Comic Con: We Watch The Watchmen Panel

By Josh Tyler: 2008-07-30 01:20:28

By now you’ve already heard that everything about the San Diego Comic Con’s Watchmen panel was flat out awesome. In fact you’ve already heard about some of it from us, when I turned in my quick description of some of the awesome footage director Zack Snyder showed off here. But now we’ve got time to get down into the nitty gritty details of just why this movie looks so good, and what Zack Snyder and his cast did to convince everyone, while seated in the heart of nerd Valhalla.

Snyder won hearts and minds that morning, firstly, by bringing almost the entire Watchmen cast with him. While other panels made excuses for why their stars couldn’t show up, Watchmen recognized the importance of the venue, and lined each and every one of their stars up along the stage. It was one of the biggest panel to show up in Comic Con’s biggest venue, Hall H, all week. Watchmen deserved nothing better. Zack Snyder (director), Malin Ackerman (Silk Spectre), Billy Crudup (Dr. Manhattan), Matthew Goode (Ozymandias), Carla Gugino (first Silk Spectre), Jackie Earle Haley (Rorschach), Jeffrey Dean Morgan (The Comedian), and Patrick Wilson (Nite Owl) were all on stage along with the co-creator of the original “Watchmen” books, Dave Gibbons.

Whenever there’s a film adapted from a popular book like this one, it’s inevitable that the director and the cast will stand up in front of everyone and talk about how serious they are about staying faithful to the source material. In the case of Watchmen though, it’s impossible not to believe it. Snyder started the panel out by declaring right off the bat: “It’s a labor of love, to try and get as much of the graphic novel into this movie as I could. And the cast has been super awesome in helping me at every turn, go ‘yeah but no my character says this. See that little circle by his head? He says this.’” It’s a big deal not just for him, but his entire cast. And if there was any theme to the panel it’s how important just about everyone involved seems to think the original comic actually is.

There have been so many attempts to make this thing before, and none of them seem to have gotten it the way Snyder does. Unlike those other attempts, he’s not interested in trying to modernize it or changing it to fit the world that’s happened since Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons first wrote it. Snyder affirmed, “A lot of the things in the graphic novel comment on mass culture and how the world has evolved now. I just thought making the movie about the war on terror and some sort of modern take on, trying to jam these characters into our modern politics just seemed wrong to me. It’s cooler if people go “hey that makes me think” rather than me telling them what to think… Because I felt like that’s what the book does. In the end it zaps through a lot of moral questions and you have to answer those yourselves and I think that’s what Watchmen is. “

A Hollywood director admitting he wants his audience to think? That could be the kiss of death, fro any other project but this. But Snyder and his cast are dead set and determined to make this the kind of movie everyone who has read the novel has been expecting. Star Jackie Earle Haley even went so far as to admit he’s been learning from the comic’s fans. He says, ““I even spent a lot of time with you guys on the website… I learned a lot from you about who Rorschach is.”

Because of that dedication to the books as a source, co-creator Dave Gibbons is totally on board. As if you didn’t already know that from his production blog. For him, it was the little things about the production that impressed him the most. For example he says, “they had a martial arts class called Judo Master. And Judo Master was one of the Charlton heroes who originally going to be the Watchmen but who never made the final cut. But somebody had noticed that and made sure even Judo Master was in it. And the thing that I am rather proud of with the set is there was a lot of graffiti on it. They wanted to graffiti it up, but didn’t have time. But I’ve got a little trademark which is a letter “G” for Gibbons, and after I’d left one of the prop guys plastered this little “G” up all over the place. So when I see the movie it’s got my signature on it.”

Gibbon’s co-author Alan Moore has been pretty vocal about his distaste for movies being made out of anything he’s involved in though. Of him, all Gibbons can say is, “Really I wish that Alan could feel the same kind of excitement and joy that I’m feeling. I just wish he hadn’t have had such a bad experience in the past, because I’m certainly having a really good experience.”

Even though Snyder and his cast are staying true to their Watchmen roots, that doesn’t mean they’re afraid to make the movie their own. For instance, Matthew Goode is playing Andrien Veidt with an occasional, slight, German accent. That’s right, I said German accent. He explains, “I had my own kind of vision quest… In that moment I thought wouldn’t it be really interesting then if… well maybe it’s possible that his parents, he gives his fortune away… so his parents were Nazis maybe, maybe that’s why he gives his wealth away, maybe he was born actually in Germany but then came to America, maybe, a lot of fuckin maybes, maybe in that case he’s living out the American dream, so he has this kind of public and a private persona as well as his alter ego. So it might mean he has a very clear cut American accent when he’s doing you know, his stuff as Adrien Veidt… and when he’s with the Watchmen he has kind of a half-American half-German thang going on.”

Meanwhile, Snyder talked about the changes that would be necessary to fit this massive, deep work into a feature film. He admits, ““There’s the supplemental material that’s in the graphic novel… I wanted to try and get some of that in the movie as well. It was already that the pictures alone would be a 5-hour movie… I think that in the adaptation of the graphic novel to script, we kind of have a basic structure. It was about for me that you’re gonna end up with stuff that’s not in there. That’s just the way it is. But I wanted to get at the character… So if anything I think that we had to cut out some bits that are more actiony, or a little less about the inhabitants of Watchmen and more about the pictures.”

For the most part, everyone on stage seemed to say this movie was first and foremost, all about the characters. Crudup calls Dr. Manhattan “unlike anything I have a frame of reference for.” Talking about the obstacles to playing a super powered blue guy he says, “One, you have to try and take a point of view, about what he’s capable of, and how he goes about living a mundane life and pretty exotic life at the same time. And the second is how you pretend to be the 6’4” master of matter while you’re a 5’9”, forty-year-old jackass playing dressup. So those were my two main obstacles and I did the best I could.”

Patrick Wilson faced much more emotional challenges with Dan. The guy seemed genuinely in love with being Nite Owl. Cutting right to the heart of who and what his character is, he says, “You always pull for Dan. You do. What’s so amazing to me, because you know OK, he’s flabby, he’s morose, he’s down on his luck, he’s all these negative words. And yet, when you look at the first few panels, especially when Rorschach and I go down to the Owl chamber, and there’s this shot of him saying ‘You don’t think that’s a little paranoid?’ and he’s got this sort of smile on his face. I love the fact, that’s something you don’t get when you read something based on a book. It’s a whole different level when you get to see the artwork. For me that was so informative. That helped me so much, to see that a guy that could be played so down… but yet he has this light in his eyes. And I love the fact that the artwork, and the drawings that Dave came up with are so informative as an actor… you see these shots in the graphic novel that he’s smiling and you see him fighting for it. And that’s what I think that’s something that really keyed me into Dan… he wants it so bad.”

If you’ve seen the trailer, then you know just how amazing this thing is shaping up to be. And if you’ve read the comic, well then you know that if any property deserves a proper treatment then this is it. The Watchmen panel was just another reason to believe in Zack Snyder. Believe in Watchmen.