Watchmen (Snyder, 2009)

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Zack Synder has been locked.

Fans of Watchmen unite - the project is finally moving along positively! Director Zack Snyder, who's currently out promoting his Spartan epic 300, answered some questions to press about the comic book adaptation.

Zack started off by saying, “I feel like the movie is in a pretty cool place. I think the script is starting to become pretty cool.” He also added that “we're trying to get a budget together now” and “I've been drawing away, you know. I think it's coming along, so they say.” Zack also discussed the movie's setting and CGI choices.

Although he wouldn't reveal anything about the actors or who they might be, he did say that, “it's cool because in some ways you can get real actors, you don't have to go ‘Hollywood.’ ” And also about when production may start, stating “they have talked about maybe shooting in the summer” - which was also confirmed as a possibility at a later press conference by his wife, Deborah Snyder, who is an executive producer on both 300 and Watchmen.

Zack also says he's setting his film in 1985 and comments:

“There has been a push on I think everybody's… on the other scripts that exist about trying to update the movie or make it take place in present day, or things of that nature. I think that by setting the movie in ‘85, by having the Cold War, having Nixon, having all that stuff you reinvigorate what the story is about. It allows all the metaphors…”

“I think what Alan Moore has, in his book, the comic he's made about authority and government and all those things, they're big themes. Maybe if you make that movie right, [then] what that has to say makes people think about what's happening maybe now or in their own lives. That's my hope for what the movie can be.”

And finally, he discusses just how much CGI he may use:

“The idea of Watchmen is not to do a CGI movie, but to do it when it's necessary. Like when Doc Manhattan goes to Mars, there's an issue here, we've got to figure that out. We can't go to Mars, I know, a lot people are going to be disappointed by that - but I just don't have the money. Antarctica also, there's no Carnac built there. I know, again, we should probably build it and then go film it there, but I don't think they're going let us do that. So those two things right off the bat you can think about. Dr. Manhattan himself, what do you do, how do you make him - how do you render him. Rorschach's mask. There's things that have to be dealt with and figured out. But I think that the appetite for me is to make a movie that feel's more like Taxi Driver than like Fantastic Four, again. So it's a balance.”

Zack also says, “go see 300!” as the best way to help Watchmen (maybe even get a bigger budget) and includes that the studio doesn't “understand why it's not Fantastic Four. I have to remind them, I go, ‘look, it's much more Strangelove than Fantastic Four,’ which they don't like hearing.” So if you are a fan of Watchmen, go see 300, and stay tuned for what sounds like an incredible project that may be starting very soon.

[X.]

Zack started off by saying, “I feel like the movie is in a pretty cool place. I think the script is starting to become pretty cool.”

Although he wouldn't reveal anything about the actors or who they might be, he did say that, “it's cool because in some ways you can get real actors, you don't have to go ‘Hollywood.’ ”

Was Zack Snyder born to Eskimos in a fucking igloo? May be I should cool down, and cut our talented whiteboy some slack.

[X.]

Snyder has confirmed that Tom Cruise was in talks to play Ozymandias in the movie, but it's no longer happening. Sigh...the Big Grin would have been perfect in this role. Frank TJ Mackey perfect.

Those of you who haven't read the graphic novel, Ozymandias turns out -- Spoiler! you need to highlight to read -- to be the villian at the end. He blows up half of America.

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That is sad news - hope somehow it does yet happen. It's always amazing to see Tom Cruise in such roles.

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Synder says Gerard Butler has been confirmed for Watchman. It could be a rumour but who the hell cares.

Gerard Butler Will Be In Zack Snyder's Watchmen!       

The IESB has been busy covering Comic-con's little sister convention, Wonder Con, up in San Francisco this weekend. Today, we had a chance to catch up with Zack Snyder, Gerard Butler and more from 300.

Since our last meeting, Zack Snyder had some casting news to talk about. In our interview with him in February, he talked about his current project Watchmen. Watchmen is a story close to Snyder's heart based on the graphic novel by Alan Moore.

The Tom Cruise casting talks came out on the web recently over at Chud where Snyder said it looked like Cruise would not be in the film after all.

However, while talking to Zack at Wonder Con this weekend he confirmed to the IESB that our favorite King of the Spartans, Gerard Butler, would in fact have a role in the film.

They are a winning duo and 300 kicks ass, so why fix it if it's not broken, I always say. Although he wouldn't say exactly which role he would be playing, Butler will definitely be in the Watchmen film.

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Manhattan? What else could he do??

[X.]

That screaming doofus cannot be Manhattan.

The Comedian? Nope, not even him.

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The Comedian deserves a very special actor. Someone as evil yet magnetic as the young Jack Nicholson...

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A Personal History of the Watchmen Movie

I've seen the Watchmen movie.

It was in 1987, I was fifteen, and, alas, it was just a dream, a last-gasp diversion before waking up and trudging off to Thomas Downey High.? (Not that much trudging was necessary; I lived across the street from my high school.)? The details faded the moment I woke up, leaving only a few scattered fragments that I did my best to describe to my bemused friends during the lunch hour. Twenty years have condensed those fragments into a single image: An empty city street, lit orange and purple, Dave Gibbons' smooth, architectural lines and John Higgins' moody coloring miraculously translated into live-action Technicolor. And then the title, in that famous thick font, scrolling sideways as we pan up from the street and settle on the skyline. And of course, the sound of a clock ticking inexorably towards midnight.

Why do I want a Watchmen movie, anyway? What good would it serve other than to be the latest in a line of mediocre adaptations of brilliant Alan Moore comics? Terry Gilliam gave up, called it "unfilmable". Scratch a movie forum and underneath you'll find many fans who think the same. You can reduce the comments to a litany. "Make it a mini-series or not at all." "Don't ruin the book." "Can't be done in two hours." "Just don't bother." I'm more sympathetic than I want to believe. This book is such an accomplishment, I'm not sure any take on it could be satisfactory, that any director or writer, regardless of pedigree, could do it justice.

Still. The yearning to see these characters, this story, translated into photographed reality is too strong. Maybe it's just my ego -- seeing the film would be an act of wish fulfillment, my dream made reality, and I could either cry tears of recognition or smugly dismiss it, knowing I could do better.? No book survives the adaptation process unscathed, of course, but perhaps -- perhaps some scars are more pleasing than others. It just has to get in the right hands...

It wasn't a good start. Watchmen's movie rights were snapped up almost immediately by Joel Silver, who famously wanted to cast Arnold Schwarzenegger as Dr. Manhattan and paint him blue. It seems silly now -- hell, it seemed silly then -- but what else were they going to do? Ask William Hurt to inject steroids? (We were still more than a decade out from Gollum, the first remotely plausible CGI character.) The perpetually cursed Gilliam was signed to direct, and Sam Hamm, hot off his Batman script, was hired to write. I'd heard bad things about the script through the years, but it wasn't until I moved to Seattle in 1997 that I found Hamm's script, for sale in a comic book and memorabilia store. I was so excited that I bought it immediately, sight unseen, sleeved in plastic. I took it home to read, and was so distraught, angry at Hamm's betrayal of the book in the name of "audience expectations", I started my writing own Watchmen rip-off that night.

Gilliam's Watchmen was never to be -- the money wasn't there for a dark superhero movie. The one thing that Watchmen needs and Gilliam was qualified to provide -- an epic-sized world, used to examine the psychologies of the people within it -- was the very thing that stopped him. But I don't think it's too hard to imagine what could have been, since we got 12 Monkeys instead: the animals wandering through the snow, the doomsday clock, the sense that these characters held their destinies in their hands, even as Time demands they march lockstep towards their fates. With the right script, I think Gilliam could've done it.

The movie goes comatose for nearly fifteen years. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, David Hayter emerges with a draft. They say he's done the impossible: a two-hourish screenplay that gets the story with a minimum of changes. Except for one big one: It would now take place in 2006, not an alternate 1985. No more Tricky Dick in perpetuity; we'd have W. No more Vietnam; that would be the Gulf War, no doubt. Now it would have "relevance", the same way, presumably, Children of Men has "relevance".

But Watchmen was never about relevance -- it's about superheroes. Well, to be sure, it's about personal responsibility, but it gets there via the superhero genre. Adding real-life details, as counter-intuitive as it seems, doesn't make it any more accessible -- it just confuses the issue. Part of what makes Watchmen Watchmen is its hermeticism -- this is another world, with its own look, its own history, its own referents. (The ideal Watchmen director might actually be Wes Anderson.) It achieves this through the layering and layering of symbols, motifs, repeating images. "Who Watches The Watchmen?" The Hiroshima shadows. The pyramids that appear in the background, so unassuming at first, long before we realize their terrible significance. Yet, I can only think of one example where this kind of obsessive layering was brought off successfully in a filmed medium: Arrested Development. That this was a half-hour comedic television show, 53 episodes long, and never a commercial hit doesn't bode well.

Two more directors get a chance to make the movie, and still, nothing. I have a sense of what Darren Aronofsky's Watchmen would have been like. It's dark -- darker than Fincher. It gets the black ink of the comics down on celluloid. It gets the paranoia. It's the movie Rorschach himself would have made. It's also humorless. Watchmen isn't exactly filled with jokes -- the only punchline that comes to mind is "Rorschach dropped him down an elevator shaft," which paints the book's mood pretty accurately. But a film version of Watchmen can't be humorless. It requires a sense of irony about itself, since all the main characters dress up in costumes to fight crime. Good actors could alleviate that, but I've never trusted Aronofsky with actors. I don't feel he's really interested in them, as if he'd be better off turning his films into coffee table books.

Paul Greengrass, on the other hand, means immediacy. Bloody Sunday, United 93, The Bourne Supremacy -- all of these rely on a you-are-there aesthetic, or at least Greengrass's definition of same: handheld cameras, whiplash editing, "documentary" realism. He got further than anyone before him -- costume designs, completed sets, a three-minute animatic. If not for Paramount's cold feet, the movie would be on DVD by now. And yet, I can't imagine a Paul Greengrass Watchmen.

And now, Zack Snyder. It feels like a compromise, doesn't it? I don't think Snyder's a hack -- his Dawn of the Dead remake was underrated -- but there's something of a shoulder shrug about the choice. His only qualification appears to be that he's made a Frank Miller adaptation. (Is 300 an actual movie or just tableaux? It looks like Michael Bay doing Sergei Paradjanov.) ? Incredibly, though, Snyder plans to not only return the film to the eighties, but also shoot the "Black Freighter" comic-within-a-comic. This is folly. This is beautiful. I honestly don't know what Snyder's Watchmen will look like, other than to flip through the pages of the book.

And maybe that's how it should be. — Kent M. Beeson

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That sums it up pretty well for all the directors involved. Nice writ.

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here it is!! The first ever test image from Snyder's Watchman.

I present to you... Rorshach !!! (click through for a HUGE Hi-Def Image).

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As per Harry (AICN),"This isn't final film still, but one of many test shots that Zach has done for WATCHMEN"

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oh, and that yellow stuff in his left hand? Here's a crop from the hi-def image:

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"Who watches the Watchmen?" was the tagline of the seminal 1986 Alan Moore miniseries about a group of heroes investigating the murder of one of their own. In 2007, in the warm glow of "300's" blockbuster opening, the answer could be "everybody."

Zack Snyder, the director of Warner Bros. Pictures' "300," has been developing "Watchmen" at Warners since June, and during the recent press tour for the Spartan epic, he has openly said he is aiming for a summer shoot for "Watchmen."

Snyder's enthusiasm for the project spilled out online late last week when a Snyder-created image of one of the "Watchmen" characters was discovered embedded in a DVD trailer distributed by marketing street teams and was posted all over the Web.

Street Wise Marketing was charged with running a campaign using tactics from a community Web site to handing out Spartan condoms ("Prepare for glory," read the packaging) and a DVD of the "300" trailer that was a sensation at last year's Comic-Con International in San Diego. Inserted at the 1:52 mark is an image of Rorschach, the hero with an inkblot mask, a trench coat and hat, with a gray city behind him. According to sources, the shot is a test image of what that character might look like. At this point, the movie is not greenlighted, nor is it cast.

Street Wise knew of the insert but was asked not to disclose it. The trailer was in the hands of viewers for about a week before someone noticed it and posted it on YouTube.

Adapting "Watchmen" has stymied such filmmakers as Darren Aronofsky and Paul Greengrass and such studios as Universal and Paramount. The scope and density of the source material -- the only graphic novel Time Magazine listed among the 100 best novels since 1923 -- is vast and budgetary concerns were among the reasons the project was put into turnaround by Paramount in early 2005.

"To do it right, you need a huge budget," an insider said.

Sources said Snyder's vision for the movie would have the project in the $150 million range. The studio, on the other hand, wants to keep it less than $100 million. Snyder's "300," based on another award-winning comic book, cost about $65 million to make and grossed $70 million during the weekend, breaking records and surprising many at the studio.

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Ron Perlman for Comedian? Looks like he wants to play the part... He'll suit it, that's for sure.