Additional reporting by Larry Carroll
Last week, "Watchmen" director Zack Snyder offered some advice for newcomers to the comic book series that provided source material for his most recent blockbuster (opening today): "Don't read it."
To be fair, he was simply suggesting that those who haven't read Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' celebrated comic book series wait until after seeing his adaptation of the aforementioned story to crack open the cover. For those of you going into Snyder’s film as well-versed “Watchmen” fanatics, however, we also got Zack’s thoughts on the one movie addition that he is most proud of, and the one graphic novel element that he found hardest to cut. (Beware: there are SPOILERS AHEAD!)
“There are a few things that I contributed; a lot of it is in the title sequence, as far as the iconographic stuff,” he said of the eye-popping opening credits that establish the alternate reality in which the Watchmen reside.
“[Showing] the dropping of the bomb on Japan is really important for the context of ‘Watchmen.’ [That establishes] the idea of killing hundreds of thousands to save millions; that moral imperative that permeates the book as a concept,” he explained. “A few other images from that [opening] montage. I love Adrian at Studio 54, that cultural response to the question ‘What is a superhero?’ In the sense that people in costumes are ridiculous; we would never have people in costumes running around in our world. But you look at that scene [and see David Bowie, Mick Jagger and The Village People hanging with Veidt in the Seventies] and everyone’s in a costume.”
As for the greatest subtraction, “The thing that I would have loved to have done was [the scene where Walter Kovacs goes to his apartment]; the thing about that scene that I love in the graphic novel is Rorschach had to know that the woman in the apartment who he took the apartment from had falsely accused him of making sexual advances toward her. So when he goes back to get his costume, in the normal case he would have killed her or beat her up. But when he sees the kids he lets her be -- because he sees himself in those children. That was a piece I really would have liked to have gotten to, but it just felt like that was a tangent.”
Snyder also felt like the idea of plain-clothed Rorschach escaping prison and going all the way back home to retrieve his costume was “clumsy,” so instead the director devised another way to get him back in his trenchcoat and face mask. “I think we found a great way to get around it in the movie,” he explained of a new scene where a terrified Dr. Malcolm Long hands the suit back to Kovacs during the escape. “Which is basically having the psychiatrist have Rorschach’s costume in his office.”
What do you think of Snyder's choices when it comes to adding/subtracting elements of the story? Sound off in the comment section!
Comments