TALKING ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL WITH DANIEL CLOWES

[MattBrady]

by Daniel Robert Epstein

Daniel Clowes isn’t exactly a screenwriter on par with William Goldman or Frank Pierson…yet. Clowes previously adapted his legendary graphic novel Ghost World with director Terry Zwigoff to great acclaim and an Academy Award nomination in 2001. Now Clowes and Zwigoff have reteamed on another adaptation of Clowes’ four page Art School Confidential story. The film, Art School Confidential, follows a talented young artist, Jerome Platz [played by Max Minghella], as he attends a small East Coast art school. Here the boyish freshman's ambition is to become the world's greatest artist, like his hero Picasso. Along the way he meets a myriad of nutty art school students and an alcoholic former art school student.

The film opens May 5th in select cities. We spoke with Clowes during a frenzied day of interviews.

Newsarama: How did you like the process of creating an original screenplay?

Daniel Clowes: To me it was a lot different and a lot more fun than Ghost World just because that was such a headache with trying to turn an 80-page comic into a movie. If it had been translated directly it would’ve been a 45-minute movie. So to figure out how to make that work as a film and go through the struggle of finding the Steve Buscemi character and figuring out how he fit into the whole thing was very difficult. Art School Confidential was really like working on a comic. To me the most exciting part of working is starting with the blank page and trying to figure out what’s going on. That’s what I got to do with this.

NRAMA: Did you have to look at the old Art School comics you did?

DC: It’s funny because I kept meaning to go back and look at it and see “Oh, is there anything in there I forget?” I just felt like I knew it so well that I never did. When we finished the film I put together a screenplay book for Fantagraphics. To do that, I colored the Art School Confidential story for the first time. I had to actually scan it and look at each panel on a screen and color it. That was like the first time I’ve read it in years and I was like “Ah. There’s all this good stuff I should’ve written.” It’s very frustrating.

NRAMA: A few minutes ago they brought you and [Art School Confidential director] Terry [Zwigoff] in together to be interviewed.

DC: I’d never done that before.

NRAMA: It’s really interesting to see you guys pretty much finish each other’s sentences and thoughts.

DC: It was the same thing the first time we met. We instantly connected. He reminds me of my older brother. I have an older brother who is about a little younger than him, but pretty close to his age.

NRAMA: Are you surprised that you connect so well with someone that is something like 15 years older than you?

DC: Terry’s quite a juvenile fellow. I think we’re both actually trapped in the same stage of adolescence, like 17 or something. So we meet at that point. We each have different interests and different strengths. I admire him on some level and I think he looks to me for certain things. To me the main thing about him is I find him hilariously funny, just his endless complaining and fetching, which drives some people crazy I’m sure. To me it’s never anything but hilarious. The reason I really wanted to write this script was to write a film for Terry as my audience because normally I’m writing for myself or some perceived audience. With every joke in Art School I thought “if it can make Terry laugh, it’s a success and I don’t care about any other audience member.” To see him respond to this script was really a great thrill.

NRAMA: As co-producer, how involved do you get with things like the look of the films like cinematography and production design?

DC: For Ghost World I did all that stuff. I was on the set the whole time and all through pre-production and helped with the casting and helped do the set decoration and stuff like that. I didn’t have an agent at the time. When I hired my agent, I told him what I did and he said, “Well, why didn’t you get a producer credit?” I was like, “I didn’t know you could do that.” So for this film I figure I’m going to do the same thing, so as we started shooting, I said, “Hey. Can I get a producer credit?” The producer’s like, “Oh sure. Why didn’t you ask? Of course.” I thought, “Oh, that’s great.” You don’t get any more money and you don’t get your own parking space or anything. There was really no benefit to it except when I’m 60 and if I want to pick up some 22-year-old girl at a Hollywood party, I can say, “Yeah. I’m a producer.” That’s really the only benefit.

NRAMA: Obviously you and John Malkovich have this relationship from when he produced Ghost World, so how was it getting to finally work with him as an actor?

DC: Really on Ghost World he was a guy we’d call when we really needed an actor or really needed the studio to do something. He’d make the call for us from his home. It wasn’t like we were hanging out with him all day with him as on-set creative producer. In this case, we got to actually hang out with him and he was there for much of the filming. He’s a really interesting guy. He’s absolutely what he presents himself as being on a talk show or something. That’s not a persona at all. He talks exactly the same way in a dinner conversation as he does to David Letterman or something. He’s very much his own thing and he’s really absolutely one of a kind. His acting was so good that at first we didn’t know what to make of it. We were like, “What is he doing with this?” Every line he read, would be different from how I imagined it. I really thought that something was wrong. Then when it was all put together, suddenly we realized that he knows exactly what he was doing and he knew how to pace the arc of his performance over the course of this movie even though it was all filmed out of sequence.

NRAMA: Amazing.

DC: It really was a higher level of acting than I had seen anywhere else.

NRAMA: Was the serial killer element in Art School there from the beginning?

DC: Yeah, when I first started I knew I wanted to do something on art school but I didn’t have a story. Our producer, Lianne Halfon, who also produced Ghost World, said “I love the title, Art School Confidential. It has such a range of meanings.” So I said, “Okay. We’ll use that title.” Then I just thought of that movie High School Confidential with Russ Tamblyn from the 50’s, which is a classic teen exploitation film where Tamblyn plays an undercover cop in high school trying to bust a narcotics ring. That was really of the first thing that drew me into it. I thought “What if that was in art school and it was taken very seriously?” I had gone to school at Pratt Institute in the late 70’s and early 80’s when New York was really a very different place, Brooklyn especially. The air was filled with murder. The thought of something like that was not at all far from any of our minds. We had a girl in our class who was actually electrocuted in her bathtub by some home intruder during senior survey week. Stuff like that was happening a lot and it was really like this Escape from New York type world was looming.

NRAMA: It almost did…

DC: Now when I walk down the streets in New York and no homeless people approach me at all, it’s unfathomable. It used to just be such a gauntlet that you’d have to hunch your shoulders and wade through the crowds. I don’t know how it happened. I still don’t understand the Guilianization of New York.

NRAMA: I remember you told me that when you and Terry were working on the script for Ghost World, you had to get into the head of teenage girls. Was it different this time around because you experienced art school?

DC: Yeah, it was much more getting back into my head at that age and trying to recall the various emotions you have, which range from delusions of grandeur to intense self-doubt. The world of art school is really rudderless. If someone were to tell you the absolute rules and the way the students could get an A in class, everybody would gravitate towards that. But there is no guy telling you that, so it’s very hard to navigate.

NRAMA: The undercover cop in Art School Confidential is really creating outsider art, do you ever wish you could do work like that?

DC: There’s a reason people respond to that and I certainly do as well. It’s hard to do that in comics because most people who create comics have that knowledge of the history of comics. I would never say it’s my favorite form of art or that it’s the absolute highest form of art, but it’s always interesting. There’s always something to learn from it, which is more than you can say about 98 percent of the other stuff.

NRAMA: The first half Art School Confidential reminded me of your early work which was funnier and nuttier. Then the second half was much more melancholy and echoed books like David Boring…

DC: I wrote it during David Boring, so it has a similar feel to it I’m certain.

NRAMA: How was it switching to that different tone in the script?

DC: I think Terry really responded to that part of the story so much that he brought a conscious shift to the film. In the script it’s a little more subtle and you don’t realize you’re there until you’re trapped in that world of the second half of the film. I tried to bring in more comedic elements into the later part of the film just to keep that somewhat alive and it was very difficult to find a way to put it in the final filming. It was not appropriate.

NRAMA: Did you do a book while you were in production of Art School Confidential?

DC: No. While we were in production I couldn’t do anything. I had finished The Death-Ray right before we started shooting Art School?

NRAMA: Last time we spoke we talked about The Uggly Family which you did for Cracked Magazine. Did it spark any interest in someone reprinting it?

DC: Mort Todd, the guy who wrote most of the Uggly Family claims he has a guy who scanned everything and cleaned up all the artwork, so we may do something. Fantagraphics said they’ll do it anytime, so it’s a matter of me getting my act together and putting together a book.

NRAMA: You have said in the past that you probably won’t do a straight up original screenplay ever. That it would be easier to show people a 10-page comic in Eightball.

DC: Yeah or even not have it printed. Just to give to the producers. Anything that makes it a tangible object makes it so much easier for them to comprehend.

NRAMA: Do you feel like studio executives understand comics or do they just know that comics are the hot thing right now?

DC: I don’t even know if it’s either of those things necessarily. It’s just for something to exist prior to being a movie makes the people who are involved in the system more comfortable, just because that’s the way it’s always worked. I would say you could write it as a short story but for me, doing a comic is the easiest route.

NRAMA: I know that you and Terry had a small blow-up during the editing of Ghost World, anything like that on Art School Confidential?

DC: I knew what to expect and since I wrote the film for Terry, if he responded to something, I wanted him to go with that. I wanted him to follow his vision because it’s a director’s medium and I don’t think it’s appropriate for a writer to try to bring it back to his own thing. The director is the guy signing his name to it and he’s the guy who gets credit or blame ultimately. I wanted him to make his film and I was very happy with what he did. It’s hard for me to watch in some ways because I hear the lines that are missing. I took about two months where I didn’t watch the film at all. Then I watched it the other day and it was the first time I was able to just see it as the film and not as the screenplay that has lines cut out of it. I was actually very impressed with what he did with it. I thought he made a lot of really good decisions.

NRAMA: So there’s no director yet on the film about the kids who made the shot for shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark film?

DC: There’s not. They’re going to wait until the script is pretty much completely done. They have some very interesting ideas, but I think I’d end up being murdered by [uber-producer] Scott Rudin’s henchmen if I were to reveal who they were thinking of.

NRAMA: I was lucky enough to break the story about you and Michel Gondry working together on the film adaptation of Master of Time and Space.

DC: That’s somewhat true except it’s one of those things where he and I have just talked about it a million times. But nobody’s written any contracts or anything. It’s not a real project in any tangible Hollywood way. He and I would love to do it but I have to finish several things before I’d even think about it and he’s got a whole another film he needs to make before that. Whether we do that one or do something else, I think we will definitely work together because we got along very well.

NRAMA: Were you a fan of his work before you met him?

DC: Absolutely. He’s one of like two or three directors that I would love to work with. I was flabbergasted when he called me.

NRAMA: Did you read the book Master of Time and Space?

DC: Yeah. It certainly could not be made directly into a film unless a studio would let Gondry do whatever he wanted and just write a check. It’s a completely crazy story, which is what we both love about it. It’s really a problem of trying to figure out how to keep the craziness and do something that somebody would actually make.

NRAMA: How did you and Gondry come together?

DC: My agent said, “Would you like to work with Michel Gondry?” I was like, “Yes. Whatever it is, yes.” Then Michel just called me at midnight one night. I flew out to New York City for a week or so and just hung out at his apartment and had many totally crazy conversations and a lot of fun. I think we’ll definitely do something sometime.

NRAMA: What are the other directors you want to work with?

DC: Certainly Terry is one of them and Spike Jonze too. But it’s funny because I have a certain something in my work where there’s this anger undercurrent and Terry’s really the only director I can think of who can get that. I’d love to do stuff for other directors just to see what would happen because my only experience is Terry. But yet I can never think of anybody who is really appropriate for that certain anger.

NRAMA: Are you collecting something out of Eightball now or doing another original book?

DC: I’m doing a series of comics that may turn out to be an Eightball or it may be something else. I haven’t decided. They’re all five or six page stories, so I may send them out to magazines or something at some point.

NRAMA: Are you doing an adaptation of Art School Confidential at all for Fantagraphics?

DC: No, I just did the screenplay book and it has some production drawings and things like that. Once it’s all done in one medium, it’s dead in all the other ones to me. Unless I rewrote it and did a whole different story, but I think I’ve had enough of Art School for awhile.

Art School Confidential opens in select cities on May 5th
http://www.sonyclassics.com/artschoolconfidential/

[Supreme Convoy]

I can't wait to see this!

[skip]

I would recommend Chip Kidd's written novel "The Cheese Monkey's" to anybody stoked about this movie. Both seem to play on that notion of brilliance, and lunacy –somehow– peacefully co-existing in collegiate art programs.

[Sheeplovr]

I saw It At Ny Comic con it's hillarious and will be a hit with the kids
I can't wait to see it again

[JOEY JP]

OMG!! I want that shirt Ethan Suplee has....

[manasteel88]

Opening in select cities eh?

guess i'm just gonna have to wait for the dvd...looks interesting though...gotta love ethan suplee...and that john malcovich guy is pretty good as well...

[JOEY JP]

Originally Posted by manasteel88

Opening in select cities eh?

guess i'm just gonna have to wait for the dvd...looks interesting though...gotta love ethan suplee...and that john malcovich guy is pretty good as well...

Actually, the film played last night (wednesday) at the San Francisco Film Festival. I totally forgot about the festival. I would've gotten advanced tix, but since I forgot, they only had Rush tix available, and just did'nt end up goin...

[McAlice]

Can't wait for this Forgot it was coming out

[DreamLord]

I've seen the trailer. I'll probably love the movie since I love Ghost World.

[BradE]

Someone at my school suggested Cheese Monkeys when I showed them this trailer. I bought it and read it on a plane to New York. Short book but still funny as hell.

What's this "select theaters" bulls__t? I go to an Art School and I know that just about EVERYONE is waiting to see this movie. Have Sony gone completely retarded?

...well I guess the 900 Million they stand to lose (According to Digg) when they release the PS3 has already proved that they have...

[Ms. Eva]

Can't believe I missed this thread a few weeks ago. Just v. v. excited to finally live in a town with indie theaters. It's gonna be here in a coupla weeks. I saw the trailer, it looks hilarious.

Yay..!