Motley Crew

Ah, the Watchmen may look like a polished troupe of skilled crime fighters in this group shot taken at the peak of their do-gooding days. But that was then. Watchmen’s cast and director explain.

Like a weakling bombarded by cosmic rays or bitten by a radioactive arachnid, the superhero movie itself appears to be undergoing a startling transformation.

“What’s cool about Iron Man or The Dark Knight or even Hancock,” says Carla Gugino, “is that these are big superhero movies that have interesting story arcs and characters too. If all of those things can come together, it’s very exciting.”

Gugino is a member of Watchmen’s ensemble cast, most of whom have gathered at Comic-Con in San Diego to spread the word about their unconventional superhero pic. The comic-book-based opus promises to further jolt the once-maligned genre into fertile territory with its psychological drama and dysfunction.

Adapted from the groundbreaking 1986 series of 12 comic books by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons — which was later reprinted as a collection and named one of the 100 best novels of the 20th century by Time — Watchmen imagines what the world would be like if superheroes had actually existed since the 1940s. The alternate history it presents is warped in surprising, surreal ways: President Richard Nixon, for example, is serving a fourth term (the movie, like the novel, is set in the 1980s); America won the Vietnam war; and the world is on the brink of nuclear doomsday, thanks to the tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, which are at an all-time high.

Although now outlawed, a former team of costumed do-gooders known as the Watchmen are reunited by the murder of one of their own — The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a sociopath with links to the CIA.

Determined to unravel the mystery behind the killing are a group of superheroes who, each in their own way, manage to deconstruct and subvert comic-book mythology.

There’s the vigilante Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), named for the inkblot mask he wears. Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson), a Batman-like crusader, has gotten fat in retirement. Ozymandias (Matthew Goode), the self-proclaimed smartest man in the world, is a celebrity and business mogul, producing action figures of himself. Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman) struggles to live up to the legacy of her mother, the first Silk Spectre (Gugino), who was part of the earlier generation’s superhero team, the Minute Men. And lastly, there is Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), a scientist who, after a terrible accident, has been reconstituted into a superbeing who has grown detached from humanity. Oh, he’s also blue, luminescent and naked.

Despite the obvious technical hurdles, Crudup says the mechanics of creating his CGI character were secondary to understanding the god-like Manhattan.

“How does it feel to be someone who is eviscerated by a particle accelerator,” muses Crudup. “I don’t have a template for that. At the same time, the material is not so black and white that I can use my imagination to say, ‘Here’s my idea of a hero or a villain.’ He’s a very complicated entity and how he sees things is totally remote to me.”

For Wilson — best known as the handsome, unhappily married philanderer in Little Children, the movie that also marked the incredible comeback of his Watchmen co-star Haley — the role of Dan Dreiberg, a.k.a. Nite Owl, meant that, unlike most actors who have to build washboard abs prior to playing a crime-fighter, he actually had to get flabby.

“I think of him as a linebacker who’s gone soft,” Wilson says. “He’s a big guy, sort of barrel-chested, but it’s more how he holds himself. He feels heavy. I was never told to gain weight. [But] I probably put on about 20 pounds.”

Behind the camera is director Zack Snyder, still white-hot after the success of 2007’s 300. An avowed fan of the book, since signing on to the project (which has been in some stage of production since the late 1980s), Snyder has pushed the movie closer to its dark, violent, sexually graphic origins.

Goode remembers a moment, early on, when the director clarified his approach to the project. “Zack said, ‘If I end up making Fantastic Four, I’ll have failed my mission.’ So that got me very interested.”

“The passion involved all comes from Zack,” says Morgan. “He’s the cog that started the whole deal. No one else could’ve done this movie.”

Or convinced Warner Bros. to spend more than $100-million on a comic that, outside of geek circles, is largely unknown.

Despite the obvious pressure to produce 2009’s first blockbuster, Snyder says, “My wife’s a producer and all these actors are just now my friends…. For me, it’s a boutique-y affair. It’s not about making a giant movie that conquers the world. I don’t feel that way at all.”

As is demonstrated by his casting choices. Although Jude Law, Joaquin Phoenix and Keanu Reeves, among others, have been linked to Watchmen at various points, Snyder says his chief concern was to hire actors suited to the story.

“For a director, the last thing I want to do is tell the actor, ‘Dan would never do this.’ You don’t want to do that. You want them to be your partner. That’s the best-case scenario,” he explains. “Jackie sent me a DVD [of himself as Rorschach] that was so cool that, even though we were talking about a bunch of other actors for it, when I saw it, I thought, ‘Okay, that’s done.’”

Haley’s Rorschach is arguably the fan favourite of the strange superhero lot, referencing such pulp heroes as The Shadow, The Question and The Spirit. Although he’s a cult icon — Jude Law even has a Rorschach tattoo — he’s nonetheless a brutal figure feared by the underworld, often acting as judge, jury and executioner.

“I didn’t think about trying to get people to like this guy,” says Haley. “I think that job was done in the book. But at the same time you have to embody it. I need to make sense of it in my head. In my head, I can justify everything this guy is doing. Who Rorschach is, is because of his upbringing. He was basically victimized by his mom….

“And Rorschach — in his twisted, messed-up way — started to realize people are not what they say, they are what they do,” continues Haley. “They are their behaviour. So his sense of justice has become very black and white. When he’s going out to get information and hurting people, it’s okay because they’re guilty by association…. [But] the people he saves don’t like him. The police don’t like him. And, worst of all, his teammates don’t like him.”

Haley admits there were times during the Vancouver shoot when he couldn’t shake the character. “It’s not that I couldn’t go to sleep,” he says, “but while I was going to sleep, I would think, ‘Don’t go there.’ It was a little disturbing, and playing Rorschach did sit with me more than characters usually do.”

Demented vigilantes? Naked superbeings? Sedentary caped crusaders? If it sounds bizarre, that’s part of Watchmen’s appeal, Snyder believes. “The best movies have a point of view. It’s not that you couldn’t have thought of it, but you just don’t think that way. It’s like that with [Quentin] Tarantino movies — his point of view is so particular in how he sees the world. Watchmen does that.”

Kevin Williamson lives in Calgary where he is a movie columnist for Sun Media.

Stay tuned for cineplex.com's interview with Malin Akerman this Friday.

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Online buzz is pointing towards Watchmen as one of the most faithful comic book adaptations ever to hit the big screen. Are you looking forward to Zack Snyder's take on the '80s classic? Have your say below!