Watchmen: the most darkly ambitious of graphic novels
For the actor Jeffrey Dean Morgan, filming Zack Snyder’s latest — the eagerly awaited adaptation of the Watchmen graphic novel — was memorable. And scary. Wrapped in $100,000 worth of neoprene, plastic and leather, with a flamethrower strapped to his beefed-up body, Morgan filmed a scene in which he doused a stuntman with flames. As he unleashed his fiery fury, petrol dripped from the flamethrower and gathered on top of the pool of water in which he was standing. Then, just as the last jets spat forth, the fuel on the water caught light. The flames streaked towards Morgan, running up his leg. The actor yelped as pain and panic wrestled for his attention. “Don’t get the costume wet,” came the shout from the director on the sidelines.
“That’s typical,” beams Morgan as he recalls the incident. “Zack’s eyes are huge with panic, and it’s because he’s worried about the suit. I wasn’t badly hurt. But if this role was a little hard at times, it was not because of things like that. It’s because of the character I play, the Comedian. Indeed, all the characters in Watchmen are not what people might expect from a comic-book film.”
That would be an understatement. Watchmen is the Crime and Punishment of graphic novels, a dark, difficult story set in a dystopian universe. Created by the cult British writer-artist pairing of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, it first appeared as 12 monthly comics in 1986 and 1987, before being collected into a seminal graphic novel that has sold 750,000 copies, won a Hugo science-fiction award and been voted into Time magazine’s list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century.
Moore’s tale is a sprawling cold-war murder-mystery, a neo-noir infused with a vast conspiracy and the threat of nuclear armageddon. It unfolds during an alternative 1980s where the Watergate scandal didn’t occur and Nixon still occupies the White House. In this America, the costumed crime-fighter is a fixture of everyday existence, although, importantly, these spandex-clad scrappers do not have superpowers.
The series was originally pitched as a vehicle for DC Comics to roll out two recently acquired properties, Captain Atom and Blue Beetle, but when the comic-book giant ditched this plan, Moore created his own characters. “They are deep and complex — it’s subversive,” Morgan continues. “Unless people know the book, they won’t expect characters like the Comedian. He does terrible things. I certainly know that, for me, for Zack and for countless fans, Watchmen made comic books feel entirely credible. You were no longer childish or geeky just because you were reading one.”
In truth, the average child — although not necessarily the average geek — would struggle with Watchmen’s central themes. This is not a predictable comic-book world where everything bar the illustrations is cast in black and white, with good versus evil and the white knights triumphant. It’s a sombre, brooding story, and the masks worn by the costumed vigilantes conceal more than just their everyday identities: the Comedian is a violent misogynist, while his inkblot-masked colleague Rorschach, brought to life by Jackie Earle Haley, is a vengeful sociopath. Rare for a comic-book adaptation, Watchmen also comes with an 18 rating.
“It is hard to make excuses for a man who can impregnate a woman then shoot her, or do what my character does to the woman he loves,” Morgan notes. “There was one scene in particular — it was beyond an attempted rape, it was absolutely vicious — that was much harder than anything else I have ever filmed in my life. It made me think, ‘Jesus, is this what I want to be doing as an actor?’ ” Earle Haley agrees: “When you look at things through these characters’ bent perspectives, you start to realise how bent the world we live in really is, what we do to each other in the name of our own interests. I know Jeffrey had trouble with some of his character’s scenes, and I did too. There’s one where I exact vengeance on this pervert. It freaked me out. When you leave the set at the end of the day, these are hard guys to shake off.”
The other characters who flesh out the story include Silk Spectre II (played by Malin Ackerman), Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson) and Ozymandias (Brideshead Revisited’s Matthew Goode) — plus the one being in the Watchmen world who does possess superpowers, Dr Manhattan (Billy Crudup, who almost went up in flames himself when the sensors on his motion-capture suit started to smoulder). Manhattan is a nuclear physicist who, in true comic-book fashion, acquires his powers after an experiment goes awry. Their tale picks up in New York City in 1985, where the government has passed an act outlawing costumed vigilantes. When the Comedian is murdered, potentially world-ending events unfold.
“I guess Watchmen looks at the reasons people might want to wear a spandex outfit and go fight crime,” Snyder says. “Then there are the moral issues of people dispensing justice to others just because they believe them to be bad people.
It also deals with much broader, bigger themes. For me, the central one is summed up in the credits when we show an image of Hiroshima. As nuclear war looms large in the 1980s, this is the moral imperative in the movie — killing 200,000 people to save millions.”
Snyder believes The Dark Knight wouldn’t have come about were it not for Moore’s Watchmen and its recalibration of the comic book’s usual you’re-either-good-or-bad values. “Although, saying that, I think our movie allows itself lighter moments than that film does . . . After all, our main characters all get to wear lurid costumes!” Yet Watchmen almost didn’t come about at all. Snyder was first approached to direct while he was putting the finishing touches to 300, another stylish comic-book adaptation, about the last stand of Leonidas’s Spartans against the Persian hordes. “The project had been to every studio in town — it had been to Warner Brothers twice,” he explains. Indeed, by the time Snyder looked at the studio’s draft of the script, the film had spent 15 years in development. The producers once entered talks with Joel Silver, the man who backed the Matrix franchise, who tried to sign up the Governator. “Even then,” Snyder says, “every studio was saying, ‘Giant graphic novel? No chance. You can’t get Arnold Schwarzenegger? No chance.’ ”
That said, the film almost took flight during this 15-year maelstrom, with Terry Gilliam, Darren Aronofsky and Paul Greengrass all hopping into — then jumping straight out of — the cockpit. When Greengrass, fresh from his success with Jason Bourne, showed interest, Paramount almost got the project up and running, with Joaquin Phoenix, Jude Law and Hilary Swank lined up. Then the studio got cold feet, worrying about spending $100m or more on a comic-book movie with no famous characters, no place in generic popular culture and no obvious potential for a money-spinning sequel.
Watchmen: the most darkly ambitious of graphic novels
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