Interview: Zach Snyder on The Watchmen

Q: Do you want to do other work that utilizes that same technology or are you thinking of going in a different direction?

Zack Snyder: Well, for instance, with Watchmen, which is the thing we’re working on right now, there’s no reason to do it that way. There are things like ‘if you go to Mars,’ sure. I think that my experience with 300 helps me with using technology. It helps me go, ‘Gosh, you know what, we should do this here. When we go to Antarctica, we can do this and that would be cool. And in this scene we ought to use snow.’ There’s things I do know how to do because of 300, but also I think that Watchmen is much more like Taxi Driver or Dr. Strangelove than it is like Fantastic Four so you have just a stylistic thing that you have to get at.

Q: There’s been talk about Watchmen for quite a while actually.

Zack Snyder: There has been. Yeah.

Q: Is there a lot more pressure for you from fans to deliver on something like that?

Zack Snyder: Yeah, there really is.

Q: Are you going to be at Comic-con this year?

Zack Snyder: I don’t know if we’ll get shots done by Comic-con this year, but hopefully. Our plan is to shoot in the summer, but I’ll go down there and I’m sure I’ll have something to show. I hope.

Q: Is that pressure?

Zack Snyder: Yeah, that pressure is real as real can be. But also the thing is with Watchmen, there’s huge pressure from the fans, but at the same time, the way I gotta do it, and the way that I work is I just have to sort of go and say, ‘Ok, I feel like when I look at what I’m planning to do, I think it’s cool.’ So that’s the only thing I can do in the end, and hopefully everyone else thinks it’s cool too.

Q: How far along are you on that production right now? Where are you at currently?

Zack Snyder: We’re trying to get a budget together that is palatable to everybody. It’s a long movie, and I’m trying to shoot the Black Frater part as well, and no one has ever even talked about that. You know, it’s like crazy time. And whether that ends up as a DVD extra or as a special release or something like that, that’s yet to be seen. But I don’t know, that’s my plan anyway.

Q: Is it fully cast?

Zack Snyder: It’s not fully cast yet, but I’ve been talking to a lot of people.

Q: When will you know?

Zack Snyder: I’ll know soon, I think after Berlin – when we get back from Berlin.

Q: Oh, with this [means doing press for 300 in Berlin]?

Zack Snyder: Yeah, I’ll start to know who’s going to lock in.

Q: Are you drawing the storyboards on Watchmen?

Zack Snyder: I am. The way I do it is, if you look at that book – the way I do it is, with Watchmen, the cool thing is that Watchmen is much more of a linear story, not when you look at the overall – it goes all over the place. But if you look at the scenes, for instance, when Rorschach picks up the badge, and looks up and she fires this grappling gun and goes up to the thing and looks around the room – there’s no reason not to shoot it like that.

 

I don’t know if you didn’t shoot it that way, that would mean your ego got f*cked up somehow, and you thought, ‘Wow, I can do it better than that; I’ll do a low angle, and I’ll dolly in, and ooh, I’m cool.’ You know, that’s not how I want to do it. So basically in my book, it’s similar to that. I have a drawing, but then I redraw the shift frame because all those frames are like this. So I redraw it, but then I glue in the book right next to the drawing, the frame from the graphic novel.

Q: Have you had a chance to talk to Alan Moore?

Zack Snyder: I have not; they’re trying to work it out for me to go talk to him.

Q: Good luck.

Zack Snyder: I know. He’s going to hate me, but I hope he doesn’t.