The misfits of Zwigoff: a visit to the set of Ghost World

• Ghost World plays on 25 July at Cinema Rediscovered, running from 22 to 26 July, as part of its ‘Comics Come Alive’ strand.

Two Satanists are strolling down Lincoln Boulevard. It’s a dry, sunny morning in LA, yet both have open umbrellas and their garish pink clothes are incongruous. Two teenage girls, dressed in casual thrift-shop chic, trail them half a block behind. “What do you do if you’re a Satanist, anyway?” asks the blonde girl. “You know, sacrifice virgins and stuff,” her dark-haired friend replies. “That lets us off the hook,” quips the blonde, as they pass a piece of graffiti sprayed on the wall. “Ghost World,” it says, in big blue letters.

“Cut!” calls director Terry Zwigoff from the other side of the street. This is a scene from his new film Ghost World: a black comedy about teenage girls spending a summer in the bizarre corners of a contemporary US city. It’s the last day of shooting, and Zwigoff is exhausted. He’s not used to the punishing schedule a major studio production demands; the only movies he’s made before are low-budget documentaries, put together at his own pace. But his last film Crumb (1994), a psychobiography of the underground cartoonist Robert Crumb and his family, was an unexpected success and his entrée into Hollywood.

Crumb unflinchingly explored links between creativity, sexuality and deviance seldom limned before on screen. Though a documentary, it was emphatically the work of a film-maker skilled in constructing narratives that engage both the intellect and the emotions. The result was raw and affecting, a human spectacle at once “fascinating and oddly moving” as Jonathan Romney wrote in Sight and Sound. Despite, or perhaps because, of this, it went on to become one of the highest-grossing documentaries in history.

“After Crumb made a lot of money,” recalls Zwigoff in a Midwestern drawl not unlike Crumb’s own, “I got 300 scripts a month. Even that first Austin Powers movie came my way. But I didn’t connect with any of them. Film-making’s not interesting to me if it isn’t personal.” Instead, Zwigoff spent three years co-writing Ghost World with another underground cartoonist, Daniel Clowes. It’s based on Clowes’ comic strip of the same name, the success of which has earned him the tag “the Crumb of his generation”. But though Clowes’ work is distinctly adult in nature, like Crumb’s, his reputation rests not on short strips but on book-length narratives strongly influenced by cinematic storytelling.

“What attracted me to Ghost World was Dan’s dialogue and characters,” says Zwigoff, “but we wound up sharing a lot of the same sensibilities:’ What they share above all is a determined outsider stance. Zwigoff’s films and Clowes’ comics alike display a fascination with the unconventional, an affection for the margins of American life and the detritus of times gone by. “It’s looking into things people see every day, but gloss over,” says Clowes.

Clowes’ comics exhibit what could be called a trash aesthetic, but they are also imbued with a sense of humanity towards his subjects: the lost look in the eyes of strangers on the street, the pathos of childhood bric-a-brac, the crumbling world of fake diners, flea pit cinemas and bad TV. In this world relationships of trust are central, never more than when they’re neglected or betrayed. Clowes’ best work – Ghost World, David Boring, Caricature – is all about our need for such relationships, and our inability to sustain them. The theme crystallises in his trademark ‘bad-sex’ scenes where streams of self-conscious thoughts flow through his characters’ heads preventing them from communicating what’s important to them or even being present in the moment. These scenes are funny, unsettling and compassionate. They operate, like the Crumb film, in the gap between what is said and what is implied, what his characters believe and what the audience understands.

Zwigoff, for his part, is an accomplished chronicler of American culture’s more obscure corners. Before Crumb he made Louie Bluie (1985), a documentary about a forgotten blues musician from the 30s, and A Family Named Moe (unreleased), about an equally little-known Hawaiian guitarist from the 20s. And though Robert Crumb achieved public recognition in the 60s as part of the counterculture, his work has remained defiantly uncommercial, uncompromising and underground, a posture reflected in Zwigoff’s film. “It quickly became known as ‘a very disturbing film about a dysfunctional family’,” he says. “But that wasn’t what it was about to me. It was more about the risks and rewards of not fitting in. To be an outsider in America, to be an artist, to be alienated – it’s not without its problems. I can certainly identify with it; I’ve never been able to fit in.”

The teenage girls in Ghost World are high-school misfits who swear like troopers and have few friends. They’ve just graduated and are seeking something interesting to do with their summer. Hence the scene I observed being filmed, where they stalk a middle-aged couple who may or may not be Satanists, but whose peculiar appearance has intrigued them. It’s not the sort of situation you see in most teen movies, but then Ghost World is very far from the safe, comfortable adolescent world depicted in such recent films as American Pie and She’s All That (both 1999) or earlier models like The Breakfast Club (1984) and American Graffiti (1973). “I had to see a lot of teen movies when we were casting,” says Zwigoff. “I can’t think of a single one I liked. They all seemed so false.”

Ghost World is closer in spirit to Todd Solondz’s jet-black comic nightmares Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) and Happiness (1998) or to Steve Buscemi’s Trees Lounge (1996). As in Trees Lounge, one of the girls becomes involved with a man twice her age – a character called Seymour, played, as it happens, by Buscemi himself. Based on Zwigoff, Seymour is an obsessive record collector, immersed in the popular culture of the 20s and 30s but unable and unwilling to engage with the world around him. “It’s like Lolita from the point of view of Lolita rather than Humbert,” muses Clowes.

With characters as marginal as these, Ghost World wasn’t easy to pitch. Despite Zwigoff’s success with Crumb, it was a lengthy struggle before he and Clowes secured funding from MGM and Granada Films. “Terry and I were the two worst pitch-men in the history of Hollywood,” admits Clowes. “We would mention Woody Allen films, and get the most horrified looks. The best thing that happened to us was American Beauty, because then we could say, ‘It’s like American Beauty’, and they’d think, ‘$200 million! Let’s make that movie!”’

The comparison was assisted by their casting of Thora Birch, the rebellious daughter in Sam Mendes’ Oscar-garlanded movie, in the lead role. But Ghost World aspires to a subtlety largely absent from Mendes’ film. “While I thought American Beauty was unbelievably well made and acted,” says Clowes, “I really didn’t like the script. A lot of it was very simple and trite – ‘Oh, the military dad is gay! The slutty girl’s a virgin!’ It was just very easy. What’s the point of creating paper tigers? It’s not dramatic at all.” Where American Beauty appears to posit a simplistic division between rebels and conformists, both the script and the original comic book of Ghost World seem informed by a more complex sense of social identities and what they mean to those who adopt them.

With its colourful, chaotic sets, Ghost World also boasts a more convincing visual representation of the stuff of teenage life than is found in most Hollywood films. The Thora Birch character’s room is overflowing with tat – old roller skates, broken toys, gaudy plastic bangles, chocolate wrappers. You can almost smell the mouldering Doc Martens and cheap green hair dye. Such detail is unsurprising, given Zwigoff’s background in documentary-making. “Directors and producers usually expect to see the same teenage room they’ve seen in so many other films,” says production designer Ed McAvoy. “But we’ve used books where photographers have gone into real teenagers’ rooms, and you see how un-art-directed they are.”

Despite the painstaking work that’s gone into the production, Zwigoff remains unhappy with the sets. He estimates that 90 per cent of the things he wanted to show – posters, records, books and so on – could not be used because of legal-clearance difficulties. The problem was particularly acute with Seymour’s hoard of old pop-culture artefacts. “I’ve been collecting this stuff for 30 years,” says Zwigoff, “so I have some beautiful museum pieces that I wanted to feature. They’re breathtaking design-wise and they show important aspects of the character’s personality. But you can’t clear it, and you wind up shooting some generic thing you can rent at a prop house.”

The set for Seymour’s room had already been struck by the time of my visit so it’s impossible to judge whether such misgivings reflect genuinely damaging compromises or merely a documentarist’s uneasy accommodation. Nevertheless, the mindset of the obsessive collector is accurately and wittily captured in the script, something for which Clowes gives Zwigoff full credit. “Terry lived in this world of record collecting, that’s what he did for a living for years,” he says. ”It’s such a great thing to use – the kind of specific world you never see in a movie.”

Before Ghost World Zwigoff had researched a documentary about collectors, though he has yet to raise the funding to make it. The theme is also present in Crumb, where Crumb is shown neurotically worrying about the record collection for which he seems to have stronger feelings than for any of the people in his life. The specific focus of his obsession – 78 rpm records – is Zwigoff’s too, and the pair share a nostalgia for the interwar era (a time before either of them was born). “It’s true, every single film I’ve made starts with a 78 playing,” reflects Zwigoff. What is the attraction of that period? “I just think everything seemed better then – art, design, music, culture – it all seemed to come together in the 20s.”

It was record collecting that originally led Zwigoff to cinema. When he decided to make his first documentary, about musician Howard ‘Louie Bluie’ Armstrong, he had no formal training or experience in film-making at all. “I wish I had,” he says. “It would have helped. I had to throw away most of the first week’s shooting because I didn’t know anything about coverage. I got to the editing room and my editor said, ‘What am I going to cut to? You’ve only got a four-shot of this band – you’ve got to get individual shots!’ But you learn fast when the money is flowing out of your bank account. By the end I knew how to make a documentary.”

The move from documentaries to features has occasioned another bout of rapid learning. Zwigoff encouraged Clowes to be present on set and the two conferred continuously when setting up shots. “Terry and I worked on this together for so long,” says Clowes, “and we had such a unified vision for it, that I’m like the detail co-ordinator. He focuses on the bigger picture, and I look at the details.” They plan to carry this strategy for collaboration into another film, Art School Confidential, again based on a Clowes comic.

Perhaps to compensate for the fact that they are debut feature film-makers, Zwigoff selected a highly experienced crew. Production designer Ed McAvoy has worked in Hollywood since the early 70s; costume designer Mary Zophres’ credits include the Coen brothers’ Fargo (1996) and The Big Lebowski (1998); veteran director of photography Affonso Beato has lately been responsible for the lustrous look of Pedro Almodóvar’s films . “When I saw Affonso’s work on All about My Mother it just seemed right,” says Zwigoff. “It’s very colourful, and yet it’s an insulated little world, somewhat artificial.” Looking at the rushes, it’s clear Ghost World will be visually striking. It is boldly designed and shot with a bright, primary-colour palette which Beato relates to its comic-book origins. “The colours are enhanced and co-ordinated, as in comics,” he says. “It’s not Dick Tracy – it’s more realist – but there are lots of reds and yellows.”

Zwigoff, however, insists that Ghost World has little in common with other comic-based films. “I’m sure I’ll be pigeon-holed now as the comic-book movie guy,” he says, “but films of comics are usually a bad idea. I like parts of Batman but most of it is terrible; Altman’s Popeye is terrible; Ralph Bakshi’s Fritz the Cat is just embarrassing. Warren Beatty tried to do something interesting with Dick Tracy, but it didn’t really work.” Given this history, why has he opted for a comic-book look? ”I’m trying to make a film the way I see the modern world,” he explains. “It’s very colourful, but also very empty and grim. It’s like a modern American strip-mall wasteland – they’re painted bright, shiny colours but they all sell the same crap. It’s cheery on the outside but if you look closely it’s depressing.”

This conception of the film’s look reflects the nuanced tone of the script, which mixes humour, drama and pathos, often in the same scene. The desired result is the kind of nervous laughter and comedy of alienation that were achieved in Crumb as well as in the films Zwigoff admires – the Coen brothers, Todd Solondz, the misanthropic comedies of W.C. Fields, Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy. When well executed it generates satisfyingly complex emotions, but it’s a tricky thing to get right. Underplayed, it can seem flat and uninflected (arguably a problem in Neil LaBute’s In the Company of Men, 1997); if overdone, it can feel contrived (the Farrelly brothers’ films spring to mind). Clearly much of Ghost Worlds success will depend on post-production, particularly on the editing. Crumb is a promising precedent, but while Zwigoff took a year to edit that film, here he has a mere six weeks. “I don’t know if the tone’s going to work,” he confesses. “I have faith that I can cut it funny, but comedy scenes are very hard.” He shrugs. “It’s a personal thing; I can’t expect anybody else to cut those scenes together and make them work.”

Back on Lincoln Boulevard the Satanists take another turn around the block. The teenage girls track them once again. This time Zwigoff is satisfied with the take. The “Ghost World” graffiti on the wall is sprayed over and disappears. For most of the crew, the film now wraps amid much cheering and celebration. But for Terry Zwigoff the hardest part lies ahead.