to the film world, to make that transition?

CLOWES: Well, there's a give-and-take because if I have to draw, say, an ugly strip mall in my comic, I have to go out and sort of observe an ugly strip mall, or several of them, and then distill all of the elements, and get the sort of correct iconic elements to make it look real but to make it also sort of read the way I want it to read. Then I have to go through all this work of drawing the perspective and all that and trying to make everything work in the drawing. If you find the perfect location, all you have to do is put the camera in the right place and in a way it's much easier and it's more real because it is a real thing. It has that advantage. But then, there's the incredible difficulty of actually trying to track down these locations. You envision what you want and you're always sure you've seen something that's perfect somewhere, but your mind plays tricks on you and nothing ever looks the way you remember it. If you have a billion dollars you can build it, which has its own set of problems, but we didn't have such luxury most of the time, anyway. I found that actually the most difficult part of the process was not in having to compromise and having to listen to people tell you they'd rather Enid wear this kind of clothing or have this kind of haircut. They were perfectly willing to do exactly what Terry and I wanted them to do, but it was very, very difficult to articulate exactly what we wanted. You know you can sort of draw a picture of it or point to something and say "We want it like this" but when it's something more general, like Enid's overall "style," it's very hard to articulate.

SILVIE: I'm sure you referred to the comic a lot.

CLOWES: Yeah, it was kind of cool because I'd be walking around the production office and in every single room there would be the most dog-eared copies of my comics and Xeroxes up on the wall. Being there for the whole thing, I got to see what it took to be a director and it wasn't quite as daunting as I thought. I really thought you had to know all this technical stuff, but you really don't. It certainly helps, but that's really what all these other people are there for. As long as you can articulate precisely what you want, they can figure out how to get it, to some degree.

SILVIE: Did you have any sort of creative interference from producers or anything like that?

CLOWES: We were really lucky. One of the main players in this whole thing was a producer named Lianne Halfon, who was an old friend of Terry's and who had come in to do some work on Crumb -- towards the end, his original producer was diagnosed with cancer right before the film was finished, and Lianne came in and sort of took over for her. She had started her own little one-woman production company right around the time we were starting to work on this, so we got involved with her because she had worked in Hollywood for years and knew how to communicate with other Hollywood people. It's truly like a different language. She was the one who sort of shepherded us through the whole process, and she really protected us from ever having to sort of contend with the money people.

SILVIE: So you never had to have unpleasant confrontations with Hollywood people?

CLOWES: To some degree, but not really once the film was going. It was really, sort of... I think the budget was low enough that we were sort of beneath everybody's...

SILVIE: Harassment?

CLOWES: Yeah, just the level at which there's any point in giving us shit about it [laughs].

SILVIE: So how long did it take to get the film off the ground from that time?

CLOWES: Oh, it took forever. I guess we turned in the first script in 1997, and it was made in the spring of 2000 [laughs].

SILVIE: Right. Because it seemed like for years there was hype about the movie.

CLOWES: Yeah, it was years. We were working with this company Jersey Pictures, Danny Devito's company. We turned the first draft of the script in to them, and they were pretty thrilled about it. Then every studio we took it to had some little problem with it where they, you know, they wanted to cast it wrong, they wanted to change it, they wanted to make it lighter. It just turned into this big ordeal. We could have gotten it made a million times, but never with enough money to do it the way we wanted to do it.

SILVIE: I'm sort of confused: is Jersey Pictures a studio?

CLOWES: No, they're just a production company.

SILVIE: OK, so what's the difference between a production company and a studio?

CLOWES: A production company doesn't have any money. They actually get all their money through deals they have with studios. Their basic job is to set up films and they act as supervisors through the whole development process.

SILVIE: So Terry's producer friend worked for Jersey Pictures?

CLOWES: No, she was an independent producer in the beginning. The way the film finally got made is that she had worked for years with John Malkovich in various theatrical productions, and he decided to start his own film production company of which she was made the head executive, and that's what I think enabled us to get the thing made. He was very supportive and made a lot of key phone calls for us.

SILVIE: So you have no dirty Hollywood sleaze to share?

CLOWES: I do, but not at this point [laughs].

SILVIE: [Laughs.] Wait till after the movie is released. What's the most significant or interesting or shocking thing that happened to you during the production?

CLOWES: I don't know, the whole thing was very strange. There was something really enthralling about having this group of unbelievably highly-trained technical experts investing 15 to 16 hours six or seven days a week to try to get this vision on screen as perfectly as possible.

I'm used to working in comics where the printers you work with, for example, seem totally unconcerned with the quality of the work they're doing, and then to go into this world where every single person is an insane workaholic. You imagine that they must all have horrible personal problems that lead them to want to never be at home or never do anything except the technical minutia of working on these films. It's really interesting [laughs]. I totally relate to that, I really sort of bonded with these people.

SILVIE: There was an interview with both you and Chris Ware in, I think it was Mean Magazine, where the interviewer brought up the point of cinematic influence, and Chris Ware said he tries to resist it, and you said that it affects you in a way that it would be dishonest for you to try to resist. And there is a clear cinematic influence in a lot of your comics.

CLOWES: Sure.

SILVIE: Has working on this film changed that?

CLOWES: I don't really think so, because working on the film is so unbelievably un-cinematic. What you're looking at on the set is so different from what you see on the screen and I was so focused on the behind-the-scenes kind of stuff, the on-set stuff, what the actors were doing, what was going on in the room rather than how it looked on the camera.

SILVIE: So did it deconstruct looking at movies for you at all, or was the experience so removed from art that it had no effect?

CLOWES: I couldn't watch movies for months, actually.

SILVIE: Seriously?

CLOWES: I've sort of gotten over it a little bit, but even now, when I'm watching a movie I'm so aware of all the little technical details - the sound-mixing and the extras and all that stuff...

SILVIE: So what's the artistic effect of that on you, in terms of the cinematic influence in your comics?

CLOWES: It was more the other way around: I was taking the knowledge I had accumulated about comics storytelling and trying to plug that into making movies. I would always go back to comics when I was trying to explain how I wanted the timing for a scene to work, or how I wanted the composition of something to look. I would think in comics terms and try to translate that into movie terms. I don't know. There are things you can do in movies that you definitely can't do in comics and you certainly have a lot more ammunition in movies. You have to take advantage of those things when you're making a movie and be very careful not to misuse them, not to manipulate the audience or to create false emotions. It's really powerful to be able to add music to something. You can really communicate complicated things to the audience in a very subtle way. The audience understands everything. That's the amazing thing.

SILVIE: Has working on the movie changed how you view your comics?

CLOWES: Working on the movie I was constantly having to defend myself. I would write a scene and people would say "I don't really get this scene." In some cases, I knew it was a good scene and I knew I was right. I just couldn't articulate why it was good. You get to where you fight the battles that are worth fighting. There were certain scenes that I knew were just not communicating and that's why people were responding badly to them and I knew that I had to change those. In my comics, I don't have editorial input. I think it made me a little more rigorous in regard to judging my own stuff.

SILVIE: Did you ever have to turn to your comics as proof that you knew what you were talking about?

CLOWES: Oh yeah, all the time. I was constantly feeling like the biggest loser in the world when we were making the movie.

SILVIE: Seriously?

CLOWES: Oh, yeah, I mean, you know, because these people have made hundreds of movies and they all knew the drill and I sort of felt like "What am I doing here? I have no idea what I'm doing." I felt like a guy with a straw hat and overalls walking around in bare feet going "Garsh." So I had to constantly think "Well at least I know how to draw comics pretty good." [Laughs.] How pathetic...

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