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.
