Who Watches The Watchmen

Widely acknowledged as the "Citizen Kane" of comicdom, and quite possibly the best-written comic story ever, the history of all superhero stories are divided into pre- and post- 'Watchmen' eras after its release. First published (in comic form) in 1986-1987, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' "Watchmen" redefine the industry and together with Frank Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns", made 1987 "the best year in comic's history". Naturally, the monster that we come to called, "Hollywood", would waste no time in cashing in such material in a time like now when comic-to-screen adaptions are reigning high at the box-office (especially with the considerably box-office success of "From Hell" and "League of Extraodinary Gentlemen", both written by the inimitable Alan Moore, despite the fact that both pales terribly in comparisons to the original). Also, it is publicly known (unfortunately due to Queen Amidala's new hairdo) that another of Alan Moore's masterworks, "V For Vendetta", with the Wachowski Brothers helming the scripts,is scheduled for release on the 5th of November 2005. Before you scream for mercy, rejoice yet, as we seem to have a appropriately capable director at hand. Director Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Supremacy, Bloody Sunday), who recently spoke at length about how he'll be handling this movie over at CHUD(and here's part one, part two, and finally, part three), does look like the more suitable one, upon reading on his past experiences in works regarding the same paranoia theme that embodies Watchmen. Here are some of the excerpt from the interview. Q: What are you working on at the moment? Costumes and sets? Greengrass: It’s a bit like how do you fit fifteen people through a small door simultaneously. That’s what pre-production is like in the early stages. How do you fit an American football team through a door that’s about two feet wide and three foot tall. You have to crew up first of all – not first of all, these are in no order of priorities, these are just the things you have to do. You have to start designing sets and wardrobe. You have to start really analyzing how you’re going to make the film. You have to start working on the screenplay. You have to start thinking about casting. You have to start thinking about budgets. We’ve made a good start. It’s interesting the kind of issues that first raise their head, really. How do you deliver the Citizen Kane of comic books to screen? That is basically the problem. It’s a bit intimidating to be honest. I believe two things, really: I do believe, obviously because I am here, that you can make a film based on Watchmen the novel that is both truthful to the novel and also works in two hours. I really do believe that, I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t. The second point is that I believe in an odd kind of way that it’s twenty years since Watchmen, give or take a year or two – certainly twenty years since it was set – and I think in many ways a lot of what Watchmen was about is very, very relevant to today. I think that those are the two things that beat most passionately inside me. Q: How did you first become aware of the novel, and how did you become involved with this project? Greengrass: I was going to say that the interesting thing from my point of view – I got a call in November or December, not that long ago, saying had I heard of Watchmen and was I interested in doing a film. I said are you kidding, of course I had heard of Watchmen. But the interesting thing from my point of view is that I’m not a person steeped in comic book lore. That’s not where I come from. It wasn’t something that – I didn’t sit as a child and read millions and millions of comics. I’m a Brit, as Alan Moore is, and Watchmen I read at the time that it came out. The reason I read it is because at the time there was a lot of pieces of work done in this period of the mid to late 80s that were, due to the state power, sort of dark and conspiratorial and reflecting the acute paranoia of the late Cold War. I was very involved in doing different sorts of work then, but one of the things I did at the time was a book called Spycatcher, which at that time caused a lot of stir because it got banned by the British government. It was a kind of book about spies and I actually wrote it with a guy who was inside our MI-5, which is like our version of the FBI sort of CIA type of thing. It was really an expose of what was going on. At the time that that came out, there was a kind of fantastic prolonged twelve month period where it was a court case and it became a great set piece encounter – conflict, really – trying to define where the boundaries lay between the government’s desire to protect national security and our right as citizens to know what is done in our name. The whole Spycatcher affair became a great controversy over here. At the time there was a lot of work done that reflected that kind of paranoia. There was a lot of drama done, there were films done, Spycatcher – and Watchmen. They were often linked together in the press, the zeitgeist was paranoia. That’s really where I come to Watchmen. That is why I am convinced I can make the film, because I understood from personal experience the milieu that gave rise to Watchmen. I understood a lot of the references that Alan Moore used. He just happened to be expressing that paranoia in the medium of the graphic novel, the comic book, where I and others were working in different mediums. But we were all part of reflecting the same mood. Q: So that means you’re not going to be shying away from the political edge. Greengrass: No, not at all. I think it’s very, very important. One of the things that distinguishes Watchmen is that it’s about the way we live today. At that time it was about the way that we lived then. I think that we need to make a film of Watchmen that reflects the times we live in. What’s interesting to me is that Watchmen, when it came out, reflected late Cold War paranoia, and what was really interesting about it is that it was an incredibly bold kind of allusive, allegorical, dense, rich story that involved the collision of two elements: a real world running towards Armageddon – which is something at that time we thought was liable to happen, with the great arms race of the 1980s – so you have at the back of Watchmen this ticking clock, which is these footsteps to Armageddon, which is really a Cold War formulation. The Soviet Union invades Aghanistan – Q: And they move the clock ahead one minute. The nuclear clock. Greengrass: Exactly. And yoked together with that was this murder mystery involving generations of caped crusaders. It was the collision of those two elements that created the really great originality of Watchmen. What’s interesting today is that we live with new paranoias, but they are paranoias. We are once again in very paranoid times, in a way that we haven’t been I think – I’m talking about the post-9/11 world – we have been in levels of paranoia that we last experienced at the time of Watchmen. Q: That’s interesting because at the end of the 90s Watchmen seemed like it might be a relic from another time. But like you said, 9/11 made it relevant again. But on the other hand many people have said that they think 9/11 makes the movie impossible to make because of the way the novel ends. Greengrass: I don’t agree. I think it’s completely possible, and here’s the reason why: I think paranoia is driven by the circumstances of the world. In the mid to late 80s, particularly young people at that time, of which I was one, felt that the world was spiraling out of control. That there was going to be a sequence, a dance, a series of footsteps that were going to walk off over the edge into some cataclysmic event. The structures of the world were designed – were so intractable, were so locked in a sequence – that we couldn’t escape that. I think that today a lot of people feel the same thing. Now it’s not going to be the Cold War prism. The world is no longer a bi-polar world divided between the USA and the USSR. We live in a unipolar world. But the dangers, the nuclear dangers today, are profound and very real. They’re to do with nuclear proliferation, the spread of these weapons. How do we deal with a world where these technologies spread? How do we keep the peace? That’s what drives us. We fear Al Qaeda, we fear terrorists, but I think underneath that is a much deeper fear. It’s a fear that, in a way, the bi-polar world offered us curiously some security, where now we feel that these weapons are spread, that creates challenges. How do we keep peace in a world where these technologies are spreading? That’s what I think we have to use Watchmen to address. I think it’s really important. And I think that what it means is – and we’re engaged in a debate at the moment in this production on how to do it – you have to take the chronology of Watchmen, and by chronology I mean what I call the “footsteps to Armageddon” part of the machinery of Watchmen. You’ve got these two pieces of machinery, the first of which is the murder mystery with the caped crusaders and the various generations thereof, and the other is the footsteps of Armageddon. What you have to do is take that chronology as it’s given to us in Watchmen and try to update it. You don’t replace it, you just say “What would have happened if that chronology continued?” One of the most exciting things that I remember distinctly when I read Watchmen when it came out was this idea of a world that was our world but that had taken a slightly different course. Nixon had served three or four terms. Woodward and Bernstein had been assassinated. G Gordon Liddy had become the trusted advisor to the president. It was a kind of world turned on its head. What we have to do is imagine what would have happened to that Watchmen world if it had continued, rather than say let’s start with a new paradigm. It’s about building on what’s there in the spirit of the novel. That’s what we’re going to try to achieve. So you feel that it’s addressing our world, but you’re not losing the world Watchmen gave us. Which is the Nixon four terms world. Q: Alan Moore has been very vocal about not being happy with the movie adaptations of his work. Have you spoken to him about this, or tried to speak to him, or even just hope to speak to him? Greengrass: I hope to, I would love to. I intend to try. In many ways he’s made his position plain about the films. They’re not my films. I wasn’t there. I wasn’t at the scene of those accidents. All I can speak to is where I come from, where I come to Watchmen from and what I would like to do. I couldn’t presume to tell Alan Moore it’s going to be great. It’s exactly the same thing as when I sat down with families who lost loved ones in the bombing at Omagh or who lost loved ones in Bloody Sunday. In the end you can’t say to people like that, “Listen, I’m going to make this film and it’s going to be great!” You can’t say that. All you can say is, “I would like you to give me the chance to show you what I have done and you judge me on that.” That’s all you can ask. You can ask to be judged on what you tried to do. You can’t ask for endorsement in advance, it seems to me. You have to earn respect with what you do. That is the same with the Watchmen community. A lot of people out there will be skeptical about us, will doubt that it can be done, will worry about how we will do it. All I can say in all honesty and humility is, I understand that. I believe with a passion that we can do it, I believe with a passion that I was making a contribution in my country as Alan Moore was in his way at that time, but I was dealing with a lot of the same material and ideas at that time. I beg only that you judge me when I’m done, as I’m sure I will be. A review from CHUD on the scripts by David Hayter are right here, and there's also another review from the ever-reliable AICN, right here. Anyway, Moriaty, from AICN, has recently raised his concerns over if the changes in Paramount's executive offices may signal bad news for how this movie will be adapted. Like he said, let's keep our fingers crossed for this one. In my opinion, the single most anticipated movie. So much so that despite my cynical self, I'm not going to say "Let'see how they screw this one up".