Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Watchmen - Starburst Magazine: David GIbbons/Zack Snyder Interviews

At Visimag (please follow both links for the complete interviews):



DAVID GIBBONS INTERVEW

SUBJECT: Watchmen

David Gibbons

Best known for his award-winning comic series-turned-graphic novel, Watchmen, which he illustrated and co-created with writer Alan Moore, David Gibbons spoke with Starburst about turning their popular cult classic into a new motion picture.

The story is set in an alternate 1985 America, and follows the masked vigilante Rorschach who, when one of his former colleagues is murder, attempts to gather his crime-fighting legion together again to solve the mystery.

A brief excerpt:

Did you feel it was as incredibly faithful as I did?:
I did. 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 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 it packed an incredible emotional weight as well. So I think on every level the amount of detail, the moral ambiguity of it, I can’t imagine being happier.


ZACH SNYDER

SUBJECT: Watchmen

Zack Snyder

The acclaimed director of 2007’s mega-successful blockbuster 300, was a natural choice to helm the popular graphic novel Watchmen, bringing it to the cinema screen in his own unique way. Watchmen is the only graphic novel to win the prestigious Hugo Award or to appear on Time magazine’s 2005 list of ‘the 100 best English language novels from 1923 to the present.’ Set in an alternate America in the 1980’s the story spotlights a group of former superheroes who must find a killer, before he finds and murders all of them. Starburst spoke with Zack about his new mega-blockbuster.

A brief excerpt:

Are you surprised when the public enjoy a movie that’s complicated and violent?:
I love it when mass culture doesn’t do what they’re supposed to do. It means they’re not going to go quietly to the boardroom movie, and I think that that’s scary too in some ways. The cool thing that the studio has done, which I think is interesting, is they’ve acknowledged that there is a place for an unusual movie, a movie that doesn’t tick all the boxes, because there is such a thing as people getting worn out by that same old thing. They don’t want to go again to another Fantastic Four movie; their brains won’t let them go. A giant superhero movie that’s unconventional and bizarre, it’s a formula that sucks for them, because it’s not repeatable. And like I say, Warner Brothers has been amazingly supportive. I made them a difficult movie, and they’ve been nice about it.

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