Going commercial but not exactly mainstream

Tucked into in a small corner of Hollywood, director Terry Zwigoff shuffles into his cramped, spare office dressed in a plaid shirt and rumpled pants that look suspiciously similar to what he was wearing at the previous night’s premiere of his new film, “Bad Santa.” He pulls a copy of Variety from the assorted papers scattered across his desk, and, unprompted, he addresses the mixed reactions his film has been generating. The language in the film, starring Billy Bob Thornton as a department store Santa Claus with a penchant for booze and burglary, takes the poetry of profanity to a new level.

“This is the most negative review I’ve seen and it’s really factually wrong,” Zwigoff says, his voice barely rising above a mumble. “I feel like writing the guy a letter, but it’s a no-win situation.” Reading from the page, he continues, “It says ‘helmer Zwigoff reportedly wrangled with producers over edits that brought the feature down to a manageable R rating. What’s left will still offend plenty.’

“I never argued with them over that. It’s not true. I argued with them over other creative issues but it never had anything to do with the level of profanity. There was never any danger of the film becoming NC-17. That was just not an issue.”

Zwigoff makes no attempt to hide the difficulties he encountered in directing “Bad Santa.” Thornton’s character, Willie T. Stokes, finds himself transformed by his unlikely relationship with one particularly sad case who crosses his lap (the remarkable 8-year-old Brett Kelly).

“The main thing I struggled with was keeping Willie in character, not too compassionate,” Zwigoff says. “I didn’t want him to be won over by the kid falsely. I wanted the kid to have to earn his turn. I thought that would be much more moving. A lot of the fight in the editing room with the producers was about that, more than anything else. They felt my film was a bit too harsh and wanted to let Willie earlier in the film show some affection for the kid, for glimmers of it to come through. And I didn’t feel that was true. That comes from watching too many W.C. Fields films. He would never do that. The sentiment had to be earned; I didn’t want it to just be cheap.”

Written by John Requa and Glenn Ficarra, executive produced by Joel and Ethan Coen (who also contributed an uncredited but widely acknowledged rewrite), and financed by Dimension Films, “Bad Santa” is a definite step up the Hollywood ladder from Zwigoff’s previous “Ghost World,” based on an underground comic book by Dan Clowes, or “Crumb,” his warts-and-all documentary about his longtime friend, the cartoonist Robert Crumb.

Zwigoff might seem an odd match for the material, but his innate feel for the pain of being an outsider meshes quite easily with the film’s more off-color sensibilities. “I have very personal, very specific taste,” Zwigoff says. “I know exactly what I want and not everybody agrees, but you try to find something that works for everybody.”

Having struggled to insert as much of himself into “Bad Santa” as possible, there was still one opinion Zwigoff sought. “I showed it to Crumb when I was in France on a pretty bad videotape,” he says. “We watched it late at night and he didn’t laugh much. His comment was, ‘I don’t think this is as personal a film as your others.’ I said, ‘Is that a bad thing?’ He said in his world of being an artist it was something he couldn’t do, but it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.”

Rhetorically responding to Crumb’s comment while also explaining his own perhaps slightly perverse rationale, Zwigoff continues, “To me, I sort of consciously knew it wasn’t that personal on a certain level. Part of the thing that attracted me to it was I wanted to make a more commercial, mainstream picture that would be advertised on TV, open in 2,000 theaters and be seen without having to rely solely on word-of-mouth, unlike any of my other films. That appealed to me.”

Leaving aside the fact that the acidic, laceratingly profane script is probably not many people’s idea of a commercial project, Zwigoff notes, “And I really hated the fact I was building this reputation as this independent, art filmmaker. I was pigeonholed as that and I didn’t want to be. I wanted to try something completely different. I was even getting pigeonholed as the comic-book director. I don’t even read comic books, I just happen to know Dan Clowes and Robert Crumb. It’s frustrating. They’ll figure out a way to pigeonhole me again. Now I’m sure I’ll be relegated to ‘eccentric.’ ”

Once production commenced, despite the dismissal after only 10 days of cinematographer Ed Lachman by the producers (John Cameron, Sarah Aubrey and Bob Weinstein), Zwigoff was surprised by the amount of latitude he was allowed. “I felt like the whole time I was filming this film I was looking over my shoulder thinking, I can’t believe I’m getting away with this. I can’t believe they’re putting up $23 million to make this film. It’s unbelievable.”

That’s not to say his struggles over the film were confined simply to the editing room. There was first the no-small-matter of how exactly to end it. Test audiences didn’t like the original ending (which Zwigoff credits to the Coen brothers), whereby a letter from Willie is read in voice-over as the young boy cleans blood off his front steps, so a new coda was created.

The new ending “was something the Coen brothers, Requa and Ficarra and I didn’t write. It was something the studio wanted. It didn’t bother me, it just seemed like a Hollywood ending. They wanted it to be all tied up and they wanted the kid to triumph and it for some reason didn’t bother me. Whatever, fine. It didn’t ruin the film for me, it didn’t improve it to me, it was just like, yeah, OK. I didn’t feel strongly one way or the other.

“I didn’t feel strongly enough about it to fight over it anymore. If you want it, fine. I sort of shook hands with them at the beginning and said we’re in business to make a mainstream film that can play in cineplexes, not an art film. I agreed to do that, so I didn’t press it too hard even if I would have preferred a different ending.”

With an obviously hard-won wisdom, Zwigoff adds, “You really do have to pick your battles. You choose a few things, certain things where it’s just do it this way or see you later. I’m gone. And you’ve got to be willing to walk. It’s not something to bluff with, you’ve got to mean it.”

At times it is hard to tell when the disarmingly low-key Zwigoff is joking. “I’m not real ambitious about a career,” he says. “I keep telling my wife, and she thinks I’m kidding, but I’m not. I really would like to retire if we had enough money. I hate making films. You’ve got to get up at like 5 in the morning and it’s very stressful and I hate living in L.A. while I’m making a film. I live in San Francisco. I like being home with my wife and three cats and my yard, my records. I hate being down here. I really don’t like doing this.

“I like the finished product. I’m proud of the films I’ve made. I’m proud of this film. But how many more? Can I just do one more and quit? I’m 55. I’ll make a few more films and die. And if they’re good, that would be great. I love film, it’s a very powerful art form, but my whole identity isn’t wrapped up in being a film director.”

Zwigoff is happy that the “Bad Santa” DVD will include his cut of the film, and he is already working on casting “Art School Confidential,” another collaboration with Clowes that he hopes to make as his next film.

Heading back to the editing room where he has been working on cutting “Bad Santa” for TV (no easy task considering the unrelenting coarseness of the dialogue), he likens the endless mixes and corrections and minutiae of the post-production process to “Chinese water torture.”

He shrugs dismissively and with an odd combination of modesty and despair says, “It’s all right. I agreed to do this thing this way, but I would have done things a little bit different. I’m OK with it, but I’m such a perfectionist it’s hard for me to compromise at all.”