I guess word on the street is that you’re going to bring this kind of fidelity to Watchmen and sticking close to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s original work. Is that true?
Yeah. I feel like where we are with the script right now is, in some ways, the closest that it’s been in any iteration to the graphic novel, in the sense that we’re trying to keep as much of the things that make the graphic novel awesome. That goes to everything: 1985, R-rating, everything. Which, by the way, it was never going to be before.
It was a PG-13 previously.
Sure.
Is Warner Bros happy with an R?
No. They’re mad at that. T hey don’t want an R-rated movie, but they’re cool with me. They’re like, ‘OK, if that’s what you think, Snyder. But it’s a bummer.’ [laughs] They have to leave a lot of money on the table.
Right. You can’t have the 15 year olds in there.
Exactly. But on the other hand, Watchmen is Watchmen, and I said, ‘Guys, the reason this movie works is that it’s counter. It’s anti.’ I believe audiences are ready for what’s the next step of the genre. It’s an exhausted genre right now, at least that’s what I believe.
That’s interesting, because while Watchmen has been under development for decades, but the book is a critique of the superhero genre, and you couldn’t have done that on film until now, when audiences are very used to the conventions of the genre.
Absolutely. That’s the cool part about it, for me anyway. Your movie audience is basically where your comic book audience was when the graphic novel was written – you’re basically in a place where you can make a satirical comment about a superhero and the audience will get it, because they have the frame of reference.
I’ve heard some interesting rumors about Watchmen, that the cast isn’t going to be like 300, which is a bunch of actors who aren’t marquee names, but rather that you’re talking to some very big names.
You know, we are and we aren’t. I gotta say I think we are when it’s appropriate, but it’s not driving the movie. There were some people who I was considering who are big names, but it’s exactly that at this point – we’re just talking about it. When you’re in the early stages of talking about a movie what happens is that everybody goes, ‘Tom Cruise! Brad Pitt!’ That’s the first conversation, and then you end up with the actual people that are going to be in the movie.
I heard rumors that Tom Cruise was actually interested.
He was interested. I did talk to him for quite a while. To be honest.
Ozymandias, would that be the role?
That was the role.
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A lot of people have said that Watchmen should be a mini-series or whatever, but my feeling is that you want production value with Watchmen. The fans want to see it awesome and they want a lot of it. It’s hard, and it’s a trade-off, if you want it to be as good as it can be.
You’re really going to shoot the Tales from the Black Freighter, huh?
That’s my hope. My hope is to shoot the Tales from the Black Freighter as a supplement for the DVD, for the ‘real’ Watchmen.
Anybody else approaching this material, that would be the first thing they’d cut. It’s interesting to see how you’re approaching this – keeping that in really shows how you’re thinking.
For me it goes back to the why of Watchmen. The why of it is almost like what I was saying about Frank’s point of view. It’s funny, because Watchmen, politically – I don’t think Alan Moore could be any more opposite of Frank Miller. I think it gives you a little bit of an idea of how I approach it; the fact that I go from Frank to Alan shows that to me it’s about the work, what they work is, what they’ve done with the work and what it represents. They’ve both, in their own way, innovated, and they’re both geniuses in this convention we call graphic novels or comic books.
