Los Angeles – Watchmen: the movie.

Those three words, in that particular order, may not send a chill down everyone’s spine. But for those of us who’ve spent the last two decades mulling over the cinematic possibilities of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s brilliant, merciless deconstruction of American superhero mythology – originally published by DC Comics as a 12-issue miniseries and then packaged in a trade paperback form in 1987 as the watershed “graphic novel” – it’s a phrase we thought we’d never hear.

It’s not like Hollywood hasn’t been trying to make a Watchmen movie. It’s just been a nightmare of multiple studios, shifting script drafts and revolving directors. Terry Gilliam started to make it in 1989, from a draft by Sam Hamm, who’d just scripted Tim Burton’s Batman. In 2005, Paul Greengrass tried to shift the story from the comic’s alternate 1985 to the present as an allegory for the war on terror. Didn’t happen then, either.

And then Zack Snyder came along, hot off his success in bringing Frank Miller’s ultra-violent graphic novel 300 to the big screen. Warner agreed,  grudgingly, to an adaptation that honoured the text, which meant a mammoth running time (at 161 minutes, Watchmen is the longest comic book adaptation yet produced) and an R rating. And while the original, controversial ending has been tweaked, it’s still pretty damn dark.

Addressing the press in L.A., the filmmakers still can’t believe they pulled it off. The graphic novel’s exploration of the tormented inner lives of masked heroes makes for a story that’s more conceptual than dynamic, and the episodic structure of the comics – preserved in the shooting script by David Hayter and Alex Tse – left many believing Watchmen was unfilmable. Many, but not all.

“‘Unfilmable’ is a sweeping term,” says illustrator and co-creator Gibbons, who at a dapper 59 seems like the elder statesman of the creative team. “I think to somebody like Zack, it’s more of a challenge than a condemnation. It’s a very difficult thing to film – because of its length, because of its detail, because of its scope – and I’m amazed that they’ve been able to get it down to whatever it is. 

“Zack has made some very intelligent decisions, and there’s a tremendous amount of craft brought to it. It’s not the comic book – this is a translation of it – but I think it’s a very, very faithful translation.”

“It’s not Lord Of The Rings, you know?” says screenwriter Hayter. “Lord Of The Rings is a stack of material; Watchmen is just 12 comic books. It is complex and it is literate and there is a lot to it, but it doesn’t take a long time to tell the story. 

“What is difficult, then, is convincing a studio that it’s all right to do a six-person character drama that covers 40 years of history, where pregnant women get shot and superheroines get raped. That’s difficult.”

Getting a workable script to the studio was just the first hurdle, according to Snyder, who still seems amazed to have brought the film to completion, particularly after the studio targeted three areas for major cuts.

“‘The Comedian’s funeral, nothing happens there,’” he laughs, remembering what he was told at the meeting. “‘And this whole thing where Dr. Manhattan goes to Mars, that seems like a whole area where nothing happens; and where Rorschach is being interrogated by the psychiatrist, that’s another area where nothing happens. So if you just lop those three areas off, we’re gonna have a nice, tight little movie!’”

“And I said, ‘Guys, truthfully? Those three sections, that’s why I’m making the movie.’ 

“If you take those three sections out of the movie, it’s a bad superhero movie. There’s no action and there’s no real story.”

“It doesn’t matter how big a fan you were, practically speaking,” co-screenwriter Tse declares with jittery energy. “Without Zack’s leverage, if 300 hadn’t made a half a fucking billion dollars, it’s like, ‘Too bad, it’s not gonna happen in that way.’ If [300] hadn’t made the money and he’d walked into the studio and said, ‘I wanna make this rated R,’ they’d have been like, ‘Fuck you, no! This has gotta be PG-13. We’re spending $130 million on the movie and we’re not gonna make it R-rated.’ 

“But 300 was rated R. It came out, it made money – what are you going to say to that? It buys you a lot of creative currency within the company, and even if they don’t get it or it makes them nervous, you have a little bit of trust there.”

Ever the optimist, co-writer Hayter thinks Watchmen’s long journey from page to screen has actually worked to its benefit.

“We’ve seen the X-Men on film, Batman, all these things, and here comes Watchmen the same way it did in the 80s for the comic book world, saying, ‘Okay, you’re all thrilled at the idea of a guy putting on bat-like armour and going out and beating up bad guys – but what if the people he’s violent toward aren’t necessarily bad in your view? What if he’s a bit of a psychopath and that’s why he’s putting on this costume? Who are these people?’”

But where is comics writer Alan Moore in this scenario? His name appears nowhere on the film; the Watchmen movie is officially “based on the graphic novel co-created and illustrated by Dave Gibbons.”

To say Gibbons’s absent collaborator wants nothing to do with the film isn’t quite accurate; he told the Los Angeles Times last fall he planned to be “spitting venom all over it for months to come.”

“I hope he doesn’t go way out of his way to shit on it,” says Tse, “because so many people put their heart and soul into preserving what they could from the graphic novel.”

Gibbons sums up the situation diplomatically. 

“Alan has had a very unfortunate experience with movies, particularly with The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and he made up his mind that he didn’t want anything to do with Hollywood any more. 

“My secret dream,” says Hayter, “is that he’ll be sitting at home in Northampton and he’ll flick on the TV one night, it’ll come on and he’ll grudgingly start to watch it and then realize how much this whole movie is a love letter to him and his genius.”

Moore may never see the film, but Gibbons has.

“The strange experience for me is this: when you draw a comic book, you kind of close your eyes and run a little movie in your head and freeze the moment. So to sit and watch the movie was like seeing my little movie again.”

Interview Clips

Matthew Goode and Billy Crudup on signing onto a "comic book" movie

Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Jackie Earle Haley on playing unpleasant heroes

Malin Akerman and Patrick Wilson on playing the film's most human characters

normw@nowtoronto.com