All you need to know about the Watchmen
NORTHAMPTON-based Alan Moore reinvented the comic book/graphic novel genre when Watchmen was first published as a 12-issue limited comic book series from 1986-87.
After watching films like From Hell, The Extraordinary League of Gentleman and V For Vendetta become major if not very good movies, he is sensibly continuing not to be associated with any adaptation of his works.
The same goes for Watchmen, which only gives a credit to illustrator Dave Gibbons, who described his set visit as one of his most exciting experiences connected with comics.
The film follows the graphic novel’s emphasis of secondary colours like greens, purples, oranges and browns, and to keep the style, the clean lines on the page were effectively replaced with “grit and texture” on screen.
FOR Watchmen director Zack Snyder, the film was another labour of love after his acclaimed work on Frank Miller’s graphic novel 300.
Dr Manhattan’s Glass Palace on Mars aside, most of the sets were real instead of the work of computers. But he says he won’t go down the James Cameron route of allowing technology to get in the way of his filmmaking ambitions.
After Titanic, Cameron has waited a decade before making his next, forthcoming movie Avatar, because he wanted the hardware and software to catch up with his visions.
“I made 300 using
off-the-shelf technology,” says Zack. “Anybody could have made 300 but if it wasn’t for that – a hit despite having no stars, violence and an adult rating – I don’t think I’d have been able to make this.
“As long as these movies make money, then we’ll get them.”
Zack adds: “I first read the graphic novel in 1988. I was at film school at the time and thought I could make a movie about a door knob or a coffee table. It didn’t even occur to me that Watchmen could be a movie.
“When they called me, I relived that same moment. It was a little bit daunting and scary.
“During the Warner and Fox legal wrangle, a part of me secretly hoped the film would never be released, just so that the only 20 people to have seen it by that point could go out and do lecture tours to describe it!
“I think what makes this film different to the other Alan Moore adaptations is that this one is self-aware. None of the others is trying to open your eyes to the genre.
“We’ve tried to make something that has a cultural ‘cool’ that’s ‘out there’ in the way that college kids know that something is ‘out there’.”
After 15 years in various stages of development, Watchmen is being released at perhaps the most sensitive time for international affairs since the end of the Cold War.
Zack says: “The timing of its release is really very interesting.
“Whether it marks the beginning of an era, or the end of one, it does mark something!”
