Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with my exclusive one on one with Zack Snyder from this year’s WonderCon. I swear, this is the last WATCHMEN story you'll see from me! Taking a look at the front page as I prepared this story I was worried we'd be hitting Watchmen overload at this point. This is, I believe, the fourth time I’ve spoken with Snyder and the third time we’ve talked about Watchmen, the first being at Comic-Con in 2007 (Read that interview here!) and the second being that weird PS3 digital press conference with Snyder and Dave Gibbons two weeks ago. But this is the first time I had a chance to talk with Snyder after having seen the movie. They weren’t doing any one on ones with any of the Watchmen people at WonderCon, but luckily for you guys I have some really solid blackmail material on the Warner Bros press reps and they set me up with Snyder immediately after the panel, while Zack was supposed to be eating… He did grab some bites during the interview, but he didn’t get much eating in, choosing to use his mouth for talking about the flick instead of eating a delicious looking roast beef sandwich. I also learned a lesson during this chat… as excited as you can be at finding a 24 pack of AA batteries for $3 at Big Lots, realize there’s a reason this no-name brand of battery costs $3… they don’t like to… what the word? Work. That’s it. They didn’t hold much of a charge, fresh out of the package, so they ran out half-way through the interview, but I think I was able to swap them out and restart the digital recorder in about 30 seconds, so there shouldn’t be much of an interruption. That said, we do talk about some spoilers and about a lot of details, both from the comic and the adaptation, so you've been warned. Hope you enjoy!
Quint: So are you just going to disappear over the weekend or are you going to be this Box Office Mojo every hour?
Zack Snyder: I don’t know. It’s hard to say, because I kind of hermit down a little bit. Do I get stressed out or think “Is this movie going to make a ton of money?” I really honestly try not to think about it like that. I think that’s a recipe for disaster.
Quint: Yeah, well that’s not your focus. You need to focus on making the movie.
Zack Snyder: And also, my biggest worry with the movie was just whether people would get the jokes and get the sort of irony and get the satirical elements or whether they though it was heart attack serious. I mean, it is heart attack serious on one hand…
Quint: That’s the complexity of the material, which is why everybody thought it was…
Zack Snyder: Unfilmable.
Quint: …unfilmable, exactly.
Zack Snyder: That’s the thing. It’s the same with DAWN OF THE DEAD. When I did Dawn, at the end we were getting ready for the movie to come out and I was like “Fuck, I hope people get this,” because there was a good chance people would think “Oh, this is a B-movie and it sucks… Zombies, how good can that be?” That makes me nervous, so when I hear them laugh at the McLaughlin Group, then I go like “OK they get it.” Do you know what I mean? It’s funny though, because it depends on where you show it, like when I was showing the footage in Europe, they don’t get… the McLaughlin Group… they don’t know who the fuck that it, they just think it’s some crazy cheesy talk show, but then you show it in New York to a bunch of New Yorkers and they think it’s the most hilarious thing.
Quint: And the Pat Buchanan thing got a big response too.
Zack Snyder: Yeah and that’s cool.
Quint: What do you think about that Playstation thing? The e-press conference thing.
Zack Snyder: It was whatever. (laughs) It was cool, I guess.
Quint: It was bizarre.
Zack Snyder: They didn’t let me run around enough, like they hand me my avatar and they are like “Okay, sit down!” I’m like, “Wait, you just handed me a game controller where I can control myself and you just made me sit down…” That is not fair!
Quint: And with that you can choose to dance and things, so before everyone showed up, all of the press guys were doing the mambas with their characters and they were like “We are going to stand up on the table and do that when we ask a question…” They were like “Don’t you dare. You can’t do that.”
Zack Snyder: I wanted to see some of that!
Quint: They were very serious.
Zack Snyder: “We will delete you!”
Quint: “You will be e-banned.”
Zack Snyder: “You will be deleted from the press conference,” which is weird because they would have the control to do that. The future.
Quint: Well I got to see the movie in Austin. They did the Myspace screening.
Zack Snyder: How was the sound there?
Quint: It was amazing. The Alamo’s set-up was perfect. The sound even came through here (in the WonderCon ballroom), which surprised me.
Zack Snyder: It was a little echoey, but not bad.
Quint: The sound design on the movie really is impressive. It really does rattle you.
Zack Snyder: It was cool, because I do like big sound design.
Quint: And there are only a few things that you have the ability to play with when you are adapting the material so closely, so the characters are there. Your job is to make sure that they get to the screen, but it’s within the visuals and the sounds that you actually really get a chance to play.
Zack Snyder: Absolutely. And also, just sort of working on the performances and trying to figure out where people are and what they are thinking and stuff like that.
Quint: I think I had read somewhere where you were talking about your use of slow motion in the movie, being like when you are reading the book and you get to a splash page. That’s the way I read… When I read a comic, I don’t really pay too much attention to the art on the first read through. On the second one, I will take my time, but I will read the story and then I’ll turn the page and there will be a splash then I stop and I will look at it and I read somewhere that visually that was what you were going for.
Zack Snyder: We did that definitely on 300 like crazy and you know, there’s not that much slow motion in WATCHMEN...
Quint: Definitely not, but the way you would pick which scenes, where it’s not always necessarily in support of an action scene, but it was in support of those big moments like when Comedian is going out the window or when Manhattan is in Vietnam.
Zack Snyder: Because you are thinking if you were going to shoot the scenes without the drawings, I don’t know that the big slow motion would be when he breaks through the glass. That seems like a slightly odd spot for it, but it does support… even like Manhattan in Vietnam, there are these moments where I was like “Man.” I really tried to approach it that way in the sense of “What stuck with my from my first read?” As far as when I turned a page and was like “OK, that’s awesome.” Or that moment or that idea…
Quint: The moments that would stop you in your tracks that you would want to let the details sink in.
Zack Snyder: Absolutely. So that was kind of how I was thinking about it.
Quint: When you came on board… This had been a project unlike anything except maybe JOHN CARTER OF MARS, where it’s been tried and has gone into production and then gone out of production, then again. When you came on board, did you take any time to look at what Gilliam or Aranofsky or Greengrass had done or did you just start with the original material?
Zack Snyder: No, I didn’t, because I was afraid that those ideas might just be awesome. I’m sure they were, so I was just trying to… I knew that whatever point of view we wanted to go to hopefully would just be our own. I acknowledge those guys as being amazing and even just like the TVs blowing up, that’s an homage to the beginning of BRAZIL, because I just wanted to say “I know you guys are out there.” Debbie (Snyder) read all of the scripts and there are seven scripts. She read all the way back. I just read the last one.
Quint: There must be a fascinating book in that.
Zack Snyder: There’s got to be, because there was some crazy shit they were thinking about doing.
Quint: Going back into the days when Joel Silver had it and he wanted Schwarzenegger to be Dr. Manhattan and just trying to think of the level of effects at the time and how they would have…
Zack Snyder: They would have just painted him blue. It would have looked like Blue Man Group.
Quint: He would look like Mr. Freeze in BATMAN AND ROBIN.
Zack Snyder: Yeah. But that would not be good. I don’t think that’s cool. He would have been like Jambi.
Quint: But without the turban. Then he’d start granting wishes… I guess that is actually kind of like Dr. Manhattan…
Zack Snyder: It is! (laughs, then calls out to Billy Crudup at another table, calling him “Jambi!”)
Quint: I was at a Disney panel yesterday and they were talking about 2D animation. The guy on the panel was under the impression that the Rorschach mask was done with 2D animation and not computer animation. Is that true?
Zack Snyder: There was 2D. We had rendered it first in 2D, but then there is no way to put that on his face.
Quint: I was watching… I grew up and love movies that have the 2D animation effects mixed in. Those are very nostalgic for me, like SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES and that kind of stuff.
Zack Snyder: Even like GHOST, right?
Quint: Exactly with the little demons.
Zack Snyder: Yeah, but no. It’s just whether you could make the argument that… Okay, it was done, like the actual squishing together of the rorschachs was done in 2D, but then it had to be bent in the computer, so that’s 3D.
Quint: I had a lot of conversations with people after seeing the movie and no matter what their overall opinion is, whether they loved it or hated it, we always kept coming back to just how crazy it is that you were able to navigate this film through the studio system. It really does blow my mind that this movie is out R-rated with a huge budget…
Zack Snyder: Lloyd (Levin) and I were just talking about that . In the end you can say what you want about the movie, whether you like it or not, but it has to be acknowledged that the tone of the movie, the sort of confidence level of the movie itself is crazy. Hollywood has no business making a movie like that.
Quint: Nobody would have imagined that it would have been that violent and that crazy.
Zack Snyder: Yeah, really and the director’s cut is even more violent, but I just didn’t know… Maybe it’s me, but I just didn’t know how else to do it. It’s funny because when I started drawing the movie and started talking to the studio, I didn’t say I was against PG-13, because I didn’t know what that meant. I have never made a PG-13 movie and so when I started drawing and showing the studio my drawings, they were like “This is not PG-13, I don’t know what you think it is, but you can’t have lesbian whores in a PG-13 movie. You can’t write that in blood on a wall…”
Quint: “In the opening credits.”
Zack Snyder: I was like “What? Really?”
Quint: “That’s not the F word!”
Zack Snyder: Yeah, I didn’t say “Fucking lesbian whores…” That’s when I think they stared to realize what kind of movie we were going to make. I think if we had made a PG-13 movie, we would have had even more money, but it wouldn’t have been this movie. It would have been a crazy movie.
Quint: When I wrote up my review, I was talking about how people always associate the novel with Alan Moore’s writing, which they should, because that’s what makes WATCHMEN WATCHMEN, but people forget that there has to be spectacle to it to or else the characters don’t work. The whole point of the characters is that they are these real flawed characters in this world that is recognizable as a super hero world and the point I was trying to make was like “Can you imagine this movie without Mars? Can you imagine it without Antarctica? Can you imagine it without the Vietnam sequences?” Those are huge spectacle scenes.
Zack Snyder: Of course those are the scenes were they would go “Are those necessary?”
Quint: Really?
Zack Snyder: Yeah.
Quint: I would have thought they would have wanted them just for advertising.
Zack Snyder: I thought so too and that was my argument for why to keep them.
Quint: That’s what you sell the movie on.
Zack Snyder: They were like, [“Take them out] in order to streamline the movie…” [Loud noises are heard in the background] What the hell is going on back there? [Waits a bit for the rumbling to stop, then continues on anyway] Those are the sequences that stick out in my mind as the reason to make the movie… What could sound like this for so long?
Quint: My guess is it’s the train crash scene from KNOWING.
Zack Snyder: OK.
[The sounds stop]
Zack Snyder: There we go.
Quint: The Rorschach stuff is my favorite part of the film. I mean, obviously he’s going to be the fan favorite character, but the middle of the movie is my favorite section. And I don’t say this about almost any movie, the middle is almost always the part where everything gets quiet and you have to build up to the end, but the middle of this movie, with all of the prison sequences, with the Night Owl and Silk Spectre romance, that to me is my favorite.
Zack Snyder: Oh really? That’s interesting.
Quint: I think Jackie [Earle Haley] just knocked it out of the park. At the Myspace screening, there was a huge… It wasn’t like a quiet screening, but when he screams “Give me back my face” people applauded and then when he has his “I’m not stuck in here with you” moment, people went apeshit. They love it.
Zack Snyder: They lost their minds there, but that’s good. In some ways it’s interesting because I’ve looked at the movie so much, it’s interesting that that scene comes… It’s a little bit of a reward for having… There are a couple of things, I was conscious of trying to sort of reward the audience for having to deal with some shit that they... I kind of looked at it as “Yeah, it’s a fan movie, but it is going out to the world” and so even at first people were like “Oh, you don’t need that fight at the beginning of the movie…” It was like “help me, a little bit.” It’s WATCHMEN, we know what it is.
My whole thing is once the Comedian dies, it’s a lot of talking for a long time for the Comedian’s funeral, so you want to add a bit of honey to help swallow the bitter pill of drama that is coming, you know? But there’s an interesting sort of cadence to the movie, because I personally think the tone of the movie is more the movie than the movie and that’s a thing that I’m obsessed about anyways, so that part of the movie I am probably the most happy with, just the way it feels. It feels like WATCHMEN or what ever that is. It’s inexplicable or impossible to explain or talk about, but if it wasn’t that, then it’d be a huge disaster. I think the trick is that part of it is the way the film feels boutique-y. That’s what helps it.
Quint: Yeah definitely.
Zack Snyder: When we were making 300, we were pretty sure that we were making a boutique movie that fanboys would like and that would be it. We approached WATCHMEN with the same attitude. The material is different, but we were like “Look.”
The studio was thinking we were making a movie for mass audience, but I was like “Look, I’m just going to make this movie for me, a movie I would want to see and then we will see how it goes out into the world.”
Quint: The movie’s that are different are the ones that live. You are going to have people who go see it thinking it’s a big straightforward action superhero movie and they will be disappointed, but at the same time you are going to have people going in who are surprised by that, just like how everybody was surprised when the comics came out.
Zack Snyder: Exactly, that’s what I’ve been saying. It’s funny because in some ways I think the uninitiated WATCHMEN person, like someone who doesn’t know anything about WATCHMEN, that experience is the purest experience. If you have read the book a bunch of times, watching the movie is like a different thing. You’re ticking boxes as you’re viewing it. But if you go into that movie, if you are smart and you go into WATCHMEN thinking that it’s a superhero movie… I just want to know what that’s like.
Quint: At our screening, the people who hadn’t read the graphic novel were more enthusiastic than the people that had, but I have also read the other way where say it’s dense and people don’t….
Zack Snyder: I always say, “Look, if you are going to go, then pay attention,” because by the way it is all in there, if you pay attention, it really is. There is nothing, except for Bubastis (Ozymandias’ pet lynx thing) that you would have to… although he does say in the interview “You know lunchboxes, genetic engineering…” It’s a throwaway, but…
Quint: The big fan thing and something the fans have been holding on to, something you have addressed a billion times, so I don’t want to go into it, but the Squid thing… it has to be addressed. I can feel the fan nervousness and as I was watching it, I missed the squid, too. But the second it was over I was thinking about it and what I love about what you have done with the new ending is that you place character first. You took something that was already a part of Alan Moore’s world and underlined it. I’ve always appreciated that conflict within Manhattan as he wrestles with his disconnect with humanity and his God-like abilities, but elevating him to a God status, especially from the point of view of everybody watching the catastrophe… I thought that was a really interesting idea.
Zack Snyder: For me, that idea of that that’s God, is pretty elegant. It was difficult for me, because once I was exposed to that, it was difficult for me to turn away from it. I had felt like I found that spark.
Quint: And it plays. It plays well with the character and the material is already there, all you are doing is shifting the focus on to something that is already in the graphic novel.
Zack Snyder: It was all within the book. Adrian uses Dr. Manhattan’s energy to teleport the creature, his technology.
Quint: Was there a point where you decided that or did you know from the very beginning that the Squid just wasn’t going to work? Did you try to fit it in and just realized that you would have to sacrifice too much?
Zack Snyder: With the script that I got that I was rewriting, had the Squid out. We did talk about, when I started saying “OK everything’s got to go back.” Alex (Tse) and I talked about the Squid. Debbie and I talked about it, too. And we started to say “Okay, let’s outline what we would need to do in the movie to get the Squid back in.” I had a timeline, because basically what would have had to have happen was we would be intercutting to this other story, sort of like they did in the graphic novel, where they are on the island and you see weirdness and then the monologue would have had to have been crazy to explain it. It’s already a crazy monologue anyway, but it would have been another bunch of info. I just felt like “Ugh” and honestly we were trying to figure out how gory the movie was going to be and would that have put us over the edge? To do it with all of the dead bodies… I don’t know, it just started to add on and it felt like another 15 minutes of material that would have killed us in the end.
There’s the interview. The bit that was lost in the 30 seconds of battery change involved Snyder talking about working with the studio to push his R-rated agenda and the compromises he made (most of which end up in the director’s cut and involved Manhattan’s junk). I’d like to thank Orna and Anne from Warner Bros and Bebe Lerner for making this interview happen. Also much thanks to Muldoon for turning out the transcription so quickly.
I hope you guys enjoyed the chat. I’m very curious to see what the overall reaction of this film is going to be… Both from the fanbase and from the uninitiated. I have no doubt it’s going to open huge. The second time I saw it at the regular word of mouth screening here in Austin they had two theaters open and a line around the building, which is usually a good indicator of whether a movie is going to have a big opening or not. There’s no doubt in my mind that the Warners marketing will pack them in this weekend. The real test will be next weekend.
On the second viewing I felt the length a bit more, but I was also able to fall immediately into the world unlike the first time where I was disconnected for the first reel, mentally looking out for the next scene from the comic, not just watching the movie unfold.
Also, Malin Ackerman grated on me a little bit more than she did the first time. I see why people have a problem with her. The old age make-up is still bad, but other than those few things the flick held up and even improved. I still love the new ending, all the hate-mail I get for thinking that be damned.
Got a few more chats from WonderCon coming in soon, including Ben Foster and Pete Docter. Also lining up some things for SXSW and just locked in my attendance for ShoWest, so it’s going to be a busy month for me! Stay tuned!
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
