>>PREVIEW
ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL
STARRING Max Minghella, John Malkovich and Sophia Myles
DIRECTED BY Terry Zwigoff
Opens Friday, May 12
Uptown Screen
According to comics legend turned screenwriter Daniel Clowes, art schools tend to attract a very particular crowd.
"The people who go to art school are the misfits from their communities," says Clowes. "That’s their personality – they’re the weird guys in high school. Then they migrate to this central location where it’s all weirdos making up this microcosm of weirdos and they flounder for their new roles. I think that’s why they tend to gravitate to these archetypes. I found them in the art classes I took and all the different art schools I’ve gone to or taught at. You really could just see them everywhere."
If you don’t feel like going everywhere, you could go see them in Art School Confidential, the second collaboration by Clowes and director Terry Zwigoff after 2001’s much-loved Ghost World. Like its predecessor, it’s a darkly comic portrait of young, studiedly cool characters who have a tough time learning the ways of the world at large. Clowes’s script is greatly expanded from a four-page strip about his own school days (he went to New York’s Pratt Institute before making his name as an illustrator and as the author of the comic Eightball). Less autobiographical and more broadly comedic, the movie is about an idealistic young artist’s experience at an East Coast art school that is packed with all the aforementioned archetypes. Being a Picasso wannabe, our hero Jerome (Max Minghella) is himself a cliché, though he doesn’t see it like that. He’s convinced that he’s about to become a famous artist, a delusion that he shares with nearly every one of his peers.
"It’s like when John Malkovich’s character tells his class, ‘One out of a hundred of you will make a living as an artist,’ and everyone thinks, ‘I’m the one!’" says Clowes. "I did have a teacher who said that on my first day and, of course, I thought so. I later talked to my friends and they all thought the same thing. Years later, I realized, ‘Wow, I actually did make a living as an artist.’ Thinking back, I think he was being generous with the one out of a hundred – it’s more like one out of a thousand."
Inevitably, Jerome and his classmates become more ruthless as the school year wears on. Yet to appear ambitious is somehow unseemly for artists, who are meant to have nobler things on their minds. Clowes says the struggle to reconcile artistic goals with material ones is something faced by many creative types.
"I certainly know it’s something I struggle with," he says. "I want to be the selfless artist who says, ‘I’m happy to create in my own studio and if only I see it, that’s fine.’ But I have to admit that I’m constantly being influenced by everything. Often a positive response influences me to go in the other direction. ‘Ah, I’m doing something that’s too easily digestible and I want to move away from that.’ It’s not necessarily you always moving into the success. But you can’t avoid that and that’s what the movie is about."
Though ultimately not as likable as Ghost World – the last-act transformation from art-world satire into gaudy murder mystery fails to come off – Art School Confidential confirms that Zwigoff is an unusually sympathetic interpreter of Clowes’s material. "We have a wavelength," says Clowes of the director. "I don’t need to explain a lot of things to him. When he doesn’t understand something, he’s very upfront about it and wants to know very specifically what I’m talking about, so I have to know what I’m talking about and be able to explain it to him. By doing that it helps me to think, ‘Do I really know what I’m talking about? Have I figured out what I mean with this or is it just a vague thought?’ He and I are able to work in concert and I know he’s gonna interpret my vision in the right way. He’ll see the comedy and darkness in the material and not shy away from that. There’s a lot of stuff in there that I think another director would cut out in the first draft – that’s the stuff that he embraces."
He also appreciates Zwigoff’s ability to transform the material into a motion picture. Having worked in film and comics, Clowes is keenly aware of what the two mediums don’t have in common.
"They’re very different ways to tell a story," he says. "Film has a certain flow to it that you have to be mindful of – you can’t go off on tangents or you lose the audience. You have to keep them in the moment at all times, whereas with a comic, you don’t. The comic is controlled by the reader and they can stay in their own moment and follow you in different directions – you can go all over the map.
"Writing a comic is also different because you can’t edit after the fact," he adds. "You can do tiny, minute things, but you have a sequence of panels and if you decide you want to shift the panels, you can’t do that because it’s already in this format. I find film a much more malleable medium."
Clowes will continue to test the medium’s flexibility. He’s also adapting Rudy Rucker’s novel Master of Space and Time for Michel Gondry, and writing a script based on the real-life story of several adolescents from Mississippi who made their own version of Raiders of the Lost Ark. He’s still writing comics, too, though he’s less than impressed to see the medium gain favour in the art world he satirizes in his new movie – Clowes doesn’t want to see his work in a gallery.
"I’m drawing my comics to be read as you’re sitting on the toilet or on the couch or whatever," he says. "It’s for an intimate setting. To read them on a gallery wall is a different experience and it imbues them with properties they don’t necessarily have. The thought of someone drawing for a gallery wall is a huge mistake." |
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