Dave Gibbons Interview, Watchmen

Dave Gibbons has been involved in the comic book world for the last 35 years, beginning in fanzines and underground comics in his native UK. His work has been published throughout the Americas, Europe and Japan, though he is probably best known for the award-winning comic series-turned-graphic novel Watchmen, which he illustrated and co-created with writer Alan Moore.

A frequent contributor to Britain's influential 2000AD weekly, he co-created Rogue Trooper, in addition to illustrating such renowned strips as Harlem Heroes and Dan Dare. Gibbons also worked on the popular Doctor Who strip and, in 1982, began his long association with DC Comics, drawing the Green Lantern series.

Since then, he has both drawn and written many of their major characters, including Superman and Batman. Among his other published works are World's Finest, Aliens: Salvation, Batman vs. Predator, Captain America Lives Again, Green Lantern Corps: Recharge and The Rann-Thanagar War. He co-created the Martha Washington series with Frank Miller, and his semi-autobiographical graphic novel, The Originals, won an Eisner Award in 2005.

MoviesOnline sat down with Dave Gibbons to talk about “Watchmen,” the big screen adaptation of the most celebrated graphic novel of all time, brought to life for the first time by visionary director Zack Snyder. Dave Gibbons is an amazing artist and we really appreciated his time. Here’s what he had to tell us:

Q: Do you think Alan Moore may watch this at some point?

DAVE GIBBONS: I really don’t know. I hesitate to speak at all for Alan, because he’s asked me not to talk to him about the movie. He’s happy to talk to me but not talk about the movie. I’m unlikely to phone him up and say, “Hey Alan, it’s really great. Why don’t you see it?” Even in the backwoods of England, where I come from, it’s inescapable. In my little corner store, there are all the movie mags with Watchmen and Dr. Manhattan and everything, so I guess he won’t be able to escape it completely.

Q: Some people called this graphic novel unfilmable at one time, how do you think it came out?

DAVE GIBBONS: I think it came out really well. I think to Zach unfilmable is a challenge rather than, “Oh, let’s not bother.” I think to say anything is undoable probably shows a lack of vision. Clearly the movie is a different beast than the comic book. The story in its purist, primal form is the comic book, but I think the movie has a lot of the virtues of the comic book and is an exciting translation of it.

Q: Did you feel it was as incredibly faithful as I did?

DAVE GIBBONS: I did. You know, in a way, I’m the worst person in the world to ask, because when I was drawing the comic book I would sit in my room and close my eyes and see a little movie and I’d think, “Yeah, that’s one,” and then draw that. So, to sit there and watch the movie was a bit like seeing that again for real. It would kind of morph along and then it would crystallize into a picture that I would draw and then move on to another picture I’d draw. But certainly a lot of my favorite scenes are there, more or less intact. A lot of Alan’s wonderful dialogue is more or less intact. Many of the compositions that I did are there. I thought the movie packed an incredible emotional weight as well. The scenes with Rorschach towards the end are like really – you can’t believe it’s going to happen. I think on every level the amount of detail, the moral ambiguity of it, I can’t imagine being happier.

Q: What did you think about the inkblots moving around on Rorschach’s mask?

DAVE GIBBONS: Well, that was chilling. We always had an idea that that would be a really scary thing to see in real life. In the comic book, of course, we could only approximate by showing it changing. And I have met people at comic convention masquerades with a static mask, and that’s unsettling enough. It’s like talking to somebody who’s got really dark glasses and you can’t see what they’re thinking, but to have it moving as well is really, really eerie and unsettling.

Q: So it moves in the graphic novel as well? He doesn’t have powers and it made him look like he was supernatural in some way.

DAVE GIBBONS: Well, yeah, of course, that’s the whole point about a Rorschach blot. It’s actually just a neutral thing, it’s just a random pattern, and you see in it what you happen to see. He hasn’t got supernatural powers, but he’s got incredible natural powers, and I think if anybody is that kind of driven hero of it, it’s him, and what this little runty guy does is quite amazing in terms of human spirit. And, in the comic book, all we could really do is to show in the first issue to make it clear. We had three panels where it was the same shot in each one, but the blot changed in between it. I generated a lot of random Rorschach blots before I drew it, because the most difficult thing to do is randomness. The highest pinnacle of Zen art is to make things look like they just existed. So, I have to generate random blots, and amazingly they’ve actually stuck to those blots in the movie. If you compare it, there’s like the surprise blot and the very unhappy blot. It’s amazing.

Q: How did you feel about how they changed the ending?

DAVE GIBBONS: Well, I’m quite relaxed about that. If you’re a rabid fan of something, you don’t want it changed at all. It’s heresy and it’s awful, and I can be a rabid fan and I quite understand that. However, I do think in the case of watching the movie versus watching the graphic novel, it’s a movie full of special effects. What Adrian Veidt actually does is he just produces this incredible special effect, and so I think it wouldn’t, in a way, have the same power. It would just be another amazing thing. And what I particularly like is the way they tied the movie’s resolution back into the story. It’s not like they’ve chopped one ending off and instead of a squid they’d given us an alien in a spaceship. What happens is an integral part of the whole story, so I’m very happy with it and I think it works fine.

Q: The sets seem to have a lot of attention to detail, was there something there that made you go, “Oh I’m so glad that’s there”?

DAVE GIBBONS: Well, I think everything about it. The thing that really amazed me was the framed newspapers they had on the wall, where fair enough it said something like, “Nite Owl Fouls Drug Baron,” something like that, and there’d be a little picture, but when you went up to it and looked at it, there was actually a story about that. Somebody had actually taken the trouble to [write it]. And I remember looking at The Comedian’s Colt 45 and on the handle, it says, “Presented to Edward Blake with grateful thanks, Richard M. Nixon.” That’s just amazing. I don’t know if you’ll even see it in the movie, but it’s that kind of thing that just makes it so dense. And I think, like the comic book, where you can read it and get the story and then go back and look at the details, I’m sure with the movie when it finally comes out on DVD it’s going to be [looked at] one frame [at a time]. That’s what I’m going to be doing anyway.

Q: What do you think about Hollywood’s obsession with comic books? It seems like a lot of comics creators today are making comics in the hopes of getting movie deals.

DAVE GIBBONS: It was never the pinnacle of my ambition, or Alan’s ambition, that there be a movie. It’s not like the evolution, like you see man coming out of the swamp and turning into an ape. It wasn’t like, oh yeah, comic book movie. They are two completely different beasts. There was very early on an interest in it. I think to make it into some kind of action movie, which would have been horrible. And I think other than in name, a lot of movies that Hollywood has made recently have been superhero movies anyway, the Bruce Willis movies and those kind of things, a strong central figure with almost supernatural powers. And I think that a lot of comic book properties have really stood the test of time. The fact that Superman or Batman have been around for sixty years, seventy years, shows there’s something at the root of them that really gets a hold on people. I know what you’re saying about people who bring out a comic book series just as a pitch for a movie. I think that’s a bit unfortunate, although it’s very hard nowadays not to somewhere in your mind think, “Oh right, that’s the end of Act 2,” but we never designed Watchmen to be the movie. I think the fact that it has become a movie, and it is a difficult thing to film I think, it’s just incredible. We didn’t even think Watchmen was going to become a graphic novel. We did a twelve issue comic book series and then thought, “That’s it. It’s going to go in the back issue bins and that’s the last we’ll hear of it.”  The fact that it’s been in print for so many years is just amazing.

Q: Did you ever think about going back and doing the origins of the characters from the 40s? I thought they were so interesting, and they’re over in the movie so fast.

DAVE GIBBONS: Well, it’s much like that in the comic book as well. We’ve got no plans at all to add anything to Watchmen the comic book. We did at one point toy with the idea of maybe revisiting those early characters, and of doing it in a really innocent way, the dramatic twist being we all know the terrible things that are going to happen down the line. But we decided not to do that. I think anything that you added to Watchmen would probably dilute it rather than enrich it. And I think sometimes just a hint of something is more powerful than to actually draw it out. In the first issue, there’s a line that everybody loves. They’re talking about Captain Carnage, who is the kind of sadomasochist who wanted to be beaten up, and they say, “Well, what happened to him?” and Nite Owl says, “Oh, Rorschach dropped him down an elevator shaft.” And that’s better than if you actually saw Rorschach tracking the guy down, the bad guy, then hitting him and then dropped him. I think there’s that that works. I think a little sketch or hint is often better than an explicit –

Q: Was there something left out that you wished was in it?

DAVE GIBBONS: You know, I really can’t think of anything. The cut that I saw, there wasn’t very much of the two Bernie’s, the newsstand guy and the kid, who feature quite a lot in the comic book. He’s like our man in the street. He’s the guy who reads the newspapers and comments on what’s going on. The cut that I saw of the movie there wasn’t a lot of them in it, which is a shame, but I don’t know this from inside knowledge. My understanding that I’ve picked up is that it’s probably in the director’s cut, or whatever’s on the DVD because they’re the linking material between the movie and the animated Black Freighter that probably will be reinstated. But, as I say, I’m just overwhelmed by what is in there rather than feeling a great loss for things that aren’t in there.

Q: Do you have a favorite character?

DAVE GIBBONS: Really it would have to be Nite Owl, because Nite Owl was a character that I came up with the name and the costume of the earlier version of it when I was a kid, when I used to make up my own comics. When Alan and I were creating Watchmen, we knew he had to have kind of a Batman equivalent, and I suggested that and that seemed to fit. And also, probably if I was a superhero, not to preempt anybody’s question, I’m probably Nite Owl. I’d be the guy that sat in the basement with all the gadgets rather than the psychopath out stalking the alleyways.

Q: There is obviously a darker element to this and there are a lot of ideas that are conspiratorial. Were you influenced by noir films?

DAVE GIBBONS: I don’t know specifically that I was influenced by noir films. Actually one of the effects of Watchmen on the comic book industry we were really sorry about was that we love superheroes, Alan and I, and what we were trying to do was to get to know them better as it were, and we went down some dark paths with it. But immediately people in the comic book industry understood that as, “Oh, this is a way to do comics now, make them dark, make them [inaudible], that was never our intention. In fact, if Alan and I talked about doing anything after Watchmen, apart from going back, we were going to do a character like Captain Marvel, who’s light, fantastic, something for the kids almost, because there’s a whole range of things. So yeah, it is a dark movie because of the questions it asks. It has to be. And I suppose we were influenced by movies. People bring up something like Taxi Driver. It’s Rorschach, he’s kind of in that mold.

“Watchmen” opens in theaters on March 6th.