From my exclusive interview with Zack Snyder at this summer’s Comic Con:
You guys have not yet decided on the Black Freighter.
I’ve decided on it! I want to do it. It’s just whether or not we get the money for it, and we’re working on it.
You’d shoot it for the DVD?
Yeah, that’s what it would be for.
The Black Freighter I’m asking about is the comic within the comic in Watchmen, a horrific pirate tale that parallels and comments on the arc of one of the main characters in the story. It’s the most obviously extraneous bit in the sprawling graphic novel, and has always been cut from every draft of the script to date. But Snyder’s detail oriented, and he wanted to include the Black Freighter somehow.
Now he can. Moviehole has broken the story, and I can confirm it: Warner Bros is coughing up the dough to film Tales of the Black Freighter and include it on the DVD of Watchmen. This was confirmed last week by Zack and his producer and wife Debbie when I visited the set of Watchmen; they told my group of visiting journalists some more stuff about the eventual DVD of the film that I can’t talk about – embargoed!* – but rest assured, you’re going to want to pre-order this bad boy.
I think that Warner Bros ponying up for the Black Freighter sequences indicates that they’re happy with what Zack has been shooting for the last month (I know I’m happy with what I saw). That’s especially nice since in that same exclusive interview he told me that the studio didn’t quite get what Watchmen was all about. And even better: now that Gerard Butler has left Escape From New York, he’s free to star as the shipwrecked sailor!
* Don’t bother emailing me and asking that I spill the beans. I won’t. You’d be surprised at how often I get requests like that. Also, I get a lot of people emailing me for email addresses or phone numbers for celebrities.