Hey, Daniel. What was it like making a movie without Terry Zwigoff, who directed Ghost World and Art School Confidential, but isn’t in charge for Wilson?

With Terry, I was very much there the whole time in kind of a Coen brothers-ish scenario. We were bouncing ideas off each other and it felt fairly collaborative – for this one, I had decided I really had not enjoyed that process. I really like hanging out with Terry, we have fun together, but the actual process of making the movies was not at all fun for me. After the last one I thought, you know what, I’m just going to do what I do, write the script, hand it off and see what happens. My whole goal with this one was not to even see it until it came out in the theater.

So you didn’t have much interaction with the actual film crew this time around?

We visited. My wife and I went to the set for two days and watched and it was great fun. I actually much prefer this situation because I got to see it through un-jaundiced eyes; to just sit and have that experience of watching it as a film rather than having seen every scene shot over and over. When you see a movie like that, you just remember what day it was and where you were standing. To this day, when I watch Ghost World, I think: “Oh, yeah, I was in a corner of the room and the producer’s cellphone went off and ruined the take.”

That sounds awful.

Yeah, and it’s funny – when you’re there the whole time, people just treat you with utter contempt. “What’s the writer doing here?” When you go for two days, you’re a celebrity. The director said, “Oh, everybody’s very nervous!” That was much preferable.

I began writing [Wilson] when [my father] was in the hospital, on his literal deathbed. He never got to see any of it Daniel Clowes

You drew the graphic novel around the time your father was dying, and Wilson’s father dies in the book. How much of it is autobiographical?

I began writing it when he was in the hospital, on his literal deathbed. He never got to see any of it. When I first began it was just something to keep my mind occupied while I was sitting in the hospital room with him. He was very much like Wilson’s dad, where he was just tuned out. He was clearly in his own head trying to process what was going on. I sort of expected that he would try to impart some, you know, final wisdom to his son, but he had no interest in that whatsoever. He was really just thinking about bigger things that I couldn’t comprehend.

Wilson, directed by Craig Johnson, opens 24 March in the US.

That’s a moment in the book, isn’t it?

Yeah, it was a surprising moment in life and it was one of those things where we’d always had that kind of strained relationship where we never talked about anything deep or emotional. And I was waiting for that kind of my whole life. “When he’s dying, he’ll finally summon the courage to talk to me in that way!” and that just didn’t ever happen. That was very surprising, in a way. Even though it makes perfect sense: there was always this feeling that we had this unspoken thing between us, and now I realize maybe that thing can’t be put into words. Maybe that’s how it takes form - as an unspoken thing.

Is it difficult to see somebody else living this thing that’s so personal to you?

Well, that’s happened several times. In Ghost World there were things that were very personal. It only feels weird when I start to think about what the scene represents. And then it feels very, very weird, to have these moments from your life transmitted to a general audience. You feel very vulnerable in a certain way.

Most people aren’t alive to see their own biopics.

It has that feeling, a little bit. And it’s probably as off from my vision of that scene as much as a biopic would feel if Ray Charles were to watch his own biopic. You go, “That’s not quite how it happened!”

What comics are you enjoying at the moment?

That Emil Ferris book is pretty hard to top right now. I like Simon Hanselmann a lot, I think he’s endlessly funny. [The humor in] his stuff is very rare right now. There’s a guy, Noah Van Sciver, who I really like. I get something out of everything, good or bad. A lot of things I like just the way they look. I start to read and I can’t get past one panel of reading and my eyes just stop and shut down, but I can look through and marvel at the way things look. [With Nick Drnaso in his book Beverly,] there’s somebody for whom writing is first and foremost, and that’s something you really don’t see now, especially in [graphic] fiction.

What are you working on now?



I am actually writing a comic, which I had fairly well thought-out until Trump won the election, and that kind of threw everything off. It’s not a political comic, really, but it was definitely begun with the thought that we were going to have a sane democracy continuing in place and not what’s going on. So now I’m rethinking it with the knowledge that I’m going to have this craziness running through my head for the next four years.

How do you do that?

Well, it’s hard. With a normal fiasco like George W Bush, I would just let it seep in and see what comes out. But this feels so different. It feels like an opportunity to do something at least personally cathartic, if not, you know, meaningful or that has some kind of density to it based on the craziness of what’s going on. I almost feel like I created the world we live in, back in my early comics. It really feels like the dopiest, most cynical comics I drew back in 1991 have just come to fruition. I don’t know where that leaves me.



Do you think the election has had an impact on how certain work is seen?



It’s funny; I went through that once, when the Ghost World movie came out. It was in the theater on 9/11 and it was rising in the theater. We were ready to expand to more screens and it was kind of catching on. And after that happened, even I didn’t give a shit anymore. I was like, “Who cares about the problems of two suburban teenage girls? It’s a very different world!” And that’s what this feels like. But also it’s so easy just to do “Down with Trump!”, you know? So I don’t want to do that. It’s got to be filtered through something that makes it more timeless. So we’ll see. He’ll be long-ago impeached by the time I’ve finished drawing it. Either that or we’re be printing it on our own Gutenberg presses.

It’ll just be samizdat.

Maybe that’ll be good. Get back to the underground.