London-based Framestore creates their first feature animation film

“People always said Watchmen  was the unfilmable graphic novel,” says Watchmen director Zack Snyder.  “The story itself is a pretty straightforward mystery, but inside of that, there’s this huge plot that has international intrigue and a super-villain and everything you want from a superhero story.  There is a tonal quality to every bit of it, from the interaction of the characters to the design structure. It doesn’t owe anything to any specific genre. It’s just its own…true to itself and all of its characters.”

     Watchmen first appeared in 1986 as a 12-issue limited comic book series published by DC Comics. It was later republished as a now legendary graphic novel. Watchmen is the only graphic novel to win the Hugo Award or to appear in Time magazine’s  list of “100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present.”

     “After having worked for over fifteen years to get Watchmen made, I couldn’t be more thrilled,” says producer Lawrence Gordon, known for such films as Field of Dreams, Diehard, and 48 Hours.

     The film project came together when filmmaker Zack Snyder, while still in production on “300,” expressed a desire to direct it. “With Watchmen, there has always been an element of serendipity, coincidence, and timing,” says the graphic novel’s co-creator and illustrator Dave Gibbons. “Zack was absolutely the right person to do it properly.”

     Dave Gibbons is a comic book artist best known for his collaboration with comic book writer Alan Moore. It was the success of British import Alan Moore with Swamp Thing at DC Comics that led to DC hiring many more British writers. However, Moore eventually fell out with DC and later Warner Bros., which owns DC, vowing to have nothing to do with the film productions of his stories. Moore, an avowed anarchist who had been expelled from his Northampton school at age 17 for dealing LSD, not surprisingly didn’t find it agreeable working for large corporations.

     During shooting, Dave Gibbons visited the set. “I was just bowled over by the level of attention to detail,” says Gibbons. “Careful thought had been given to every little corner, even things I had stuck in the artwork that I hadn’t given a second thought to.  I looked at the model of the full-size Owl Ship, knocked on it, stood inside it, moved some of the controls. It was so fantastic for somebody who lives in their imagination a lot of the time to see these things actually become solid in the real world.  It was one of the most exciting experiences I’ve had connected with comics.”

     “When Dave arrived, we were all a little bit afraid, but excited at the same time,” says Snyder. “We loved the book. We loved the images. We cared to make them come to life as much as we could, to make it respectful. You can show a set to a fan who says, ‘The Owl Ship looks awesome,’ but it’s another thing entirely when the creator sees it and says, ‘Wow, you guys loved that, didn’t you?’ That was what we wanted.”

      “Watchmen is more complex in that it doesn’t just create an archetypal character,” says Gibbons. “It goes through all the variations of why you would put a costume on, why you would want to fight crime. Are you slightly mad? Are you altruistic? And, what would happen if you did get super powers and you couldn’t care less?”

     “Adrian has a bit of a god complex,” says Watchman star Matthew Goode (pictured, above), who plays the gilded magnate. “He has this idea that the world needs to be fixed because humanity seems to be broken.  We are constantly warring with each other and he believes that no price is too high to get the world to unite in brotherhood.”

     Goode, who’s from Exeter, England, starred in the 2008 feature film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited.

     Watchmen had its London premiere on Monday and releases in the U.S. on March 6th. London critics agree the film is spectacular and that the R-rated film’s violence is extreme. Britain's Guardian said, “This superhero movie which makes last year's famously brooding Batman sequel The Dark Knight look like Alvin and the Chipmunks.”

Watchmen

Running Time: 163 min.

Release Date: March 6th, 2009 (USA)

MPAA Rating: R for strong graphic violence, sexuality, nudity and language.

Distributor: Warner Bros.