Spook who's talking

After the first screening of his second film, the masterful and unforgettable documentary about the life and times of happy misogynist and cult cartoonist Robert Crumb (Crumb, 1995) director Terry Zwigoff found himself having to fill in the audience response cards personally as the actual written responses proved to be far from positive: "Only two people liked it and they weren’t even sure they liked it." Luckily, the producer fell for Zwigoff’s falsified responses and took the film to the Sundance Film Festival where it won the Grand Jury Prize, and ultimately became the third highest grossing documentary film of all time.

Having scored such a success, Zwigoff found himself on the receiving end of every "quirky" script doing the rounds in Hollywood, among them The Virgin Suicides and Austin Powers, both of which the 53-year old director turned down. It was his missus who suggested that he take a look at Daniel Clowes’ Ghost World, a comic book which charts the slow demise of the friendship between two misfit teenagers immediately after high-school – the knowing Enid Coleslaw and her trusty sidekick Rebecca Doppelmeyer. Together they negotiate with the remnants of American culture and suburban ennui, all the while searching like Holden Caulfield before them for that which is not false.

Zwigoff, however upon seeing that Ghost World was a graphic novel was not as sure as his wife that he should get involved.

"I actually told her at the time: ‘I’m totally sick of comics after the Crumb film. I don’t ever want to see another comic. I’m going to get pigeonholed as the 'comic book director’. And the irony of the whole thing is that I only like two or three comic book artists in the world; Robert Crumb, Dan Clowes and maybe Carl Berks the guy that used to draw Donald Duck

and Uncle Scrooge. Besides I thought as a comic that Ghost World was a masterpiece but I didn’t think it would make a great film, because although there’s great dialogue and characters, there’s just no plot. But then I met Daniel and we made this connection right away, and decided to work on

a script."

Given this "connection", Zwigoff took the unusual step of having Clowes involved in the project up to and including the shoot, a step for which Clowes is grateful.

"As a screenwriter you get about the same level of respect as the caterer. I was there on the set while they were making the film, and I had no intention of not being there. People would come up to me and say, ‘I’ve never met the writer of one of my films and I’ve done 25 films’. I would like to have made the movie myself, except that I have no idea how to direct a film, so Terry’s the closest thing I was going to get to having that much control. Giving it to someone else I would have had nothing but fear."

And so Terry Zwigoff accidentally ended up making Ghost World, but all of his work seems to happen in a similar manner. He only became a filmmaker in 1978 after one of his regular trawls through second hand record stores turned up an old 78rpm record from 1934 by a forgotten blues musician. Himself a musician, Zwigoff set about tracking the artist down, and the slow process and film of his two year endeavour became Louie Bluie, a one-hour documentary which received both critical acclaim and respectable box-office returns for such a modest project.

As part of Ghost World then, Zwigoff developed an alter-ego named Seymour, who like the director collects old 78s and dresses almost exclusively in brown. Steve Buscemi realised the role in suitably dog-eared fashion. As Clowes remembers: "He was the only actor we could ever think of. All the studies wanted us to get a bigger name, but there was nobody else."

Indeed, casting proved to be a problem across the board according to Zuigoff.

"All the studies had the same list of actors and actresses they wanted attached to the project before they would give us the money. The only reason the film got made was American Beauty. That made Thora Birch a big enough star, and they told us if we got her, plus a couple of other people who had done decent-sized films, we’d get the money."

It turned out that Birch was more than happy to get involved, however almost didn’t having originally been asked to play Enid’s best friend Rebecca in the movie. She says, "They originally wanted me to play Rebecca and that’s when I lost interest in the project. So when the role of Enid then came up I just told Terry I was going to do it period. If I was a director and someone did that, I’d be like NEXT! but it worked!"

Birch found the role’s inherent contradictions to be a perfect challenge. She feels that while Enid is an extrovert, she’s not a very happy one:

"I think she doesn’t really know what she wants in life. She just graduates from high school and knows all the things that she doesn’t like and who she doesn’t want to be. The only problem is that she has no clue about what she does want to do and who she is really. I think that is one of the reasons she is constantly changing her appearance and testing out, in a subtle way different personalities."

Enid’s resulting uncensored commentary provides Ghost World with its momentum, as she finds her way in an America of endless fast food restaurants and strip-malls. As Terry Zwigoff has it:

"Enid is an outsider. She doesn’t quite fit in. That’s part of her dilemma. She’s trying to find some place for herself in a world that’s rapidly turning into one big consumer theme park; a mono culture without much of anything authentic remaining. She’s trying to connect with something truthful in this culture that’s basically just designed to sell you things."

As one might imagine then the character of Enid is one that doesn’t strike many false notes. A bit like Ghost World itself.

Ghost World is on release now