anderswolleck

Its been a big year for comic book creators in the movies with Frank Miller co-directing Sin City and the Fantastic Four movie being such a big hit. It was going to get even better with the reteaming of Terry Zwigoff with Daniel Clowes on Art School Confidential. But since that movie has been delayed well have to tide ourselves over with Clowes newest hardcover book, Ice Haven.

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Daniel Robert Epstein: Was all the material in Ice Haven originally in Eightball?

Daniel Clowes: Not a lot of it. Probably 90 percent of it was there, but I went back and changed little things. Things that probably only I would notice. Certain words and any little drawings that irritated me after they were in publication. It was the kind of thing where after I sent the comic away to the printer, I instantly had all these small ideas that wouldve made it 80 percent better for me and I was like Damn. Why didnt I get a chance to do that? Then when I was able to do the book, I was actually able to put these little things in. Mostly the ending of the book, which was on the inside back cover of book collection. The little thing with the character David Goldberg that made it much stronger for me.

DRE: How come Ice Haven is being distributed solely by Pantheon Books instead of Fantagraphics?

DC: I did David Boring with Pantheon and they got the book in a whole different world of stores than Fantagraphics normally does. Fantagraphics at the time wasnt going through Norton and so they were getting all books only pretty much in comic stores and progressive independent bookstores. Pantheon was getting them in Barnes & Noble and stuff like that. It was interesting to me, to see how a book like mine would do in a world like that. So with Ice Haven, I was trying to get it in the mainstream world a little bit.

DRE: Do you think youve picked up new fans as a result or was it the Ghost World movie that did that?

DC: Im sure that movie was seen by several million people and the best-selling of my books is in the hundred thousands, so thats a huge difference. Im sure many more people have seen the movie than have read any of my books. Especially with it being on the Independent Film Channel all the time. I cant even imagine how many people see it just flipping the channels.

DRE: So Ice Haven definitely keeps up with your stalking theme.

DC: [laughs] Yes, it runs through my work.

DRE: Obviously youre an observer, but I bet you never really stalked anybody.

DC: Well how do you know that? Have you checked my police records?

DRE: Maybe in your younger days?

DC: Not exactly, but its something that always occurred to me as an interesting prospect. I always liked the idea of applying the rules of detection to somebody not necessarily related to a crime, just sort of to figure out what makes them tick. Theres a store in San Francisco called The Spy Shop that sells things like briefcases with hidden microphones and things like that. Every time I pass by I think, what a great thing that would be for a writer. You could go to restaurants and listen in on peoples conversations across the room. It would just be great. So it all comes from that.

DRE: I always wanted to get bugs, little microphones.

DC: Yeah, believe me. I think about that all the time.

DRE: I dont know about other states but you cant buy them in New York. You have to buy the kit to make them.

DC: Oh, is that right? That I didnt know. Ive never actually gone so far as to look into it, but Im sure with the Internet its not hard to find.

DRE: I worked in an office and I thought bugs would really have helped me out in an office situation.

DC: Oh, yeah.

DRE: I dont think youve worked in an office for many years.

DC: No, it hasnt happened yet [laughs].

DRE: Im sure you have an unlisted phone number and things like that, because youre pretty popular with a certain kind of crowd that might be into stalking.

DC: I have been stalked to some degree. Back in my early days, I used to actually publish my home address in my comics, just because I was too cheap to get a post office box. So once some crazy girl drove all the way from Cleveland and camped out on my doorstep and just sat there sobbing for like two days. Stuff like that you want to avoid.

DRE: Was David Boring serialized in Eightball?

DC: It was. It was three episodes and I was kind of making fun of the fact that I was taking so long in between episodes. I had these absurd cliffhangers in between each episode. Like the first chapter ends with a bullet heading towards the reader. Then the next issue came out like eleven months later or something. Its the worlds slowest bullet.

DRE: Why does Ice Haven feel less structured?

DC: It was just a different way of looking at things. My original impetus for Ice Haven was that I bought a whole bunch of old like Sunday newspaper comic sections on eBay and I got really obsessed with that format. I thought it was such a great thing to have all these disparate styles together in the same booklet. I thought it would be great if you could somehow do a story that had that quality and diversity of all these different styles to tell one story. So that was where Ice Haven came from.

DRE: You use a few different drawing styles in Ice Haven, but you really seem to have perfected the one that you normally use.

DC: I dont even know which one that is. [laughs] Lately Ive been lost on my own history.

DRE: I was thinking of the one you used for David Boring.

DC: That was my sort of film noirish photographic style or something. In Ice Haven, its a much looser, more cartoony thing. At least to me it looks much looser probably to everybody else it still looks exactly the same.

DRE: It is looser. I guess thats maybe a result of me looking at the coloring.

DC: The coloring is very time consuming.

DRE: Are you still developing new styles?

DC: I feel like Im always kind of trying to do something new and try to forget what Ive done in the past and start over with each thing. Ive found thats the only way to work. I try not to live up to any expectations or to build on anything Ive done before but start as though Ive never done it before. Of course it always turns out in some ways to have similarities with everything Ive done before, but I try not to think about that stuff because I find it very crippling.

DRE: Have you done anything more with the Ice Haven characters?

DC: No, they were all created just for that story. I have this sketchbook that I just fill with character ideas that are often just little one line things. Like the Random Wilder character might have started as a guy who is very polite to his neighbor, but secretly hates her and all his thought balloons are filled with hateful indictments. It starts as something as simple as that. Then later when Im putting together a story, I take all these little character ideas and see which ones actually work in the story and enlarge them or discard them as they do or dont fit into the story.

DRE: Has it become easier to create these stories?

DC: I wouldnt say its ever been difficult. Its time consuming, but a big part of the process is to sit with these characters for a long time before actually committing them to paper to really get to know and understand them as real people before trying to define them on paper. Right now Im starting a new story and Ive spent the last two months just kind of sitting in my room thinking about these characters. Its an odd thing to do. You have very little evidence that youve actually done any work all day and yet I have this kind of entire world in my head that Im almost ready to start drawing.

I spend months and months thinking about these characters. I find that since comics are very difficult to edit after the fact, its behooves you to know what youre going to do before you sit down and get started. Whereas working on movie scripts, you can just plunge into it and rewrite it any number of times so the characters become clearer with each draft. Eventually they come out and you get a sense of what theyre about. But in the comics, you cant really do that. You cant go back and redraw them over and over unless youre completely out of your mind [laughs]. Its a much better idea to know where youre going before you start.

DRE: Was that your cell phone ringing?

DC: Yes it was. I work out of the house a lot and we have a baby, so I must be reached by my wife.

DRE: Thats interesting. I wouldve thought you wouldve foregone cell phones.

DC: Believe me, I held out as long as I could. Its actually funny, every month we get the bill and theres a couple of months where I used it a total of three minutes by myself. I was like Can I get a plan where if we use under five minutes its even cheaper?

DRE: Was it right after you got a Hollywood agent that you had to get a cell phone?

DC: No, I actually didnt get it until the baby was born. That was the demarcation.

DRE: Yeah but then all of a sudden you realize that maybe you never couldve lived without it.

DC: Well if I lived in LA. I absolutely wouldve had one for years, because if youre stuck in the car for three or four hours a day, it gives you something to do. Here I never drive anywhere so I dont have to worry about that.

DRE: Do you ever get writers block?

DC: I never have but I always expect to. I always work as though Im going to get it. [laughs] I try to get down all my ideas while I can while Im still excited about them. I always anticipate that one day theyll just all stop, but so far Ive never had any time where I couldnt work for that reason. Its always been just because a story was taking longer to develop than I wanted it to or something like that, but Ive never had it where I was just out of ideas and had no idea what to do. That seems like a terrifying prospect.

DRE: Is there anything of yours that youll never reprint?

DC: Oh, theres stuff I did when I was like 18 or 19 that I would not want to reprint, but I dont know. I always find it kind of irritating when people have every single line they ever drew in print at all times. I try to keep it so that theres only the most recent stuff from the last ten years or so. But I only do it just because people bother me about it so much. [laughs] Its easier to do it than to not do it.

DRE: Harry Naybors stuck me as the most personal character in that book.

DC: In some ways he is and in some ways he started off as kind of a cheap joke. I just thought Ill make fun of the fact that there really are no sort of distinguished comic book critics. Ill make it as though this guy has the nicest apartment and in Ice Haven hes sort of a celebrity because hes a comic book critic. Then as it went on, I realized that I wasnt all that interested in that particular joke and then I started to give him thoughts that I have on a day-to-day basis when Im sitting at the drawing board. Like Why am I doing comics? Whats the point? What is it about comics that makes me do them? I let him voice some of those thoughts and then as the story progressed I realized I had made him a fan of my work. Hes sort of obsessed with me. I thought since there are no critics out there who are actually obsessed with me, I had to create my own.

DRE: I saw that theres an Ice Haven screensaver. Did you create that?

DC: There is? I dont even know about it. I wouldnt have a clue how to do that.

DRE: Just by coincidence two nights ago I couldnt remember the name of a character from Cracked magazine.

DC: Thats a sad night.

DRE: I think my wife was late coming home from work I think.

DC: What was the character?

DRE: I think it was Souped-Up Man, the parody of Superman.

But I typed Cracked Magazine into Google and your name popped up. I didnt realize that it was you who drew The Uggly Family. I used to read that all the time.

DC: Really? My god.

Its only in the last few years Ive been meeting younger people who actually grew up reading that. When we were doing it we had no contact with the 13 year olds who read it. We had no idea anybody was actually reading that thing and now 15 years later, theyre all adults and have these fond memories of it. Its kind of amazing.

Thats something I would actually like to reprint because its never been collected in any form but I never got back any of the artwork. But a couple years ago they had that Anthrax scare in Florida and thats where all the Cracked artwork was stored. I heard it was all destroyed including the film too. Now the only way we can reprint it is to go get actual copies of Cracked and get somebody to fix them up on a computer, which would be unbelievably time consuming.

DRE: How did you retain the rights to that stuff?

DC: The editor at the time was an old friend of mine and he sort of tricked the publishers into granting the artists their own copyright. Thats how they got Don Martin to work for Cracked for a in the mid-80s because he was sick of giving up his copyright to MAD. So I co-own the Uggly Family along with the writer, Mort Todd.

DRE: Oh, I remember that name.

DC: Mort Todd was actually the pseudonym of the editor, so he was giving himself work under a pseudonym. It was probably illegal.

DRE: Was Cracked a good gig?

DC: Yeah, that was like my first paying job when I was 23 years old. At the time it paid incredibly well.

DRE: It was just like a funny coincidence. Im glad I brought it up, especially seeing as you heard about something two weeks ago.

DC: Yeah, we were just talking about how wed like to do a collection of that and trying to figure out how in the world we were going to do that without any art or film to print from.

DRE: Its too bad the film was destroyed.

DC: Yeah and it was printed so hideously by Mafioso in Connecticut or something. Its the shoddiest print job so it would take some poor computer technician the better part of a year to clean up the art, but maybe theres somebody out there wholl do it.

DRE: So Fantagraphics would definitely not pay for that?

DC: I dont know. Maybe they will. Well see how extensive it is. Maybe its not as bad as I think. Certainly Im not doing it, I can tell you that.

DRE: Maybe if you can find a Cracked that wasnt folded up and shoved in some kids back pocket.

DC: I know. Even my copies look like they went through the washer a couple of times.

DRE: I havent read the new issue of Eightball. Im a guy that waits for the trade paperbacks.

DC: As many people do now. Thats why we do the books.

DRE: Whats Death-Ray?

DC: Death-Ray is about a teenage superhero in the 1970s who develops superpowers and gets a death-ray that can make people disappear without a trace. He goes through this kind of teenage trauma in the 70s and then puts it away for twenty years and then in present day, he kind of gets back into it a little bit. He comes back out of retirement towards the end. A very superhero story. It was just in one extra long big issue.

DRE: Will you do anything more with it?

DC: I have an idea for another story Id like to do with the character that I would add to the book, but that wouldnt be happening for anytime soon.

DRE: I saw you had a Special thanks in the credits of Bad Santa. Did you work on the screenplay at all?

DC: I did not. I had almost nothing to do with it. I think I read an early draft and told him that he shouldnt make it, but I think thats about it. I was really Terry Zwigoffs sounding board. We worked on Ghost World together and had a great time so we had this real camaraderie. Then he went off and worked on Bad Santa and had nobody that he could trust on the entire film. So he would call me at three in the morning and tell me the horror stories of working on that film. It was a thanks for being his psychiatrist.

DRE: [laughs] Why didnt you think he should make it? Too dirty?

DC: No, that was the part I liked about it. The original script was actually much more extreme and much funnier, but my fear was that they werent going to let him make that version of the script and they did to some degree. But they did cut out a lot of stuff that I thought was really funny.

DRE: Did you see Badder Santa [on DVD]?

DC: No, Terry wouldnt let me see it because that isnt his film at all. Thats just some hack editor putting in longer takes of scenes. I thought that was a real insult to Terry. Thats not his cut at all. It stinks because it seems like he had something to do with that but its just a marketing ploy.

DRE: I heard he might do a directors cut.

DC: His directors cut is by far the best version of the film. I saw it early on with a big crowd and everybody loved it. Then the studio wound up changing some stuff around. I really hope some day somebody will release his directors cut.

DRE: Did you like the version that came out in the theatres?

DC: Yeah, for what it was I thought he did an amazing job. I thought there were so many funny parts to the film and just knowing how amused he mustve been made it fun for me to watch. Its painful when they go in and change stuff around that doesnt really make any sense. They added scenes that just dont make any sense.

DRE: When is the film Art School Confidential coming out?

DC: Its the last film made by United Artists, which is owned by MGM.

DRE: Which Sony owns now.

DC: We were scheduled to be out in September [2005] and then the deal with Sony went through faster than they thought it was going to. Sony took over and then all the sudden a whole new team of people is handling the film. Theyve now decided that theres no way they have time to promote it for a 2005 release. So theyre going to put it out in I think March of 2006.

DRE: Oh, so it wont make the cut for this years Oscars.

DC: No but I dont know if its an Oscar film. Its the kind of film that the Oscars dont notice until five years later and they go Oh yeah. Maybe that was good.

DRE: Yeah, but you got nominated once so theres always a chance.

DC: I guess theres a chance. But were very proud of this film and we just want it to have a chance with an audience. So were happy that well actually have time to promote it and its not just going to get thrown into a couple of theaters and have to compete with all the October Oscar bait. We still have our own chance in March to really do something.

DRE: Is the film all done?

DC: Yes its been done for a few weeks. We finished the sound mix a couple of weeks ago.

DRE: Are you producer on it?

DC: I was a producer. I have like five credits in the end of the film. I did paintings. I designed the main titles. Its almost like a real mom-and-pop business, these Clowes/Zwigoff films. We all just pitch in and do all these weird tasks as were making them.

DRE: Art School Confidential is being scrutinized by on the Internet . Ive people who are already saying Didnt they already do this kind of thing in Ghost World? Blah blah blah.

DC: Its nothing like that. We did do that thing in Ghost World and this isnt at all like a cheap joke about art school. Its really a twisted love story/comedy set in a world of art school. Its not about making fun of bad art and pretentious art teachers at all. Its about these very specific characters. In some ways its more like David Boring than it is like about the Art School Confidential comic strip.

DRE: Is it as depressing?

DC: No, I dont think its depressing. Its got a comedy underpinning to it with an obsessive love story at its center.

DRE: Is it rated R?

DC: Oh, without a doubt yeah. I wouldnt be surprised if we hit trouble trying to get it rated R. It has nude modeling in it.

DRE: Do you do any rewriting of other peoples screenplays?

DC: Ive been asked to do them. I always think that it would be really fun and easy money. Then they send me the scripts and theyre always so horrible. My advice is always to kill the main characters off on page five and start a new movie on page six.

DRE: Do you still get paid for that?

DC: No, Ive never gotten a nickel for that. Ive spent many hours reading horrible scripts and never made a dime. I finally told my agent, I dont think Im a rewrite man unfortunately. I can only do my own thing really.

DRE: Was it tempting?

DC: Yeah, because its unreal how much money they pay. You get paid by the week and its just outrageously over the top. Its more money than the actual writer who spent nine months working on the script gets paid. I just cannot bring myself to do it. Even if something was really good, I dont think I could do it. I cant get in the mindset of thinking about a film or a story when its that far along. I have to be there from the beginning.

DRE: Is Backyard Resistance still going on?

DC: I am possibly turning in the first draft of the script tomorrow. Its actually not called Backyard Resistance. That was some title that somebody at one of the agencies made up and told Variety.

DRE: Oh good, because it sounds like some kind of Colombian rebel thing.

DC: Yeah or like a gay porn movie. I thought that [producer] Scott Rudin had come up with the title and they thought that I had come up with the title. We had a meeting right after the Variety announcement and we were looking at each other like How come youre not telling me about the title? Then we realized that none of us had come up with it. It was probably some intern who answered the phone. We have no idea. As a friend of mine said, It doesnt even make sense to the nerd in me, because there is no resistance in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

DRE: I would imagine that though its might not be your favorite kind of movie but you still liked Raiders of The Lost Ark.

DC: I did. I think Raiders is really the last really good action film, because its sort of based in reality. Everything that happens in the film is possible for a human being to do, whereas films after that, all the characters became superheroes and were doing things that were out of the realm of possibility. Raiders is really a down to earth film in a certain way. It has a certain something like no other film like that really has. I hadnt seen it since I was 20 years old, but to see the version these kids made, I got very caught up in the story just from watching these crazy12 year old kids in ridiculous costumes running around and shooting at each other. Theres something very affecting about it.

DRE: Did Rudin say why he wanted you to write it?

DC: I think he had seen Ghost World and knew that I could handle adolescent characters. Also he had read the script for Art School Confidential and were fairly impressed with that. I think that was all there was to it. I think they wanted somebody who would come to it with a kind of a different sensibility and who wouldnt bring kind of an oversentimentalized feel to it. It would be very easy to make it a weepy sentimental film. Which isnt necessary because all the emotion is already built into the material. You dont have to enhance it at all.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck