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Dave Gibbons On the Forthcoming Watchmen Movie
An anonymous reader writes "Den Of Geek has been talking to comics legend Dave Gibbons about the upcoming transition of the Watchmen from the comic book to the silver screen. 'There are hardcore fans out there who'll be satisfied with nothing less than a word-for-word, line-for-line, scene-for-scene recreation of the comic book. I didn't believe that was ever going to happen.'" It's a rather short interview, but Gibbons addresses some interesting elements of both the movie and comic-book worlds.
See ya tomorrow
It will probably have as much to do with the comic book as Starship Troopers had to do with the Sci-Fi classic.
Keep in mind, there wasn't a whole, whole lot of action in Watchmen, & a lot of the intricacies of the "superheroes" relationships will probably be glossed over.
There is a war going on for your mind.
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are almost never 100% faithful - the closest I've seen lately is "No Country for Old Men."
It's not that it's impossible but it's just not necessary or preferable. If a movie gets the spirit of its source material, captures something of its style, and brings something new to it that could only be accomplished cinematically then it's probably a successful adaptation.
I doubt that Watchmen will get the treatment its due by Hollywood. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen didn't, and neither did V for Vendetta. Why should Watchmen?
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I'm not expecting a direct, panel-for-panel adaptation. While I love Watchmen, I feel there's a few chunks that won't translate well into film, specifically some of the backstory snippets that are told through newspaper clippings and the like. I want the movie to be loyal to the original material, but not bound by it.
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Gibbons is clearly setting up a strawman dismissal of anybody who complains that the movie is insufficiently true to the book. Don't think it captured the original story faithfully enough, or skillfully enough? You're obviously a "hardcore" fan with unrealistic expectations.
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Right, so screw 'em, they'll never be happy with anything that doesn't match what they've built up in their heads. They can exercise their freedom of choice and not go. I didn't like the new Star Wars flicks, but I chose to see them for myself and formed my opinion afterwords.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
hear hear.
Watchmen is a classic. It is my favorite classic. I still get it down and read it every now and then and it still makes me shiver.
My instinctive reaction to the film is "Noooooo!", but on reflection I then think of the "V for Vendetta" movie and I remember that it is possible to make a damn good film out of a graphic novel without following it exactly. I know "Sin City" is more or less a scene for scene clone of the book, likewise "300" - but it does not have to be like that. Vendetta showed us that.
Looks like its going to suck. Bad actors, the director is a dweeb, the special effects are going to be laughable.
With production values this bad, who will watch The Watchmen?
I'm not sure that the only graphic novel to win the Hugo Award could be made into a mass-marketed movie that could do it justice. Already Zack Snyder (director of the upcoming film) has to trim 4 1/2 hours of film down to a puny 2 at best. Can you really cover it all in that short period of time? And BTW - the entire Tales of the Black Freighter will be released separately on DVD by Warner Bros right after the film comes out. Get out your pocket books, people!
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Every normal person I know seems to believe V for Vendetta was a great movie. Maybe adapting a good book into a good movie, even at the expense of diverging from the original work, isn't all bad.
"Rorschach's rampant homophobia, for example, or the original Miss Jupiter's deep and abiding love for her would-be rapist, are uncomfortable but central topics in the book."
Seeing as I barely noticed these things, I have to disagree that they are "central topics". It would be exceedingly easy to tell the important parts of the story while leaving most of that out, especially Rorschach's homophobia.
"Jon's gradual shedding of his costume down to full-frontal nudity, as he gradually distances himself from humanity, is also an important progression."
That I agree with. In the case of your previous examples, their absence would change little. This example was not only obvious, but necessary. Without removing the "deus ex machina" that Jon was, the story would have been impossible to tell.
I still think that stupid "tachyon" garbage Veidt used was a major flaw in the story. I lost a bit of respect for Moore for using technobabble and hand waving to get around Jon's immense power.
I won't be satisfied with anything less than a word-for-word, line-for-line, scene-for-scene recreation of the comic book
And some people I know...
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Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
How dare you be so modest!! You conceited bastard!!
As I understand it, in I Robot's case, the reason the story diverged so badly is because it wasn't based on the book at all.
The studio owned the name "I Robot" and used it on a similar story. The movie that came out under that title would have been called something else if they hadn't already owned that particular name.
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Hollywood will glitz up the story, and gloss over the personal details. IMHO, it's the personal relationships that make the Watchmen such a good story. At its core it is a story about people, not action.
It'll be a shame to watch that take a back seat to special effects.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I don't want to add to the silly geek speculation, but I think it is true that most Hollywood movies avoid making the viewer uncomfortable.
Personally, I nominate for deletion the entire novel-within-the-novel of the shipwrecked castaway. Every time that came up, I found myself flipping forward, looking for the main story to pick up again. In fact, it seemed all the extra characters who we saw passing by the newsstand in New York were just "whales" (q.v. Douglas Adams).
I would be very disappointed if Rorschach's backstory as told to the psychologist were cut. Some amazingly powerful and resonant stuff in there. "Looked at sky through smoke heavy with human fat and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever and we are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later."
Really, really good.
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The only way to do include any of this sort of material be to do it on the cheap and raise independent funding. If you accept Hollywood's fat cash, you accept that they're going to make your movie as inoffensive and audience-pleasing as possible. Those are the strings attached.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Maybe it will be a good movie that isn't the Watchmen.
I respect Alan Moore's opinion personally.
I'm not sure if this could have been made into anything less than a hard "R" movie anyway. Very adult content.
Including the pirate comic subtext in the movie would be very hard.
It probably deserves a trilogy or mini-series to be done right any way.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
If anyone is excited to see the movie Watchmen, you should really make sure to see the movie Taxi Driver first.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
We'll see in they try to make it a detective story with Rorschach being a more hard core Batman falsely imprisoned and having to find his old ally or the "ends to a means" social commentary story about creating a greater foe in hopes that everyone will join together to create utopia. The fact that costumed adventures are there just happen to be part of their world is just a side effect.
Sadly, I think it will be the first with much of the explanation for the characters actions being left on the cutting room floor... But what can I say? It will be Pawn who closes his eyes and says mother, but Rorschach that opens them again.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
http://www.cinematical.com/2008/05/26/tales-of-the-black-freighter-getting-dvd-release/
The knot-tops / lesbian romance subplot.
The paranoid right-wing rag subplot.
The role of the Comedian in present events.
Rorschach's unyielding, twisted sense of justice, which leads to his death. Is Rorschach's misanthropic voice the ultimate soul of the book?
The more I think about it, the more the Watchmen seems bound to its time. It was kind of thrilling to see a comic book deal with social issues. But because that was such a novel thing for a comic book to do, it could just sort of gesture at them. (As, for example, with the whole urban crime / police strike backstory.) It was enough for the book to say "we're aware of these things, and so should you be, because they shed light on today's events." The events in question, however, were those of the late 1970s and early 1980s in the U.S. and Britain. In sum, although I revere the Watchmen, I wonder how good its geopolitical or geosocial perception will look in a world that has changed so much since then.
In a sense, V for Vendetta got lucky in being made into a movie at the time it did, in that its portrait of a repressive society founded on propaganda designed to arouse fear of terrorist attack was just too deliciously close to present events for a scriptwriter to ignore. Here, too, it's enough just to make the Voice of London broadcast look like something on Fox News or CNN to stir up the audience. And of course the word "terrorist." In the end, I guess the low-hanging fruit of connection to today's events made for an enjoyable movie.
Watchmen will have none of these advantages and will have to sell itself on completely different grounds, on something closer to its own terms. I hope the producers will find a way.
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And homophobia? Would be more interesting if they showed his fear of women...
Hardcore fans are either going to see it or not, and which side they fall on has nothing to do with how accurate the movie winds up being but more with just what kind of person they are.
Therefore the producers should concentrate on making the best movie possible. To the extent that making the best movie possible coincides with adhering to the source material, so much the better. But where the source will not add to the movie, they should diverge in the interest of entertaining the mainstream and making the most money-- which usually means making the best movie possible.
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I don't know, do comic book writers ever have movie rights? I had always assumed that they assigned copyright to the comic publisher, and at best got royalties from movie adaptations, but no say in the decision making processes.
Who moderates the meta-moderators?
In an interview, past Watchmen screenwriter David Hayter said that he first pitched Watchmen to HBO to make it a 12 episode miniseries, and they turned it down. In my mind, that was the only way to make a screen version of Watchmen that people would care about for more than six months. Instead of creating Dr. Manhattan with Weta Digital's Gollum technology, they'd create Dr. Manhattan by shooting an actor normally and applying lightsaber glow with an off-the-shelf video editing program. HBO's shows have millions, sometimes tens of millions, of viewers and make tons of money. Even broadcast serial dramas like 24 and Lost that have to endure commercial interruptions have vastly more depth than any movie in theaters can achieve. Comic book movie producers aught to consider the TV route more often.
But I don't see why you're surprised that a lot of Asimov fans were disappointed. The man wrote three dozen robot stories, and only a couple of them (neither of which was collected in "I, Robot") flirted with Frankenstein themes. Even in those two, "Robots designed to subvert the Three Laws discover the possibility of doing so to a greater extent", and "Machines falsify economic predictions to get political opponents fired" are at least a little more subtle than "Robots designed to obey humanity conspire to establish totalitarianism and impose martial law".
>I still think that stupid "tachyon" garbage Veidt used was a major flaw in the story. I lost a bit of respect for Moore for using technobabble and hand waving to get around Jon's immense power.
Right... so what you want is a realistic explanation for a freakin' flying blue guy who can do anything?
Spiderman: Slashdotter with hot girlfriend and superpowers.
Superman: Jesus Christ in a cape.
Watchmen: ???
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
They killed Matt Damon and Leonardo de Caprio. Its the happiest ending I've seen since Titanic, which only killed one of the two, but sort of poisoned the festive mood with thousands of people (who weren't Leonardo di Caprio) dying in the background.
Now how is Hollywood going to top that... I have an idea: Oceans 14. We put in Matt Damon, Leonardo de Caprio, George Clooney, and any many who has ever even considered being in an "Oceans #{i += 1}" movie, and then at the end of the daring casino caper we kill them all. I would pay to see that twice, and then buy the DVD so I could skip straight to the good part.
In fact, forget the casino caper, that part tends to drag anyhow. Tell you what -- they break in 2 seconds into the movie, it turns out the pit boss is River Tam, and the next 90 minutes is filled with non-stop star killing.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
The movie's global plot contradict what most geek retain when they have to condense Asimov's Idea into a short sentence. So that's why it wasn't much loved by Asimov fans, even if you *CAN* dig out material in some Asimov's work which is similar to the movie.
It doesn't seems like paying tribute to the original material, it seems more like some independant robot story (which followed the standard Frankenstein plot) on which the marketing department decided to bolt the Asimov name because it sells better, and throw a big bunch of allusion to the books and cameos in order to somewhat make the result more related to the name they are using.
Beside it's not even a brilliant movie. I mean the CGI effects are well done, etc but it mostly feels just like any other holywood blockbuster. They basically Save the world(tm)! With lots of explosions(tm)! And that's it, basically.
At least, even if Verhoeven completely raped Heinlein's work and the resultant movie is very far from being a faithful and litteral port of the book, he nevertheless managed to bring its own spark to the movie, he managed to create a political satire which is really fun to watch once you forget the book.
(Kubrick could be another example. Often his movies weren't faithful to the book, but nonetheless managed to have interests on their own)
I Robot just feels bland. They could've tried to go for a low-fantasy film-noir-type of detective story (the original material of the novels can quite easily be fitted into this king of structure - And it's been a long time since the last sci-fi detective story). Or whatever else. But "Will Smiths vs. Frankensteinbots" (With lots of stunts !) somewhat wasn't that much attractive.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
If they can get that right the movie will be brilliant, but I doubt they will.
Another thing: The story is in a large part driven by the Cold War and the threat of nuclear holocaust. What are they going to do about that? I would love it if they kept it as an 80's period piece.
One big fear that I have is that they will make it more "relevant" and "contemporary" by changing the threat to be some kind of War on Terror driven bull.
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The ending of A Scanner Darkly was really close to the original story, and I wouldn't call it a happy ending. And yes, there was a studio behind that movie.
Then again, A Scanner Darkly wasn't a typical movie, and not intended to be a blockbuster.
Liberal means respect for individual freedoms and rights; most Americans confuse this with "libertarian". It has nothing to do with the size of government, but the role as referee. What you call liberal is more like social democracy, which sees government as a tool to promote fairness through supporting programmes. And further along the scale, there's the socialist philosophy that sees government as a force that should intervene in commerce, not merely referee.
So to use another metaphor, their scale didn't go to 11.
I didn't. Perhaps when speakingof reading, you could engage in some yourself.
You'll see that I DID acknowledge them, just that they had little impact. Reading isn't hard, why are you having difficulty?
In the future, for me specifically, if you plan to respond, please respond to what I said and not whatever stupid nonsense you chose to assign to me.
No moron, what I want is for the author to not take the easy way out when HE HIMSELF introduced said "flying blue guy who can do anything". He took the easy way out and the story suffered.
Don't blame me because I'm not intellectually stunted enough to accept the ending, just be happy that you are.
Whether the movie is 'faithful' to the book or not is kind of beside the point. Watchmen is about as un-filmable as a novel can get. Hollywood tends to look at comics as ready-made storyboards, but the best comics are a great deal more than that. Watchmen itself is perhaps the greatest expression of the concept of comics-as-comics - not a static version of a cartoon, but a visual literature with its own rules. The movie, I think, will be more or less bad, but most of all it will be unnecessary. It can't add anything to the story, and it can't re-create what's best in it.
What gets me is the director's terribly mistaken view of himself as 'a fan' who 'really gets it'. He's an idiot, and 300 was an abortion.
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I'm not going to post spoiler warnings for movies that are out on fucking DVD.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
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No, I'm deeply offended by people who assigned things to me which I never said or did.
Of course. That I choose not to is simply an indication of the contempt I have for people like you who manufacture arguments.
I genuinely don't care.
I learned. I learned that your opinion is not worth paying attention to, and that you'll contort yourself however necessary when confronted.
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I guess the answer is "constantly, all day long". Which I suspected already.
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Well, maybe Moore's an asshole, but maybe he took one look at things like that fucking abortion they made of "From Hell" and wanted to stop them from gang-raping his work.
And, y'know, it doesn't make somebody an asshole for not wanting a movie made of their work. Maybe he thinks that his work doesn't translate from one medium to another. He's not under an obligation to help make a movie of his work just because somebody else sold the rights. Writers are not indentured servants.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".