Dan Clowes Goes Back to Art School

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on February 21, 2006 Sign up now!

by Thomas J. McLean, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 2/21/2006

Young artists are sensitive souls, picked on by jocks, desperate for any kind of attention from the opposite sex and feeling in general more misunderstood than anyone in the history of the world. The idea of art school as a place where they will meet kindred souls who will finally be smart enough to recognize greatness when they see it might seem to be a kind of promised land.

But Dan Clowes and Terry Zwigoff, the writer and director behind the Oscar-nominated 2001 adaptation of Clowes's comic "Ghost World," say it ain't so in their most recent film collaboration, Art School Confidential.

Inspired by a four-page strip of the same name Clowes drew 16 years ago, the film uses the art school scene as the setting of an unusual coming-of-age story about a talented artist named Jerome, played by Max Minghella, who finds art school to be a disillusioning mix of pretentious peers, frustrated professors and dead-end careers. Jerome's reactions to these absurdities give the film its dark sense of humor, as he watches the talentless find acclaim while his own achievements are overlooked and dismissed.

Clowes says the original strip and setting for the film were inspired by his own art school experience, at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. "Personally, it was a very defining experience as a young man, trying to figure out what I wanted to do as an artist," he says.

Jerome's competition comes from the jocular Jonah, whose ridiculously childlike paintings effortlessly earn him the two things Jerome most wants: critical acclaim and the affections of the beautiful Audrey, played by Sophia Myles. Jerome's experiences lead him to an unusual path to success, one that drives home the difficult relationship between commercial success and artistic quality.

"I don't know that the two have anything necessarily to do with each other," Clowes says, adding that the elusive concept of success is a defining factor for artists. "You're always swayed by thoughts of success and you go toward it or against it."

Clowes found success in the film world right of the gate—he and Zwigoff were Oscar-nominated for best adapted screenplay.

"It was an amazing experience to be part of something this huge," he says. Still, he confesses, he prefers staying home to playing the celebrity game but he did attend the "Art School" premiere last month at the Sundance Film Festival. "I've never gotten more phone calls and e-mails and people coming out of the woodwork who I hadn't heard from in 20 years."

Clowes says Art School was the easier film to write because he was starting with a blank canvas. "Ghost World was really a lot more complicated because we had to get over the original story and realize we didn't have to be beholden to it," he says. "It wasn't until we put the old story away that it started to take shape."

Screenwriting and creating comics are different processes, Clowes says. "Writing a comic has its own sort of special magic that you can't duplicate in a movie. You're creating it all at once, the words and pictures," he explains. "It's like shooting the movie as you write it. There's another part of drawing comics that's sheer drudgery."

"Writing a screenplay is very immediate and has its own pleasure. I try to write them as though they're really little plays that are completed in my head."

Fantagraphics will publish a tie-in book for the film's April release, from Sony Pictures Classics; it will feature Clowes's original version of the screenplay, which, he says, is "fairly different" from the final version. It also will include sketches he did for the characters, photos from the film and the original "Art School Confidential" strip in color for the first time.

Beyond that, Clowes is working on another film project, this one a real-life story about a group of boys who spent years doing a shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark.