Interview: Dave Gibbons on Watchmen

Expectations are high for the screen version of the comic that elevated the superhero genre. One man who thinks the fans won't be disappointed is the book's artist. Guest blogger Owen Vaughan spoke to Dave Gibbons about how it feels to see his creation on the big screen

Together with writer Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons created one of the most acclaimed comics and brought a dark, gritty realism to the outlandish and camp world of superheroes. Now, more than 20 years after Watchmen was first published and aroused Hollywood's interest, a movie version is to hit cinemas.

The transition from comic to screen has not been smooth: screenwriters and directors fallen by the wayside, studios pulled the plug at the last minute and lawyers threatened to shelve the project altogether. Gibbons believes that director Zach Snyder has captured the spirit of the graphic novel and will give the fans the film they have longed for. He tells The Times how Snyder's enthusiasm won him over, how he came to draw a new scene for the film, and worryingly, that Hollywood initially wanted Arnold Schwarzenegger to be the star.

Blockbuster Buzz: How did you get involved with Zach Snyder's Watchmen movie?
Dave Gibbons. I hadn't been involved with any of the previous attempts at making Watchmen. Back in the day Alan Moore and I met up with a producer called Joel Silver and he talked about doing a version with Arnold Schwarzenegger in it, which would have been interesting. Then Alan had a meeting with Terry Gilliam a long the way and then really nothing. My mum when she was alive used to phone me up to tell me whatever she had about it in the newspapers. I remember she once said, "That Monty Python man is going to make a film of your comic - that'll be funny."
My involvement with Zach Snyder - I actually approached him. I'd been invited along to the London premiere of 300, which was based on the graphic novel by my friend Frank Miller. I thought it was a fantastic, a wonderful, true adaptation of Frank's work. I think it had been announced then that Zach was in the frame to direct Watchmen, so I thought, I'll have to go and shake him by the hand. I grabbed him on his way to the VIP enclosure at the premiere party and shook him by the hand and introduced myself. I just really wanted to say hello but we ended up talking for half an hour. I realised then that he did understand Watchmen. I got such a gut feeling that he could do it justice.
People have said to me, "So Dave, have you done any drawings for the movie?" and I say, "Yes, I've done thousands, but I did them 20 years ago." Zach has stuck faithfully to the script and the storyboard that the comic book represents. He's a great storyboarder himself - he likes to draw everything out - but his working storyboard for the film is a huge scrapbook with his drawings and whole piles of pages clipped out of the graphic novel, so I've had a lot of input there. It's been rather weird to watch a working cut of the movie and suddenly see a scene that's so familiar in its set-up to what I originally drew. Zach has also followed very closely the colour schemes and lighting plans of John Higgins, the colourist on the graphic novel.

BB: The colouring in Watchmen is quite unique - a lot of garish yellows and purples. How has this translated onto the screen?
Gibbons The colouring actually works very well. Watchmen is set in the Eighties, which was quite a garish decade anyway - very loud and designery. The superhero costumes work very well in that setting too.
I did do some new work for Zach. I did a poster to promote the movie at the San Diego Comic Convention a couple of years back. I also storyboarded a scene that Zach wanted in the movie but which isn't in the comic book. He wanted see how I would have drawn it had it been in the comic, so I did three new pages of Watchmen and I got John Higgins on board to colour them so they had the authentic Watchmen feel.
I read an early draft of the script and gave them notes, which they were very grateful for. I also saw a rough cut of the film, which they were actively soliciting my opinions and notes on. I think it would be fair to say that I've given them a lot of moral support. When I visited the set I was absolutely bowled over by what I saw and by what everyone had put into it. I like to think the approval and good feeling they got back from me was a help to them.

BB:  Comics and film are two quite different media. Is Watchmen going to feel like a movie?
Gibbons There is a certain section fans who would settle for nothing less than a scene by scene, picture by picture adaptation of the graphic novel but I'm of the school that thinks that would not make for a very good movie. The most important thing with Watchmen the movie is that it works as a movie and I think Zach has succeeded in translating the graphic novel into that medium. Visually, there are elements that are close to the comic book. There is also a sense of design to it that carries over the sensibility I was trying to bring to the comic. Zach framed every shot and shot it with only one camera. Quite often on movies they'll shoot a scene with several cameras and cut the footage together. What Zach did was set up and light every scene and photograph each one with one camera, then reset the camera and reset the lighting if he wanted another angle. So it has the controlled feeling the graphics in the comic book have.
To make it a better movie, he had to eliminate some things, he had to introduce new scenes, but it is faithful in the feeling that it's got, the mood that it's got and also the density. The graphic novel is famed for the fact that you can read it three or four times and still find new stuff. I'm absolutely sure that once people get DVD of the movie they'll be going through it with the pause button frame by frame because there's such a wealth of background detail and rich texturing.

BB: The graphic novel is very economic in its action. There's not a fist fight in every panel and the book is more of a detective thriller than an action story.
Gibbons Most comics, most comic book movies are action interspersed with thoughtful moments whereas Watchmen is thoughtful moments interspersed with action. I can tell you, though, that the action is very exciting and the violence is very graphic and upsetting, which I think is how violence should be portrayed. The cut that I saw was two and three quarter hours in length but it didn't feel like a long film to me. There is so much going on - we go from New York  to Mars to Antarctica to Vietnam and range from the Forties to the Eighties. The pace is not leisurely. 

BB:  Was there any resistance to the idea of keeping the film set in the Eighties? Watchmen was about an alternative now, this is about an alternative past. Does that change anything?
Gibbons I had actually assumed that it would be set in the present day but I think the decision to keep the film in the Eighties was a masterstroke because It gives it distance, it gives it a classic feel and makes it a period piece. It gives you a feeling that it's about the perennial problems of mankind rather than the immediate. I think the Cold War is a more clean cut global conflict than the present war against terror and the movie feels more archetypal because of that. The larger than life, operatic nature of the story works really well in the Eighties. Watchmen also refers very heavily back to the Sixties and Seventies and those decades were an exciting time in American history. It's a bit like Tale of Two Cities - it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. You had the Moon landing, you had the cultural revolution of the Sixties but you also had Watergate and Vietnam. It was period of operatic extremes and the story of Watchmen plays perfectly into that. 

BB:  How much did American culture of that period influence your work?
Gibbons Alan and I both grew up reading imported American comics and to us both they were things of wonder. Not only because of the larger-than-life adventures but because of the ads that you'd get in them: ads for palisade amusement park or Daisy air-rifles, they were all wonderful artifacts of a foreign civilisation. When I first went to the States the things I was dying to see were not the

Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty but the fire hydrants in the street or the cylindrical water towers that Steve Ditko used to draw on the roofs of New York  tenements in Spider-man. Alan and I always looked towards doing American comics but always thought it was an impossible dream so to find ourselves working on them was a wonderful thing. Of course, we did come to them with that outsider's point of view. The things that Americans would miss or dismiss as everyday and boring had a great deal of resonance to us. We also grew up with the counter-culture of the Sixties and Seventies and we also lived through years when people were genuinely terrified that there was going to be a nuclear war

BB:  Watchmen clearly reflects those fears, but it also exposes the impotence of superheroes in real world situations. In fact this realisation is what drives the villain in the story.
Gibbons There's a kind of conjuring trick that comics do. They show the main characters really big and imposing, with the city and moon really tiny in the background. But in real life, a guy in suit standing on the roof of a skyscraper is insignificant. One of the questions that Watchmen asks is: why would you dress up and go and fight crime? Of course the perceived wisdom in comics is that you're a good guy and you want to get out there out and do your bit and you have to wear a mask because you want to protect your family. But in the real world, the public would perceive someone who did that as a vigilante who should be stopped, which is what we show in Watchmen happening. The other question Watchmen asks is: how would the world be changed by the presence of these characters? Someone with superpowers would be disempowering to the rest of humanity. No matter how clever you were, how strong or fast you were, you could never be as wonderful as these characters. Which isn't to say superheroes are completely invalid. Like myths, they do illustrate something, they do address good and evil, they can talk with insight about the human condition. But it's not as simple as just dressing up and going out and beating up some villain and you've solved the problems of the world.

BB:  Another film that has tried to put comic book heroes in a real world setting is The Dark Knight. That has been enormously popular around the world even though the Batman it depicts is psychologically flawed and, at times, quite fascistic.
Gibbons In British comics there's the famous character Judge Dredd who is the ultimate fascist, yet in a way also a hero. That's the thing with Watchmen - Rorschach and the Comedian are pretty unpleasant but there's something about them that people like. There's something attractive about characters that know what they believe and are utterly consistent in their views of the world.

BB:  Most fans know Watchmen as a graphic novel, but you and Alan didn't plan it as such, did you? For both of you and DC, it was just a comic series lasting 12 issues.
Gibbons There hadn't really been any graphic novels before Watchmen. We thought that there would be 12 issues of the comic book and that would be it, that it would go into the back issue bins. Our contracts stipulated that once it had been out of print for a couple of years the copyrights would revert to us. But then, quite amazingly, it did become a graphic novel and it has been in print continuously. We had no inkling of that happening, DC comics had no inkling of that. I think purists would say, "Don't see the movie, read the graphic novel", but I would say, "See the movie and read the graphic novel" and I think Zach Snyder would too. I'd also tell people to read the comic book a month at a time and experience the pleasure of having to wait to see what happens next. I don't think Alan and I would have done Watchmen any differently if we had known it was going to be a graphic novel. If we did, we might have been weighed down by the portentousness of it all.
The movie and all the publicity around it is certainly getting people to read the graphic novel. From my latest royalty statement, I can say that as many copies of the graphic novel were sold in the three months to last September as in the previous 20 years. A lot of people are going to be reading Watchmen in the next few months, which is great.

BB:  How do you feel about the current mining of superhero comics by the movie industry? And do you think there's a danger movie audiences will suffer from superhero fatigue?
Gibbons: Hollywood has been making superhero movies for a long time now - the Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger movies of the Eighties were superhero movies without the costumes. The thing that's very encouraging in the latest crop of superhero movies is that the makers have seen the wisdom of staying true to the original concepts. The Spider-man movies are very close to the classic Spider-man comics. The same with the Iron Man movie and the latest Batman movies. I think Superman Returns, although well made, was a bit of a misfire. The problem when you're dealing with just a character, like Batman or Superman or Spider-man, is which adventure do you choose from all the thousands they have had over the years. This is a problem that doesn't occur with Watchmen. Watchmen isn't the ongoing adventures of a bunch of misfit vigilantes, it's a complete story and has been filmed as such. The movie has also come along at a point when it can successfully deconstruct the superhero movie like the comic deconstructed the superhero comic book. I think the average movie-goer is now familiar enough with the concepts and building blocks of superheroes that they can go into to a thing like Watchmen and not have to have it explained to them. all that groundwork has been done.

BB:  What effect do you think movies have had on comics?
Gibbons The San Diego Comic Convention used to be just a big comics convention but now it's massive because it takes in movies and computer games and I think there's a tremendous cross-fertilisation between the mediums. Widescreen movies have begat widescreen comic books. The things that people like Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch have been doing over at Marvel have a widescreen, gosh-wow feeling about them. I think some comic book creators have thought, 'Hey, if can sell my comic book idea as a movie, then I can retire.' There has perhaps been a lot of comic books that have been thinly disguised movie pitches. I think it's just one big cultural soup these days.

BB:  The other comic you are noted for is Give Me Liberty, which for readers who don't know it is the the story of Martha Washington, a young black American girl who breaks free of her poor background and becomes a war hero. You created the comic with Frank Miller, who is now making his name as a director with such films as  Sin City and The Spirit. Do you and he have any plans to bring Martha to the screen?
Gibbons Martha's a completely different kettle of fish to Watchmen. I love Martha as a character and I think that if more people knew her, they would love her too. This was a series we did in the Nineties, although we recently finished it with a final story, but in an eerie way its central idea of an American peace force has resonance now. She's a true hero and a hero who doesn't wear a costume but a uniform. I would love to see Martha on the big screen and with Frank's involvement in Hollywood, I'd be surprised that we didn't experience some kind of movie interest

Watchmen will be on general release from March 6. The complete Martha Washington, The Life and Times of Martha Washington in the 21st Century, will be published on July. Photographs by Clay Enos, from Watchmen: Portraits Titan Books