Exclusive Interview: Joel Allen Schroeder on Dear Mr. Watterson

It seems to be the mark of a generation that filmmakers take the things that inspired them as children and are now turning them into their own personal statements. That’s what Joel Allen Schroeder is after in Dear Mr. Watterson, a documentary about reclusive cartoonist Bill Watterson, his creation Calvin & Hobbes, and its influence on readers and fellow artists alike.

I sat down with Schroeder to discuss the difficulties involved in making a documentary when your subject doesn’t want to be involved, and learned how Bill Watterson eventually gave his tacit approval of Dear Mr. Watterson.

 

CraveOnline: Who were you looking to interview throughout this documentary?

Joel Allen Schroeder: We knew from the get-go that we wanted to talk to fans. That’s one thing that we definitely wanted to do. We definitely wanted to talk to cartoonists. We wanted to talk to people at Universal Press Syndicate and Go Comics. Our first interview was actually with my parents. Our second day of interviews was here in Los Angeles.

We started a Facebook page way back when, because we knew we wanted to start to find people who we might be able to talk to. Early on I really just wanted to talk to fans everywhere. We started in LA but I thought we’d have a day in New York where we’d talk to fans, we’d talk to fans wherever we were travelling for cartoonists. In the end we spoke to fewer fans that I thought we would, simply because of budget limitations. That was definitely one thing. If you think about what it costs for every interview you start to realize we just can’t talk to as many people as we’d love to.

But we wanted to talk to people who had an emotional connection, people who had sort of standout stories that… something in their childhood, or adulthood, college age, whatever age they were at the time that the strip was in papers… What’s that sort of standout story that they had that made it more than “The strip was in the papers, and I laughed. It meant something special to me because X was going on.”

In reality it’s sort of random, honestly. The people we talked to early on were the people we connected to early on, and then later on a lot of interviews that we had, we would send a camera to people. There were a few people where I heard about their connection to Calvin & Hobbes through a post online that they did, or a comment somewhere, and I’d reach out and say, “Hey, if we sent you a camera, would you be willing to talk about this? Send it back to us and we’ll incorporate it into the film.”

 

Bill Watterson is kind of the J.D. Salinger of our generation. Did you put any effort into trying to interview him or were you, from the beginning, respectful of that?

I knew from the beginning that he valued his privacy. I knew that that was a major obstacle. Having him as part of the film… was that even realistic? Basically, he became aware of the film years ago.

 

Through other parties?

I don’t the first time but we went to Chagrin Falls [Watterson’s hometown], and we know that at that time he was definitely aware of it. I’d talked to Lee Salem, his editor at Universal Press Syndicate, as far back 2009. I don’t know the first time that Lee may have talked to Bill about it. We know that that was a definite way he would find out. Actually, when we filmed at Ohio State University, the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, we actually needed to get his permission to film me looking at the originals.

 

Oh really? That was cool of him.

Yeah, and that was one indication that, well, he could have not been cool with that. But we were able to proceed. If I would have gotten an indication from him at some point that, “Hey…”

 

Not cool…

Yeah, “not cool,” or “I’m willing to talk to you guys.” Maybe not directly. I’m sure it wouldn’t have come directly from him, but if Lee Salem would have said, “You know, Bill is open to talking to you guys,” we would have pursued that.

 

He gave an interview fairly recently, actually.

Yeah, he recently gave an interview to Mental Floss magazine, which is going to be in the December issue, the full interview. And also with The Comic Riffs blog for The Washington Post. The day before the Mental Floss excerpts went online, there was an article with a brief interview, but the point of the article was that Watterson and the artist Richard Thompson, who does Cul de Sac, are going to be doing an exhibition at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum starting March 22nd. When I saw that, I was like “Stop the presses!” I can’t believe that hasn’t been…

 

That should be huge!

Exactly what I think!

 

Is it new stuff?

I don’t know what it all is. Richard Thompson, I don’t know if you know Cul de Sac…

 

I’m familiar with it.

It’s fantastic, and Richard Thompson has done a lot of other things prior to that. He has a lot of work that could be exhibited. From Watterson I don’t know if it will be mostly Calvin & Hobbes stuff, or if he’ll put… I don’t know.