In their own little world

An overwhelming audience favorite at this year's film festival, Ghost World, a collaboration between world-class documentarian Terry Zwigoff and underground comics auteur Daniel Clowes, has become one of the summer's most eagerly anticipated films.

Zwigoff's first film, Louie Bluie, is an unfortunately neglected masterpiece. It documents a flamboyant old bluesman whose gift for storytelling exceeds his considerable musical and artistic talents. His next film, 1994's Crumb, is without a doubt one of the great modern documentaries, and among the best films of its decade.

Ghost World showcases the same sympathetic weirdness and generous humor that made Zwigoff's first films so great. His knack for authenticity makes the story, which follows two best friends (played by Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson) in their slowly diverging quests for post-high school happiness, familiar enough to be meaningful. Steve Buscemi turns in another incredible performance as a shy record collector befriended by Enid (Birch).

Zwigoff, like all his characters -- fictional or not -- is a great storyteller. What follows is an excerpt from a conversation he had with The Daily during the festival.

In response to my very favorable opinion of Louie Bluie:

Thank you very much. I always liked it. I was very proud of that. There's a very complicated, weird story behind the film. I don't know if I should waste your time telling it ... I collected old records and I found this record the guy had made. It was like one of two known copies. Nobody knew anything about this guy. To me it was this incredible thing. I set out to just do a little magazine article about the guy. I assumed he was dead, because this thing was recorded in 1934.

I find him alive, living in Detroit, after about two years of detective work. I went out to meet him and I said, "Geez, someone should do a film about this guy. He's incredible." And it fell to me. Nobody else would do it. I quit my job, with a life savings of $20,000. I naively thought, "Oh yeah, I'll make my money back on this film." I quickly ran out of money. I didn't know anything about directing a film. I just had a couple of friends who did documentaries and they said, "Well, you know, we can recommend this cameraman and this sound guy and you just go out there and you direct it. You don't have to do the technical stuff."

So I show up in Detroit at this guy's housing project and I cleared permission to film there months in advance. I show up and the management had changed its mind. We had to go to a warehouse, take his furniture and his wall hangings, which were all very distinctive and which he had made himself, and all his paintings and these crazy things and put them in the corner of an office. And we filmed the whole thing there and pretended it was a documentary. Actually it was very good training for making a feature because it was more like making a feature film than a documentary. Everything was sort of created. I prompted him, rehearsed him ... I'd heard him tell these stories a million times. In the Crumb film, too, I very much manipulated, not the reality of the film, I thought it was very truthful -- but a lot of those things were prompted for the camera because I had so little money. I just couldn't wait for things to happen. I knew Robert (Crumb) pretty well and I just said, "Can you pretend you're going downtown to draw like you do sometimes? We'll follow you with the camera. "Oh, OK." And we would scout locations for just the right bus stop that has a funny poster behind it.

The hardest thing about making the leap to feature films from documentaries to me was dealing with actors, who I always thought would just be horrible, temperamental monsters ... But I didn't know how to give directions to actors so I started taking these acting classes in San Francisco and the woman who ran them let me just sit in the back and watch, because I didn't want to act; I didn't want to go up on stage ... It would take a good 20 years to become a good director for actors. But at least I had some clue when I went in there -- and Thora Birch is a really good actress.

And Buscemi didn't need any help at all. We talked about the character for five minutes and I gave him very minor adjustments. I just said, "You know, this character is based on me and Charles Crumb." All that stuff in his room is my stuff, basically. I'm a record collector. That's pretty much my room. I just had it shipped down for the film. And he was pretty easy to work with. Thora kept wanting to play the jokes as if they were funny. I kept telling her to just do it more deadpan. She said, "Why do you want everything so deadpan?" I said, "Just because it's funnier that way." You have to play the reality of the story in order for it to be funny.

A lot of the parts of the screenplay that I thought would be the funniest turned out to be the least funny. The jokes. The jokes weren't that funny. The stuff to me that was very funny would be like that scene in art class where Ileana Douglas' character asks, "And who did this painting?" pointing up at the Mutillator, the guy with the big hammer from the video game, and this dumb, nervous guy just says, "Uh, that's the Mutillator. It's a video game." Just stuff that seems authentic and true is always funnier than a punchline. But who knew? We figured it out about halfway through ...

The story went around with Crumb -- that I told people just because I thought it would give me better reviews, it wasn't really truthful -- I always intimated that I never knew the story and it was this mystery ... Well, I knew the whole story. I met his brother Charles years ago. It was the story that made me passionate about making the film. And it's such a great story -- there are these three brothers and they're all such great artists and they're so tortured in different weird, fetishistic ways. There wasn't any mystery at all ... I've talked to a couple of other film directors about it. This guy Todd Solondz (Happiness), he's like, "Why even bother to tell the truth? It's all gonna get garbled in the end." So you sort of have fun with it and sometimes lie. I found myself lying during that Crumb thing just to keep it interesting while doing a million interviews.

Regarding the sympathy and fairness with which he depicts his characters:

I'm not too judgmental about them; I'll go that far. I was always shocked by how judgmental people were about that Crumb family. Most people I know, if you get to know them well enough, long enough, they're all just as crazy, just in different ways. Or at least you have a member of your family who is. Or your own family is just as dysfunctional in a certain way ... It was very easy for me in that Crumb film. I just didn't feel that way about them. I didn't think there was anything really wrong with them.

But for a feature, you really have to feel some connection to the characters and that's mainly what I'm interested in, is character-driven plots ... Characters are interesting to me, and the little details. To sort of get across the way I see the world, that's what's satisfying. To try to have some sympathy with these characters who are in your film in hopes that some day somebody that sees this film will have it change the way they see the world ... for the better, hopefully.

It's very depressing to me that people react to that sensational side of Crumb more. They have no idea what I left out of that film. I didn't even scratch the surface ... People just see it like a big freak show. It was never that to me. I really like those people. If I lived near them I'd be over there every night hanging out.

On what drew him to Ghost World as a film project:

I was less interested in making a film out of that comic book than in working with Dan (Clowes). My wife really pushed me to make Ghost World. She thought it would make a good film. I actually found all the other stuff he did in Eightball funnier, but none of it could be translated into a film as much.

I was just being sent all these scripts. I couldn't connect to any of them. Some of them were very well crafted. I was flattered, but I just couldn't connect to the material. A lot of it seemed very inauthentic to me. Dan's comics seem very real and authentic, and these girls talk and act like real people. That, to me, was the big draw. Maybe as a documentarian, that's what appealed to me. I like that reality of it.