I’ve been interviewing Zack Snyder about Watchmen for a while. It’s been interesting watching him go from excited and nervous to utterly exhausted on set to how he was at this year’s Comic Con – filled with confidence and psyched to see the positive reaction to the work he’s been doing on a movie that most of us thought should never be made. Now it’s been made and some of us have actually started to harbor the hope that not only might this film be good, it could actually be great.
So here’s the latest with Zack. I’m sure I’ll be talking to him another time or two between now and the release of the film, and I can’t wait to keep getting into the nitty gritty.
Since the biggest concerns fans have at this point is how Snyder handled the ending of the book, I started out with that question. Be aware that spoilers exist in the first question and answer.
You’ve gone a long way towards making fans happy with the trailer. 85%
of fan’s fears seem to be assuaged by the trailer, but what they keep
asking me about is the ending. Can you let them know that they have
nothing to worry about?
I’ll say this about the ending. Patrick hinted at it in that article
[Entertainment Weekly]. I was thinking, What is Watchmen? I believe the
crux of the movie is that it offers a moral choice. That is Watchmen.
Let’s just say that, without getting too spoilerish, a certain
character in the movie survives that. Makes a moral choice that we
would consider, or what an audience might consider questionable, but on
paper you could make an argument for. I have to say, you pose that to
studio… you tell the studio that this guy who kills millions of
people, he’s going to be okay at the end. That’s tough. It’s not like
Lex Luthor ends up on an island. I’m saying this guy might be right.
That’s the movie, that’s the fun. Look, I love Iron Man. I think the
movie is awesome, I think Robert is amazing in the movie. I walked out
of the movie and said, ‘That was great! Let’s get a beer.’ I’ve always
said that you walk out of Watchmen and say ‘What’s up?’ Or you get a
beer and [mimes a drunken argument].
Do you think that Dark Knight has opened the door for a darker, more respectable superhero movie?
Sure. I’m a huge fan, it’s an amazing movie. One of the great things
about The Dark Knight is that it isn’t a great superhero movie, it’s
just a great movie that has Batman in it. That’s cool. It’s like Heat
with Batman. But the difference is that the first Batman movie – not
the first, but the one before this one – people always say, ‘Ooh,
that’s a dark movie,’ and I say, ‘Yeah, it’s dark, but don’t forget
that Batman gets to go to the Himalayas and train with ninjas to become
a super fighter.’ I want to do that. That’s not dark, that’s super
cool. That’s awesome – my parents died, I get all their money and get
to become a ninja! In Watchmen there’s nothing like that. Dan can’t get
an erection because he doesn’t have his suit on. That’s a different
kind of dark. I do think that what Dark Knight does do is that it makes
critics or audiences, when they sit down, what they’re anticipating may
be different. They’re a little more open minded to a movie that’s not
exactly like bubblegum, popcorn in your face, action freakout but that
takes an hour for the Comedian to be buried. There’s not… well,
there’s a plot, Rorschach is trying to figure out what’s going on, but
that’s not the movie.
Has the studio ever discussed franchising this?
No one ever brought it up.
How about cutting it in thirds or something?
There was discussion of cutting it in half because it’s so long, but
there’s no ending in the middle. Mass audiences would have been like
‘What the fuck?’ It would have been worse than any Lord of the Rings
ending.
Was it difficult to find what to cut out of the movie?
It was, but the stuff that ends up getting cut out are like [the
detectives] doing their thing. That type of stuff, you take that out,
and then you seperate the Black Freighter from it, since it’s now on
its own, you begin to see the movie is pretty much there.
One of the stylistic elements of the original is the use of symmetry in storytelling. Did you try to incorporate that?
It’s a different medium because it’s linear, although we do make
reference to it a lot, the idea of symmetry. I always mention that
there’s a sequence in the movie that’s twelve minutes long that’s
Manhattan on Mars thinking about his origin story. There’s a picture of
he and Janey, he drops it on the ground and we go through his story.
It’s kind of like slightly non-linear but also slightly chronological,
but it’s also my favorite part of the movie. It’s the most Watchmen-y
thing – it has nothing to do with the story, no plot aspect to it at
all. Meanwhile everyone’s on Earth going along and we go to this twelve
minute aside that has nothing to do with anything except to understand
Manhattan a little better.
If the movie was coming out tomorrow, what do you think the running time would be?
If it was coming out tomorrow it would be close to three hours.
How do you bring your own vision into the film while sticking so closely to the original source?
People go, ‘Oh you have no individual vision, you just copy these
storyboards.’ I wish it was that easy. It would be awesome. When you
take the panels and think ‘How do we shoot this as a film?’ you start
to realize there isn’t a lot of continuity, there isn’t a lot of stream
of consciousness. It takes a lot of work.