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Others have tried and failed to bring Alan Moore's Watchmen to the screen. Director Zack Snyder tells FOCUS where it all went right for his vision of this classic graphic novel.
The very fact that Watchmen is set 20 years in the past is quite appropriate given the tortured history of its journey to the big screen
In the intervening decades filmmakers as illustrious as Terry Gilliam, Darren Aronofsky and Paul Greengrass have attempted to turn this material into a manageable movie. Now, finally, Zack Snyder has created a film that does justice to the powerful source material.
Set in an alternate 1985, it imagines a world of masked vigilantes who are as flawed as the populace they police. More so, as the story asks just what kind of person would want to don a disguise and dispense summary justice, who would willingly take on the responsibility of going to the dark places that job takes you.
In this alternative reality the Vietnam War has long been won, thanks to the superpowers of the nuclear enhanced super being Dr Manhattan, and Richard Nixon has retained the reins of power by changing the constitution in his favour.
But all is far from well; the Cold War continues unabated as tensions between East and West are at their height. And then there are these vigilantes, characters whose unchecked actions subtly invoke Juvenal's line 'quis custodiet ipsos custodes?' - who will watch the watchmen?
It's a brilliant conceit, dreamt up by visionary graphic novelist Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons in a 12 issue limited edition comic book series published between 1986 and 1987. Hollywood studios were not slow in expressing their desire to adapt it for the screen.
But the combined ingenuity of a succession of ‘hot’ Hollywood directors failed to make that happen. Some considered it unfilmable, Terry Gilliam himself felt that it would work best as a 12 part mini series. But now Zack Snyder, following his successful adaptation of another graphic novel 300, has succeeded where the others did not.
And what's more he has made the film while staying as faithful as he possibly could to the source material, evidence in part of his own love of Moore and Gibbons' creation.
"I had read the graphic novel in 1988," he nods, "so I was certainly familiar with it. But I hadn't followed the saga of it getting, or not getting, made. When the studio called I was really more concerned with what they wanted me to do with it, and with what they thought the movie was.
"We talked a lot about whether we should do it, and most of our conversations were whether they would just accept what I wanted to do to their script. Their words were 'we have a thing called Watchmen, we think it's based on a graphic novel. It's PG-13, it's two hours, the bad guy dies........’. At that point they were thinking it would be cool to send Dr Manhattan to Iraq.
"I tried to be cool, like 'yeah, that sounds interesting, Watchmen, sure, send it over I'll take a look at that,'. I think that was one of the things that compelled me to do it. If they'd just come to me and said 'we want Watchmen, we know exactly what it is, we want to embrace it 100% and just make it all the way,' I'd have probably been more daunted."
As the studio - over time 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros. and ultimate producers Paramount have all had a stake in it - put their faith in Snyder he became a watchman of sorts himself, a guardian of the ideas that had originally inspired him.
"When they came at it with this franchisable, Happy Meal of a movie I felt like they would move on from me and do that," he adds. "That would be the movie they would make and they could find someone to do it, because there's a lot of guys in Hollywood who would make that movie."
"You learn to negotiate it, you navigate it and you find a way of dealing with it. But when you're very young and you're thrown into it, it can be very disorientating. The problem is that it takes the attention away from what it is you actually do. That’s when it's very easy to get sidetracked.
In the end Snyder, and his producer - and wife - Deborah felt that this was too good an opportunity to miss.
"I knew that if I did it and it sucked at least I'd done it," Snyder smiles. "If I didn't do it and there was a Happy Meal somewhere with a Watchmen guy on it I'd have to re-evaluate my place in history because you could pretty much say it was my fault, because I was clear with what it should be."
And yet even as he presented studio executives with his vision of Moore's masterwork it was unclear they could fully appreciate the potential of a movie clocking in at just under three hours, with its 18 certificate violence and lack of major movie stars.
"This is a weird movie," Snyder smiles. "The way it normally works is the studio executives watch it and then you meet an hour later to discuss it. But they called and said they weren't ready. We weren't sure how to take that, like is that good or bad news. Were they going to take a punt, or fire me. A day later they met me, and they said they didn’t know what to say because they had no idea it was going to be this crazy."
In the end Watchmen succeeds as a blockbuster movie, opening at number one in the US and UK, because of its lack of compromise. But another fact that cannot be overlooked is our increased awareness of comic book culture and its tropes that were not so prominent 20 years ago.
We got the joke in The Incredibles, we spotted the references in Heroes and we understood why Batman had to Begin again. For Snyder, the time was finally right for the Watchmen to make their screen bow.
"It's a superhero movie," he shrugs, "these are the movies people go to see. That's what's interesting, that Watchmen comes along after all those others movies, because in some ways it’s an evolution."
ANWAR BRETT
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