CraveOnline: Did you see the new Salinger documentary?
Joel Allen Schroeder: [Shakes head]
It’s very different approach to a reclusive author. They’re trying to be penetrative about it. There was a sleaziness to it that I didn’t respond to, but they did get all this new information. Was there any information that you were looking for, even if it was just from his editors? Were you trying to uncover anything we hadn’t seen before?
I can’t say that I was going for a scoop like that. I really, ultimately, the thing that interested me was just… it’s paper and ink, you know? And this one guy. And yet this strip has this wide reach, in a meaningful way. That’s really what I was mostly interested in. I think you could probably make a dozen documentaries about Calvin & Hobbes and Bill Watterson, all of different angles and perspectives. One that is more probing, one that is more about the philosophy what Watterson has put on the page, the philosophy of Calvin & Hobbes. But I was very content to focus on the impact.
The tough thing is, even some of the stories you hear that are sort of sensational, or things that most people might not know or have heard about, you don’t know… There’s this mythology. I think that this was mentioned in the Mental Floss article… is the story that Watterson burned a bunch of Hobbes plush dolls that were sent [to him], is that true? Things like that. You hear those stories and it’s hard to know if it’s true. It’s hard to fact check it.
This movie is told from your perspective, in terms of your enthusiasm and your interest, but I’m not sure where you stood on whether it was a good idea or a bad idea for Calvin & Hobbes to be licensed.
I am so glad he took the path he did. You can’t help but compare it to Garfield and Peanuts, and I don’t want to do it in a way that pushes those down, but you look at Garfield and I don’t know that it’s that easy to find people who talk about Garfield in the same way that they talk about Calvin & Hobbes in terms of having significance to people…
Artistic significance, if nothing else. When you talk about Calvin & Hobbes you have to talk about the strip.
Yeah, exactly. In the film people talk about Calvin & Hobbes not on their toothpaste, or their sleeping bags or Post-It notes. Those are some of the things that people specifically mentioned. Well yeah, that’s right. We license characters and put them on everything, and it waters those characters down. So I’m so glad that that hasn’t happened with Calvin & Hobbes.
Had you ever written to Bill Watterson?
I never have written that letter. It’s sort of what the film became.
The first letter I ever wrote was to Bill Watterson, and I got a response. Not a form letter either.
This is where part of the idea came from. As cliché as it sounds it was sort of like a shower moment, where various things… I was actually at one point trying to incorporate a Calvin & Hobbes Sunday strip [as] a plot point in a script I was writing. It was horrible.
How did that work? Was it a clue to a murder?
It was a lot less interesting than that, but I got thinking one day about how I remember, when I was in fourth grade or something, the question in school was, “Who is your hero?” I think attached to that was, “Okay, write a letter to them, ask them for a photograph,” or something like that.
Dear Mr. Henshaw.
[Laughs] And at the time, I don’t know who I picked. It was probably a Green Bay Packers player or something. I don’t know. But 20 years later, or 18 years later or something, it dawned on me that I didn’t know who my heroes were at the time, but now I know, and Bill Watterson is someone I have a ton of respect for. That letter never got written. It was the film.
