Yes indeed. Alan Moore has all but ostracized film adaptations from his life, Terry Gilliam had already previously tagged a screen version of Watchmen as impossible, and Zack Snyder (the director currently onboard, who just finished off 300) leaves me almost no hope that any of the real substance of Watchmen will ever hit the screen. Here's a snippet of
an interview with Snyder from SuicideGirls, of all places. Contains some scene spoilers if you haven't read Watchmen:
EDIT: LOL, just realized the language filter. Yeah, he's pretty blunt with his language.
Quote:
DRE:
It’s hard to figure out what a guy like yourself might do next just because you don’t have a big body of work yet. Besides adapting things like Watchmen and 300, what else are you interested in?
Zack:
I’m a bit of an action geek.
DRE:
Is that your number one thing?
Zack:
No, not at all. My instinct is that movies where people are fighting and shooting are the movies I want to see. I don't really look for a movie that has anything specific in tone, action and story. I’m just looking for something that feels cool to me. Where I think about it and say "Yeah that sounds cool! I want to do that for *dirty word* years!" As a director, you just wake up everyday for a year and go "Yeah! That’s cool!"
DRE:
Can people sitting around talking be cool?
Zack:
It absolutely can. Watchmen has a lot of *dirty word* talking in it [laughs]. Dawn of the Dead had a lot of talking in it.
DRE:
Talk to me about the kind of color palette you want for the Watchmen movie.
Zack:
The thing about Watchmen is that I'm looking to make a movie that looks more like Taxi Driver than Dick Tracy [laughs]. People bring that up to me "Is it like Dick Tracy?" because that’s colorful. Watchmen as a printed medium references comic books itself. It goes "Look, I’m a comic book" and you read it, you're like "You're *dirty word* blowing my mind!" But that’s what it tries to do, it draws you in by being a comic book. I think my responsibility is to draw the audience in by saying "Look I’m just a movie" and then you get in there and it *meep*s you up. That’s my hope anyway. It is a weird movie. When you see the trailer and you go "Okay that looks like Richard Nixon. Dude that blue guy is in *dirty word* Vietnam, what is this?"
There’s a song you can not put in a Vietnam war movie and it’s Ride Of the Valkyries which should not be put it in any movie because of Apocalypse Now. But in Watchmen, you can imagine a sequence in Watchmen where Dr. Manhattan is 100 feet tall stomping through the jungles of Vietnam with Hueys all over him, zapping the Vietcong while Ride of the Valkyries is playing. It is transcendent of itself so you can reference Apocalypse Now and that’s okay. It is pop culture.
I’ve been drawing the storyboards and I’m very careful with sequence and things like that. There’s a sequence where Rorschach shoots his grappling gun up to the window and climbs up there. I just kept pulling shots out of the book and putting them in my boards. There’s no reason not to just shoot it like that.
DRE:
I can't wait to see him shoot the grappling hook into the SWAT guy.
Zack:
Yeah, that’s cool. When Nite Owl says "I made that for him!"
DRE:
The best line of the whole book is when Rorschach says "I'm not trapped in here with you, you're trapped in here with me!"
Zack:
That’s awesome. One of the things that I think is cool that in the movie there'd be a poster of Dr. Manhattan with silverware and trays floating around him and in America it would say "Superman is real and he's American." That same poster in Europe would say "God is real and he's American." That’s good muck.[/b]
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