Thora Birch on Ghost World

Ghost World is based on the underground comic book by cartoonist Daniel Clowes.

It's an outlandish film about two girls from the suburbs who graduate from high school at the same time and jolt along, grappling with the mystery of adulthood.

My character, Enid, is a zany wild card who is outrageous and loud, but is struggling to connect with something authentic. She's looking for the real ? real food, real music, real people - in a world that seems like a huge consumer theme park.

Scarlett Johansson, who was in The Horse Whisperer, is the other girl, Rebecca, a well-adjusted teenager who just wants to get a career and a flat. They're best friends, but they're total opposites - one an insider, the other an outsider. They do dreadful things to embarrass people, just for laughs.

Steve Buscemi plays the lonely, 78rpm record-collecting weirdo that Enid starts messing around with. She uses him in a last-ditch attempt to find someone who sees the world as it really is. Brad Renfro is the unobtainable object of the girls' attentions and Illeana Douglas is Enid's ex-hippy, pain-in-the-ass art teacher.

This is not your typical teen film. It's very noir and has all the elements such as paranoia, alienation and cynicism, but in a deceptively colourful and cheerfully bright way. Dan Clowes's artwork permeates the film. When we started shooting, they asked me if I could draw, as Enid is a cartoonist at heart, and I said 'not really'. As it needed to be girl art, they got Sophie Crumb, daughter of artist Robert Crumb, about whom our director Terry Zwigoff had made an award-winning documentary called Crumb, and she created Enid's sketchbook for me.