[IMG:L]Everyone knows the Superman “S” emblem, Batman’s bat-symbol and the ubiquitous Xs that define the X-Men. But what, exactly, is a blood-stained smiley-face button stand for, and what does it have to do with superheroes?
While Watchmen is widely considered comic books’ greatest accomplishment, the dark, disturbing and complicated story of superheroes’ probable real-world effects on everything from global to sexual politics isn’t exactly a household name. But neither was 300 , until director Zack Snyder came along.
Essentially to the comic book field what Ulyssess was to literature, DC Comics’ original 12-issue, 400-page Watchmen miniseries by writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons turned comic book convention soundly on it ear when it was published throughout 1986 and 1987, when its British creative team produced a work of staggering depth, rich complexity, subtle, profound writing and sophisticated, thoughtful visual imagery.
One of the first post-modern takes and in collected forms one of the forerunners of now-popular graphic novels, Watchmen demonstrated the vast potential and untapped adult appeal of comic book storytelling and elevated the form to genuine literature. It is the only graphic novel to win a Hugo Award as well as the only graphic novel to appear on Time magazine’s 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present.
Watchmen has been earmarked for a big-screen treatment almost since its inception, but the weighty project ultimately stymied the efforts of such A-list Hollywood talent as producer Joel Silver, screenwriters Sam Hamm (Batman) and David Hayter (X-Men) and directors Terry Gilliam (twice!), Darren Aronofsky and Paul Greengrass–even creator Moore, still widely considered the finest writer in comics, believed the project was unfilmable (and famously has no interest in seeing a cinematic interpretation).
But based on the creative and commercial success of Snyder‘s 300 earlier in 2007 (a incredibly faithful yet giddily cinematic adaptation of comic icon Frank Miller’s comics series) Warner Bros. tapped the director and screenwriter Alex Tse to move forward and finally bring Watchmen to cinematic life.
And Snyder HAS moved forward, assembling a intriguing cast of actors that he enthusiastically calls “super awesome”: Billy Crudup (Almost Famous) as Jon Osterman/Dr. Manhattan; Malin Akerman (The Comeback) as Lori Jupiter/Silk Spectre; Patrick Wilson (Little Children) as Dan Dreiberg/Nite Owl; Jackie Earle Haley (Little Children) as Walter Kovacs/Rorschach; Matthew Goode (Match Point) as Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias; Jeffrey Dean Morgan (Grey’s Anatomy) as Edward Blake/The Comedian and Stephen McHattie as Hollis Mason, the original Nite Owl.
After being joined on stage before the fans by Hayley and Akerman at Comic-Con, Snyder gave Hollywood.com an update on how he hopes to finally–and successfully–realize comics’ most respected story on screen.
Hollywood.com: How’s the movie coming along?
Zack Snyder It’s coming along really well. We have some sets built, so that’s good. We’re spending money. Casting is pretty much done, except for Sally Jupiter [the original Silk Spectre].
HW: How do you see Dr. Manahattan?
ZS: Manhattan is going to be a full 3-D CG character.
HW: Are you doing the Vietnam sequence, where a giant Dr. Manhattan strides over the battle?
ZS: Oh, yeah!
HW: What has been the biggest challenge to you putting this together?
ZS: The biggest challenge, really, is things like keeping the Vietnam sequence. Keeping all the festish-y, awesome things that make it what it is. And allowing the studio to go ‘Do they really need to go to Vietnam? Do they really need to do this tenement fire rescue? It doesn’t really move the story along.’ I go ‘Yeah, but if they don’t do the tenement fire rescue, how are they going to get turned on to have sex in Nite-Owl’s ship? [laughs] You know, these are the things I have to fight every day.
HW: Was it a very difficult decision for them to make?
ZS: For them, right. I mean, I try not to antagonize them because I’m afraid they’re going to look at it really closely and go ‘Whoa–Who’s going to go to this movie?’
HW: Is this going to be an R or a PG-13 movie?
ZS: R, for sure.
[IMG:R]HW: You’ve cast both Jackie Earle Hayley and Patrick Wilson. Are you a huge Little Children fan?
ZS: You know it was weird because I saw Jackie, I did like Little Children and I really, when I saw Little Children, I thought Patrick could be Dan, because I felt like that idea–I feel like he’s handsome and super-cool, but also he’s not afraid, at least in the movies, to be kind of broken and kind of sad. There’s a sadness to Dan I think throughout the movie that you’ve got to get to. And then it was only during the Academy Awards that I thought ‘Gosh, Jackie could be Rorschach. Look at him. He’s awesome.’ I was at home, watching it on TV.
HW: How do the current times change the story, which was originally written and set primarily in the 80s?
ZS: People always say ‘What’s this superhero movie about?’ I’ll go, ‘In my superhero movie, Superman doesn’t care about humanity, Batman can’t get it up and the bad guy wants world peace.’
HW: There’s so much specific visual imagery in the original Watchmen. Are you going to stick closely to that?
ZS: Absolutely. I think one of the images that stands out, I think, for a lot of people is the image of Dr. Manhattan being blown to bits and he’s like a skeleton and it’s like a white thing. And we’re really put a lot of research into that. And even in Dan’s dream, when he’s kissing Lori and a nuclear bomb goes off and blasts them apart.
HW: And even the scene transitions in the comic are cleverly done.
ZS: Yeah, we try and do that. Especially, also, [Alan Moore] does it with the dialogue a lot. You know how the dialogue overlaps and points to something else. Like for instance, when Manhattan’s being drilled by the reporters at the press conference, and meanwhile Dan and Lori are fighting the thugs in the alley, and how that overlaps. Things that are said there, ‘Is that dark enough for you’ and all that stuff. We’re trying to do that.
HW: How do you balance the needs of fans of the book and someone who hasn’t read it?
ZS: You know, it’s funny because I think that a good story is a good story. And it doesn’t matter if you know it or don’t know it. In the end, I think that the movie itself when it’s done is still that story. And so if you don’t have any exposure to that story you can enjoy it for the first time. You know? It’s funny because it has festishistic quality about it, so people that obsess over the story and love it, like each moment it’s like ‘Oh my god, that’s that moment, that’s that moment. It’s real.’ And then on the other hand you have people who are first-time viewers ,which I think in some case are going to be the most interesting because they get to go ‘Oh, wait–this is a superhero movie?’ Just like people who read the graphic novel originally and went like ‘Whoa–wait a minute! What’s happening? This is like a world gone wild.’
HW: Is this going to be post-modern superhero movie for superhero movie audiences?
ZS: To some extent. I always say that there are bits of the movie and the movie has sort of makes a comment a little on cinema. Because I feel like it’s important to acknowledge the Rorschach-Taxi Driver connections. The Dr. Strangelove and Apocalypse Now [connections]. There’s a lot to me that, regardless of how subtle they are, they have to be felt because the movie–the book is, also–an indictment of pop culture as much as it is a celebration.
HW: How has the design affected the look of the film?
ZS: I mean I think it effects it in a lot of ways because you have to sort of seamlessly get at the images from the book that I feel like are really striking and powerful. And then you also have to sculpt them into a movie experience and then at the same time they have to be influenced by reality to some extent so that the movie plays as a real experience. You don’t want it to play as, even though it does play in some ways like opera, like you want it to play moment to moment so that these problems become real.
HW: Are you interested in working on non-genre films?
ZS: Non-genre films? I don’t know what that means. I mean, I know what non-genre films are, I think, but I kind of approach it like…I guess I want to make movies that I want to see. So I guess it’s difficult–would I want to do a romantic comedy? I don’t know.
HW: Will you be including the Tales of the Black Freighter pirate comic book sequence from the source material–it’s so cool, but seems like it could be considered an easy cut from the story.
ZS: We’re working on that. We’re trying to get money from someone to do that [if only for the DVD].
HW: Alan Moore has famously and unyieldingly distanced himself from having anything to do with other film adaptations of his comics work, like V for Vendetta, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and From Hell. Do you hold out hope that you’ll be able to talk to Alan Moore about this film?
ZS: You know what? The truth is I respect Alan so much and I respect his wishes. And I know that in the past people have made assumptions about Alan and about what he thinks, and I know what he wants. And he’s just like, from years past, ‘I don’t want to have my name on the movie,’ and regardless of who shot every frame of the movie from beginning to end, frame for frame, even if the movie was six hours long he would still say ‘I don’t want my name on the movie.’ Which I completely respect, and I just hope that in the end that he doesn’t think we f*cked it up too bad.
