Dave Gibbons Q&A, and the Watchmen SuperTrailer

There still people we know that haven’t seen Dark Knight yet, and yet we’re already being asked to get excited about Watchmen – a film that won’t be in cinemas until next spring.

Yesterday I was part of an audience with Dave Gibbons, Watchmen’s co-creator, at the BFI. Ostensibly on stage to talk about his forthcoming Watchmen Companion book, the revered British comic book guy was inundated with fanboy enquiries about the content and tone of Zack Snyder’s movie adaptation of the piece of work that many consider to be the Greatest Graphic Novel Of All Time. Dave fielded the queries with good grace. He is, after all, one of the few people who have seen anything like the whole, hugely anticipated, movie.

Dave Gibbons may have co-created Watchmen, but he’s still enough of a fan to geek out at the film with the rest of us. He marvelled at having come up with the basic look of the Owlship when he was 14, and having stood inside the finished prop this year.

Dave has seen a 2 hour, 45 minute rough assembly of the – in his words – “very sexy, very violent” movie which he expects will receive an 18 certificate from the British censor. There’s no Black Freighter animation, that will be released as a separate ‘Animatrix’ style DVD and probably (eventually) be remarried with the live action film in a future ‘Absolute Watchmen’ DVD release.

Perhaps that DVD will be the thing that ultimately wins Watchmen writer Alan Moore over. The reclusive Northamptonshire comics genius has famously turned his back on Hollywood after a series of at best mixed adaptations of his work.

Zack Snyder is very vocal about his desire to make a movie that Moore likes. As part of the adaptation process certain elements in the original narrative has necessarily been dropped, and one or two entirely new pieces of action added. Snyder asked Dave Gibbons and original colourist John Higgins to mock up the new sequences in the original Watchmen style to ensure a consistently authentic look for his storyboards. One striking scene in the new 'super-trailer' that didn't seem familiar from the original comic was a sequence where Dr.Manhattan confronts a gang of armed hoodlums in a speakeasy and makes them 'go away' before they can pulll the triggers on thier tommy guns.

Dave Gibbons talked a little about the long and tortuous path that Watchmen took from printed page to celluloid, touching on the original Sam Hamm script that was considered for quite a while the best direction for the dysfunctional superheroes on film. Gibbons averred that the story just didn’t make sense as a contemporary story, and only worked in its native time frame. He also talked a little about his own secret casting ideas – those ideas we all have when reading a great book and idly casting the movie. Burt Reynolds, we were told, is Dave’s idea of the perfect Comedian.

There were laughs all round when the notion of a Watchmen franchise came up. Apparently, during the course of Watchmen’s long incubation The Comedian’s Vietnam Diary and Rorschach’s Journal were both floated as possibilities by clueless studio execs.

The highlight of Dave’s Q&A was the aforementioned 'super-trailer' - a 10 minute assembly of shots from Watchmen with an orchestral soundtrack. On the big screen the action is a colossal adrenalin rush and level of attention to detail is breathtaking. It’s hard to say how far outside the comic book demographic the film will reach, but bookstores across the US are reporting significant sales uplift for the graphic novel, and by March that demographic will be quite a lot bigger than it is today.

It’s amazing how early the Watchmen hype has begun, and it will be interesting to see how well it can be sustained over the next six months. If Gibbons is right, and we’re looking at an R-rated movie that runs for the better part of three hours, then Watchmen, especially when you factor in the Black Freighter inserts, will probably not reach its fullest audience until it’s released on DVD some time next autumn.

It’s going to be a long time to wait for 1985.