Ghost World

An Interview with Terry Zwigoff

     One of the most popular graphic novels (or "comic-books" depending on your POV) of the 90's remains Daniel Clowes' "Ghost World," a loose epic set in a retro-kitsch world of fringe citizens who don't fit in with 99.9% of the general population. These are the restless youth, sad old men, zine collectors, misfits, slackers and daydreamers who have no desire (or ability) to fit into America's corporate cookie machine. This doesn't necessarily make them superior to the unwashed masses, in fact, it makes them more outcast and neurotic. Yet their struggle for acceptance and independence might be their best reward. Clowes has an intuitive understanding of "alternative" culture, and he genuinely likes these confused non-conformists. Filmmaker Terry Zwigoff (CRUMB) was an inspired choice to bring this original material to the screen. "Ghost World" nails this strange and funny universe with a faithful, terrific script by Clowes and Zwigoff.

     The title itself refers to the urban dislocation that feeds the character's anomie. Their nameless city is an amalgamation of plastic franchises and broken businesses, "...with block after block of indistinct mini-malls, office buildings and apartment complexes." Enid and her best friend, Rebecca (played to note perfection by Thora Birch and Scarlet Johannson), are girls you might remember from high school, the odd, sardonic ones who wore thrift store outfits with torn stockings and dyed hair, listened to "weird" music, and dissected their peers with razor taunts and lonely eyes. The pair make it a moral imperative to catalog their pet peeves as a shield of their vulnerablity. Things change when Enid meets Seymour (a rich performance by Steve Buscemi), a lonely collector of 78 rpm blues records. Though she is cruel and cavalier to him at first, Enid starts to realize that she is not so different from Seymour. The script has nothing to do with uber-teen films such as THE BREAKFAST CLUB, AMERICAN PIE, or CLUELESS. These are real people, and Clowes/Zwigoff never take easy shots at them. GHOST WORLD is a truly alternative film, and hopefully, audiences will embrace its unique blend of satire and sympathy.

     Terry Zwigoff, low-key and funny, talked about the history of the film from his home in San Francisco.

CD: How did you get involved with GHOST WORLD?

TZ: I was getting a lot of screenplays after CRUMB, weird stuff, like the script for AUSTIN POWERS. I don't think I was seriously considered for it but I could have gone down there and jumped up on the conference table and acted out every part (laughs). My wife was bugging me to do that film. I thought it was great. That was more mainstream, but one of the problems with documentary is getting people to see your film. Even if you're successful you find yourself in a caste system at film festivals. You're on the bus while the other directors are in the limo. You are a second-class citizen if you make documentaries.

CD: Were you always interested in doing a feature film?

TZ: I was never looking to do a feature. Even the documentary I sort of fell into. I didn't think of CRUMB as about a dysfunctional family -- it was a story about the risks and rewards of being an artist. I didn't look down on them. Charles Crumb was brilliant. I felt a very strong connection to the family. I thought the press treated the family like a freak show. Robert was a little freaked out at first, and he was already getting ready to leave the country.

CD: So you were getting a lot of scripts.

TZ: None of them were as good as AUSTIN POWERS. Most were contrived, nothing rang true, they felt derived from people who watched too much movies but had nothing else to talk about. I got VIRGIN SUICIDES, and I thought it was well-written but I couldn't connect to it. The scripts I got were very generic. Then I was going to do the Woody Allen documentary (WILD MAN BLUES), so I spent a week with him. He was a nice, generous, smart, funny guy. I liked him, and thought he got a bad rap in the press. Though I could tell from the producer that it would be a controlling thing. In terms of final cut, Jean Doumanian had it and if I were the producer, I would too, but it's not the way I work. I mean, I didn't want to a National Enquirer expose on him. I thought him and Soon Yi were a sweet couple. The whole country is pretty hypocritical about stuff like that.

CD: Yes, we are.

TZ: So I was looking for something, and Robert Crumb stayed in our house, and left behind some underground comics he was reading because he likes to stay on top of that. I wasn't a big fan of comics, but I liked Crumb's and Dan's. I really like EIGHTBALL, and GHOST WORLD. My wife said make it into a film. I could tell from reading it that I had a strong connection to the guy. I thought he was good with dialogue, although it doesn't have much of a plot, more an episodic slice of life, but it did have these two 18 year-old characters, Enid and Rebecca, who talk like real girls. I met him in 1994, told him I wanted to make a film of GHOST WORLD and asked if he wanted to help write the screenplay.

CD: How did you adapt the comic to the screen?

TZ: The comic has a stromg, murky feeling to it, you don't know what time it is, and as much as I liked the comic, I never tried to adapt it film. I thought the press would pounce on the actors, but they're coming after me, they're coming after Dan Clowes. I never looked at comic once or twice in terms of visuals. I worked for a year and a half with Dan on that screenplay, and I wanted to treat it like a screenplay; I never tried to duplicate the tone or the look of the comic. The film is simply shot like a two-reeler, a Hal Roach short. We didn't have much money, nor time. Ostentatious camera moves take me out of films.

CD: Did you work closely with Dan Clowes?

TZ: Dan was on the set every day, and he was always giving his opinions. He was drawing the art, always whispering things in my ear, some things I agreed with, some things not. Lianne Halfon, the executive producer on CRUMB, was heavily involved, she helped us on the script. I'm open to collaboration with anybody.

CD: What was your writing schedule?

TZ: We would meet twice a week. He lives in Berkeley and I live in San Francisco, and we'd usually go to coffee houses and talk. We spent a lot of time trying to get the story to work. We were adding other characters not in the comic. The hardest thing was coming up with the ending. The studio thought the ending was too ambiguous. I didn't think so at all, and one executive wanted a double wedding with Rebecca and Enid! I said what is this? SENSE AND SENSIBILITY? Get me Gwenneth Paltrow and Miramax. It's hard to get something different done until they see what the critics say. Luckily, we've had critical success already and that's already turned things around. I was trying to make this commercial, not really a blockbuster, but...I'd rather see HEY DUDE, WHERE'S MY CAR? than PEARL HARBOR.

CD: How did you and Dan work together?

TZ: We'd assign scenes, like I did the Seymour scenes, and he did the Enid and Rebecca scenes, then we'd critique them. Dan's generally a better writer than I am, but he liked the scenes I wrote. It's very hard for me to write. The most successful way is for me to carry around a little notebook.

CD: How did you pitch such an unusual project?

TZ: We were pretty bad at it. Lianne was pretty good at it. There's a whole jargon involved, and I was not well-versed. I made the mistake of going in and being pretty honest. I walk in there like Stan Laurel, but that doesn't work too well. Most people wouldn't take the time to read it. You'd set up a meeting in two weeks, walk in and there was some executive who obviously hadn't read it. Their reader had told them that it's a teen comedy about these two girls. They want you to talk them through it, it's more about you selling yourself as a director. They don't care about the script. If you have a big movie star attached, you're almost sure to get your movie made. People ask me how to make a feature, and I say "Get a movie star." And there were no 18 year-old girl stars that big at the time. They give you a list of casting decisions. The hottest girl was Sarah Michelle Geller and they all wanted her to play the lead. Nothing against Geller, but she was all wrong for this part. Enid is very alienated. We had a hard time making this film. After it was agreed the girls wouldn't be big stars, they said, "Well, we want Freddie Prinze, Jr for Seymour."

CD: Seymour is a little older.

TZ: Seymour is almost 40! Most actors look like well-adjusted happy people. So their next angle was GHOST WORLD is based on a comic book, and X-MEN made money, and comics are hot. I said, "Have you seen the comic? It's people sitting around in a room talking. They don't have superpowers." Then the next thing is having a pop soundtrack, N-Sync, Britney Spears, whoever's popular at the moment. I specifically wrote Seymour to collect 78 rpm old blues records. I hate modern music. I can't tolerate the radio, and I'm making the film with music that I love. Executives hate this because there goes another chunk of their profits. But they can't predict that because look at O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU? which is now a hot soundtrack.

CD: People are smarter than the industry gives them credit for.

TZ: Some are, some aren't. It's a pretty dumbed down culture.

CD: GHOST WORLD is about that cultural decline though.

TZ: Yeah, the element I was fighting for was that cultural criticism. Dan was more into what he did with the comic, which was a little bit of that. I'm a lot angrier person than Dan, who's a sweeter guy. I think it is a commercial element, because I think people are angry, fed-up and connect to that alienation.

CD: I hung out with the weirdos in high school, and I definitely knew these girls. I liked them. But they're a bit lonely.

TZ: I had no friends in high school. Not until I got into college. But Dan really created those characters, and I had to find a way to relate. So I stopped thinking of them as 18 year-old girls and started thinking of them as people with their own set of problems. It helped a lot that there was such downtime getting the movie made, I eventually started going to acting class. I didn't know how to talk to actors, so I learned a lot. That was valuable because my first instincts were wrong. I spent a lot of time with Thora Birch, and she just got the character.

CD: GHOST WORLD is truly different from every teen movie.

TZ: I got afraid there were too many recurring elements from CRUMB that I kept putting into the screenplay. I tried to take them out, but Dan said, no, that's very strong. This is the third film I've made where the protaganist carries a sketchbook around drawing cartoons. Now, I'll probably get typecast as the comic-book director. It's a little embarassing: "Is this all the guy can do?"

CD: It works for Woody Allen.

TZ: (laughs) That's true. He's one of the few directors whose work I like. His films are simply shot, but very elegant. That's why I tried not to look at the comic book, I looked at the script. I wanted to feel what worked right instead of intellectualizing the material. Any time I tried fancy shots, it detracted from the humor. It wasn't adding anything to the script. I feel bad for some directors because they want to keep working but what can you do but move the camera around? There's nothing going on in the scripts. Call me old-fashioned, but I don't go to the movies to see a Kodak moment. I want some characters.

CD: What's been the audience response to GHOST WORLD so far?

TZ: We showed this film to an early test audience and they hated it. I've never heard such visceral...I rode down in the elevator after, nobody knew who I was, and somebody said, "That was the worst film I've ever seen in my life." I kinda liked that. I thought I did something wrong with CRUMB because everybody liked it. But this screening was a very rough cut, no ending, temp track, cue cards, washed out image, etc. I told them if you show it like this, nobody will like it. The look of the film is very important. One of the points I'm trying to make is about our mono-culture...nothing's authentic or comes from tradition. It's businessmen saying, "Okay let's make a chain of these coffee shops." I want more than that. There's no choice anymore.

CD: Places like Starbucks commodify jazz and coffee, sell it like a bohemian package.

TZ: Even in politics, there's no choice between Democrats and Republicans. They're so similiar. It's all about the bottom-line. Money. We're still thinking short-term about this planet. Humanity is destroying this planet. We're selfish creatures and it's pure, unadulterated greed and short-sightedness. At a certain stage, you can't turn back.

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