Ghost World opens Friday, July 20, at the Neptune Theatre

Daniel Clowes' Ghost World originally appeared as an eight-part serial in Clowes's comic Eightball, and later in anthology form, all which are published by Seattle's Fantagraphics. Clowes then co-wrote the screenplay with director Terry Zwigoff. He spoke with The Daily during the Seattle International Film Festival.

As the film's co-writer, how much input did you have on the rest of it? Were you on the set, or did you have some say in the casting?

I had more input than any other screenwriter was ever allowed. I got to be there for all of the pre-production, which involves the casting and hiring set designers and things like that. I got to see all the casting and help design the costumes and help plan out the sets and all that. Then I got to be there for all the shooting. Terry conferred with me before every single take, and I really got a lot of say. Terry felt that those girls especially were my characters, and didn't want to do anything that I didn't approve of. You never get that from any other director. I was amazingly lucky. Then again, when you're a writer you're only paid for the script, so everything I did was on the house for the last year and a half. But it's got my name on it, and I figure that it really does live for a long time. I feel you should do what you can while you have the chance.

Were any scenes from the comic shot for the movie but later cut?

There was stuff from the comic that was sort of more verbatim stuff, that was really funny in the comic, but we filmed it and it just didn't work as well in the film. We really learned that the film had to be its own thing and we couldn't just copy the comic. We really had to re-think every single thing on the film. Like in the diner scene, with the Weird Al guy. We had all the dialogue from the comic, where there's page after page where they were making fun of him. I though it was hilarious when we were filming it, but when we watched it, it was kind of tedious, so we just dropped it. It's weird what stuffed worked and what didn't.

I kept waiting for a scene in a grocery store where the girls see Lunchables in the Satanists' shopping cart.

We actually had that in the script for a while, but we didn't have the room or the time for it. We cut it out because it turned out later that you could never get clearance on stuff like that. It would never be funny with anything other than the Lunchables. You would've needed Kraft to watch the whole film and sign off on it. They'd think, "Oh, you're making fun of us." Which, of course, we would've been.

Panning across the apartment building in the opening scene, there's that guy with the Jim Belushi haircut. Tell me about him.

In the script he was "Man with hair on his back," or something like that. The extras guy -- they read the script very carefully and they want to bring in exactly what you have in the script -- and so the extras casting guy came in and had nine Polaroids of guys photographed from the back, with hair all over. God, why would they humiliate themselves like that? And that guy had the haircut too, so that's an added bonus. He was amazing.

The character who got the biggest crowd response was the guy who hangs out at the convenience store.

Yeah, that guy was the real thing. We had seen a tape of all this stuff he'd done where he'd play characters like that, these kind of dirtball characters. You could tell he absolutely understood that. He wasn't playing down to it. You could tell he was totally from that world and understood every nuance of it so well. We basically wrote that scene like, "Dave Sheridan ad-libs next five lines." We just turned the camera on him and let him do all that stuff. He showed up on the set that day with that haircut, which he had given himself. And he actually had those tan lines, he had actually gone out that weekend and had gotten sunburned with a tanktop on. Everything he did was so flawless. We didn't have to do any work on that guy at all.

Joey McCobb, the lame comedian at the Humor Grotto, was really true to the comic.

The reason that's true is because the guy who played Joey McCobb is my best friend who invented Joey McCobb. We were in a train station and said, "Wouldn't it be funny if some corny comedian made up all those jokes off the top of his head, 'Take my wife, please'?" We tried to get a real comedian and we tried out all these actors but they just weren't that funny. I said, "Why don't we just get Charles (Schneider) to do it himself?" He came in and Terry was like, "Why didn't we get him in the first place? He's perfect!" It's a very rare instance of somebody playing a character that they made up themselves.

Do you have any other comics in mind for a movie adaptation, such as "Art School Confidential"?

Terry and I, we like that whole art-school thing. We could do a whole art-school film. To me, my four years in art school was like what Vietnam was to Oliver Stone. There's so much material that I could just go on forever. Just an endless fount of stuff.

Finally, one of the props shown in the movie is a brochure for the fictitious "Academy of Art and Design." Did you realize that the campus pictured in the brochure's photo is actually the UW?

Is that right? I had no idea! That's hilarious!