Terry Gilliam’s Take on Zack Snyder’s ‘Watchmen’
At this years San Diego Comic-Con Quint from Aint it Cool News managed to score a 30 minute interview with Terry Gilliam (The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus / Twelve Monkeys).
During the interview Terry Gilliam offered up his thoughts on how he felt about Zack Snyder’s Watchmen. It’s an interesting read, mostly because at one time Gilliam was trying to turn the so-called un-filmable graphic novel into a film himself.
From AICN:
Quint: That’s what we love about you guys. Now, did you see WATCHMEN? Did you end up seeing it?
Terry Gilliam: Yeah, I thought it strange. I thought it was too reverential. That’s what I really thought it was.
Quint: Faithful to a fault, yeah. I would agree with that.
Terry Gilliam: And you look at it and he’s tried really… so much is stunning. It got trashed, but there are great sequences in there, but the overall effect is kind of turgid in a certain way. I started putting it down to… you know, in the comic book, or graphic novel… They’re still comic books to me (laughs)… It’s like the Comedian’s coffin is going into the grave with the stars and stripes on top of it and reading it in the comic book it’s three panels, boom, boom and boom. On film “hhhhhhhhhhhhmmmmm…”
The pace is wrong. I was glad our version didn’t get done, the one that Charles McKeown and I had wrote, because we had reduced it down to about two hours and five minutes I think and we lost so much. Comedian was cut down to next to nothing. So (Zack Snyder) did a good job, but it just felt… I also thought THE INCREDIBLES had kind of fucked it for him.
Quint: A little bit, yeah.
Terry Gilliam: THE INCREDIBLES is doing WATCHMEN.
Quint: And HEROES took the ending.
Terry Gilliam: The same idea, yeah. And I just thought “Well, they just kind of fucked it up for WATCHMEN.”
Quint: That’s why people are worried about JOHN CARTER OF MARS, because that’s been stolen from so much and so liberally, going into STAR WARS and all of this other stuff.
Terry Gilliam: Yeah, but so much of that material had been in a quarry that everybody had been digging goodies out of and suddenly you get lost. I think WATCHMEN really bothered me, because I thought it should be better. It was all there. It looked right, but to me it was pace. It didn’t have pace. It needed a bit more quirkiness in there. Dr. Manhatten was getting boring, frankly, and then Ozymandias by the end I thought “Oh, come on!” They lost me by the end, frankly, but it was certainly looking better than what I was going to do! (laughs)
Quint: If you had been able to make the movie now with the same freedom, do you think you would have been able to find that happy difference between the version you were going to make and the one that Snyder made?
Terry Gilliam: I think so, because I think I’m more anarchic than Zack. To me it’s “Okay, what’s the essence to this thing? How do we boil it down?” The bits in the book with the big jellyfish thing, the giant squad at the very end… Losing the pirate story, fine. You get that out of there, but I never felt the characters, because to me it was a character piece is what it was about, and I never felt Night Owl and whatever her name is, it didn’t feel right, but I just thought the look of it was brilliant.
This is just one small excerpt from a lengthy interview that is also one of the best interviews I’ve read in a long time. I highly recommend heading over to AICN to read the interview in its entirety.
Oh yeah, almost forgot. As a long-time fan of the graphic novel, I thought Snyder’s Watchmen was superb and I will forever consider the film highly underrated.
jason: 
Paul: 
Coijo e tal: 
VinceC: 
beth: 
sasss: 
September 1st, 2009 at 10:11 am
Wah Wah Wah! I could have done it better!
Well you didn’t so get over yourself. I thought it was brilliant. Although I admit they could have done a slightly better job with the reworked ending. It felt a bit forced to me.