AYBGerrardo: We’ve all heard that you have seen Zack Snyder’s rough cut of the movie. How long was it? Were you pleased with what you saw? Was there anything that you weren’t particularly thrilled about?
Dave Gibbons: I’ll try and answer this comprehensively and clearly because I know that people have been very concerned about reports that have come back about the movie. There is a tendency, naturally, when you’re anxious about something that you’re going to read patterns and read stuff that isn’t really there. So I’ll try and be unambiguous.
I have seen the rough cut of the movie. I saw it the Tuesday after the San Diego Comic-Con, in Burbank in California. I was at the same screening as Kevin Smith and his buddy, and also David Hayter and Alex Tse, who are the screenwriters for it. Zack was there with his wife Debbie, and Wesley Collier with his wife, and the producers of the movie, Lloyd Levin and Larry Gordon. It was what they call a “friends and family screening,” so we were all there to see it and to give feedback on it.
[long pause] What can I tell you? Obviously, I’m not going to say anything that’s going to give away specific questions about what’s in or what’s out, because I don’t really think that’s helpful to anybody. And I don’t really think you want to know. But a lot of my favorite scenes are in there. Many, many of what I think are the best scenes that we did are in there.
Some scenes aren’t. The cut that I saw didn’t have the “Black Freighter” material in it. Although, as you probably know in the same way that I do — in other words, by reading on the Internet — this is being produced and, for all I know, one time will be integrated with the rest of the material.
[pause] There are scenes in the movie that weren’t in the graphic novel. And when you think about it, this is inevitable as well. In the graphic novel, we had a huge luxury of space. We had hundreds and hundreds of pages, the equivalent of hours and hours of film. Anybody who deals with story knows that sometimes you have to amalgamate stuff. This, I think, has been done very successfully in the Watchmen movie.
[long pause, chuckles] I’m only pausing because I’m just trying to be quite clear about what I should say and what I shouldn’t say, and I only mean that from the point of view of I don’t want to give any spoilers. I don’t want to say anything that’s going to be misleading. Not that anybody at the studio or anybody connected with this has told me anything I must or mustn’t say.
I really enjoyed it as a movie. I thought it was a great movie. It was a long movie, I think the cut I saw was about two hours and fifty minutes. I’m not sure about that, because I wasn’t timing it. I was just enjoying it. And I enjoyed every minute of it. I could have done with more of it. I mean, as you can appreciate, I’m unique in all the world sitting in the dark watching this, because it could easily be confused with me lying in the dark with my eyes shut, dreaming up the images in the first place. So many of the images in there are the essence of what I saw in my head when I came to design scenes based on Alan’s script. So, there was a really, rather dreamlike and surreal quality to it.
The film is very rich. It moves backwards and forwards in time, just as the graphic novel does, so each time period is very clearly delineated and very clearly identifiable, which means there had to be huge attention to set dressing and cars and costumes and hairstyles and music, all those kinds of things. A lot of almost subliminal things that you don’t really realize are necessary to set something in its correct time.
All of the performances, I really enjoyed. I think all of the actors made their characters come very convincingly alive for me. I wouldn’t want to pick out one over anybody else, but I don’t think there’s a weak performance in there. And they certainly came vividly alive to me in both their identities. It’s strange to play Dan Dreiberg and then play Nite Owl. And it’s a lot more subtle than, you know, “This is a case for… Superman!” It’s quite a difficult trick, I imagine.
[long pause] What can I tell you? [another long pause] It’s very fast-moving. It is very violent and it is very sexy and I made some remarks at the BFI show in London and those two phrases were quoted and I know they caused some people some dismay. It isn’t a violent sex film, it just happens to have those amongst the other elements, just as the comic book did. In that respect, it’s very, very true to the comic book. It undoubtedly deserves an adult rating, and certainly there are some very brutal scenes in it, and – as you know, from reading the graphic novel — things that you don’t normally expect heroes to be doing.
“Was there anything I wasn’t particularly thrilled about?” Yeah, I started to get an uncomfortable feeling in my bladder about an hour from the end, but I managed to overcome that. Funnily enough, the first time I got the chance to say anything to Zack after I’d seen it was when we were both in the men’s room, having made a run for it. I wanted to shake him by the hand, but it wasn’t really appropriate.
As I said, feedback was very much solicited from everybody that had been there, and I did give some extensive feedback. Very much a work in progress, things that clearly were unfinished, a lot of the computer graphics were unfinished, characters had wires on them and things that obviously were going to be removed at the post-production stages hadn’t yet been done. But even in that rough state, I really, really enjoyed it. It was unlike any movie that I’d seen before. It did have that richness, it had that sense of sweep across time and across space as well, going from the forties up to the eighties and from New York City to Antarctica to Mars, and a kaleidoscope of characters major and minor. I really did think that it is an experience and a kind of a movie-going experience that hasn’t been… experienced before [chuckles].
I can’t wait for everybody to see it. That’s the feeling I got from everybody involved with it, as well. I really can’t wait to get feedback on it. And certainly, having seen the screening at San Diego — though I only saw that on a monitor, which was a little bit frustrating, because of where I was sitting up on the stage — but when it was shown again at the BFI event in London, I got the chance to sit in the audience and see it twice on the big screen. Just an amazing experience, and I think I speak for everybody else in the audience there as well, you can feel the crowd just absolutely lapping it up.
So rest easy. Rest easy, WatchmenComicMovie.com people, I really don’t think you’re going to be disappointed. I certainly wasn’t. Nathan: So many other directors have tried to make a Watchmen movie. Have you ever met with any of them? Were you invited by any of them to consult on their films?
Dave Gibbons: I did meet Joel Silver, way back after the graphic novel I think had just been released as a graphic novel. Alan and I met Joel and Jeanette Kahn, who was then publishing DC Comics. We had lunch in London and we talked about the movie. Joel was just… he was like a Hollywood movie guy from central casting. He was loud, enthusiastic, rather brash… not quite talking about the same thing that Alan and I were talking about when we talked about Watchmen. But we had a cordial lunch and we concluded it as friends. He suggested, memorably, that Arnold Schwarzenegger should play Dr. Manhattan, which we let past because he also said that he thought Arnold Schwarzenegger should play Sgt. Rock, which felt like a bit of a stretch to me. But apparently, the plot was that now Rock was an immigrant – or his father was an immigrant — to the USA, and had always been suspected because of his German-ness and him now commanding a platoon against the Nazis was his chance to redeem himself and prove that he was a true blue American.
Anyway, that was the meeting with Joel Silver, and then, the movie got passed around a little bit. Terry Gilliam, at one point, was in the frame to direct it. I know that Alan met with him briefly, I never had the chance to meet him. So really, until Zack came on board, I hadn’t really had a lot to do with the movie adaptations of it. My mum, when she was alive, used to read me snippets from the tabloid newspapers. You know, “Oh, the Monty Python man’s making a film of your comic! Oh, that’ll be funny!”
But once Zack got on board… I actually introduced myself to him at the premiere of 300 in London and immediately hit it off with him. The guy was very enthusiastic. I knew from the very beginning, seemed to me to completely get Watchmen. And since then, I’ve consulted… I suppose quite a lot. I was shown an early draft of the script and asked to comment. I have done a little bit of production storyboard for him in the form of drawing sequences in the style of the comic — and having them colored by John Higgins — that hadn’t actually appeared in the original graphic novel, because he wanted to see how we would have handled them if they had. Which I think shows a commitment.
As you know, I got to go to the set and see a couple of scenes being filmed. The scene that I really saw at great length was the Crimebusters meeting, which was amazing to see everybody in costume and just amazing to hear those words spoken and smell the cigar smoke and actually being in the presence of all these people. And again, the great sense of commitment came over. Do believe me, everything that I’ve said about attention to detail and everybody’s commitment… I’ve got my hand on my heart, it’s absolutely true. It’s not blowing smoke at all. It was quite staggering to see how much everybody was into it and how much they were using the graphic novel as a shooting script and a bible.
whomod said: I generally don't like it when people decide to play by the rules against people who don't play by the rules. It tends to put you immediately at a disadvantage and IMO is a sign of true weakness. This is true both in politics and on the internet."
