Last week producer Joel Silver (Lethal Weapon, Non-Stop) spoke about his previous plans to bring Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ seminal comic book tale Watchmen to the screen, during which he stated that his and Terry Gilliam’s (Brazil, The Zero Theorem) adaptation would have been “MUCH better” than what we ultimately got from Zack Snyder in 2009 [read Silver’s comments here]. Well, Snyder has now taken a break from publicity on 300: Rise of an Empire and pre-production on the Man of Steel sequel Batman vs. Superman to fire back at Silver stating that he made his version of the movie “to save it from the Terry Gilliams of this world.”
“It’s funny because the biggest knock against the movie is that we finally changed the ending, right? And if you read the Gilliam ending, it’s completely insane [or, as Deborah Snyder interjects – “The fans would have been thinking that they were smoking crack”]. The fans would have stormed the castle on that one. So, honestly, I made Watchmen for myself. It’s probably my favorite movie that I’ve made. And I love the graphic novel and I really love everything about the movie. I love the style. I just love the movie and it was a labor of love. And I made it because I knew that the studio would have made the movie anyway and they would have made it crazy. So, finally I made it to save it from the Terry Gilliams of this world.”
Snyder then commented on the criticism levied against his adaptation for remaining too faithful to the source material, stating that, “That’s the problem with comic book movies and genre. And I believe that we’ve evolved — I believe that the audiences have evolved. I feel like Watchmen came out at sort of the height of the snarky Internet fanboy — like, when he had his biggest strength. And I think if that movie came out now — and this is just my opinion — because now that we’ve had “Avengers” and comic book culture is well established, I think people would realize that the movie is a satire. You know, the whole movie is a satire. It’s a genre-busting movie. The graphic novel was written to analyze the graphic novel — and comic books and the Cold War and politics and the place that comic books play in the mythology of pop culture. I guess that’s what I’m getting at with the end of Watchmen — in the end, the most important thing with the end was that it tells the story of the graphic novel. The morality tale of the graphic novel is still told exactly as it was told in the graphic novel — I used slightly different devices. The Gilliam version, if you look at it, it has nothing to do with the idea that is the end of the graphic novel. And that’s the thing that I would go, ‘Well, then don’t do it.’ It doesn’t make any sense. f you love the graphic novel, there’s just no way. It would be like if you were doing Romeo and Juliet and instead of them waking up in the grave area, they would have time-traveled back in time and none of it would have happened.”
So are you happy with Snyder’s Watchmen, or would you have preferred to see what Silver and Gilliam could have come up with? Let us know in the comments below or head on over to The Flickering Myth Forum…
Originally published March 3, 2014. Updated April 11, 2018.
