Tweet

After being offered the director’s chair, Zack Snyder realized that even if he turned it down, he’d be responsible for whether it turned out to be a success or a failure. It’s from that sentiment that Snyder took full ownership of the project – one that is quickly becoming the most anticipated movie for 2009 – and began an arduous journey of filming the novel that couldn’t be filmed.

“My hope is that you’ll walk out of Watchmen and think, ‘What the fuck?’” the director said, discussing the trenches-of-thought aspect of the film. He continued, talking about the ethical questions and the challenges the movie should, if his hope is fulfilled, face the audience with.

“The crux of the movie is that it offers a moral choice. A certain character survives that makes a moral choice that an audience would deem questionable,” he said.

So far, the trailers, clips and comments have done nothing but excite the fans of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s iconic comic. I asked Snyder if he was able to maintain the dualistic storytelling that made the novel so incredible, and he assured me that despite the shift in mediums, he held onto that element as much as possible, claiming that “symmetry” was a theme in his adaptation.

Dave Gibbons himself shared his excitement at how well that adaptation process has been, saying during the Watchmen panel that he, “expected at any moment that [he'd] be pinched and wake up.” For Gibbons, it was an experience that found him standing within the world of his drawings come to life.

“To stand on the Owlship. To smell the Comedian’s cigar…,” Gibbons said with an air of reverence, relating the impact the reality of his world had on him.

Perhaps the coolest detail of that world, beyond the detailed recreations of “Watchmen” figures like the Gunga Diner and the Newsstand, was the inclusion by a savvy production designer of Gibbons’s signature G inside a square that he marks his artwork with – plastered hundreds of times over a graffitied wall. “It’s like [the movie's] got my signature on it.”

Stay tuned all this week as we bring you coverage from Comic-Con International. Not only will we be roaming the floor in search of love, but we will have the latest news Live from Hall H, great interviews with some of Hollywood’s hottest stars and random convention shenanigans, courtesy of our Comic-Con Attack Squad! To keep tabs on all of the happenings, just head over to our Comic-Con 2008 Homepage.