Q&A with Dave Gibbons of “Watchmen”
Questions and answers with artist Dave Gibbons, from the “Watchmen” junket in Beverly Hills, Calif. Gibbons created the comic-book series “Watchmen” with writer Alan Moore, who declined to be involved with the movie.
Q: Will Alan Moore ever see the movie?
Dave Gibbons: I really don’t know. I hesitate to speak at all for Alan.
I certainly… Because he’s asked me not to talk to him about the movie. He’s happy to talk to me, but don’t talk about the movie. I’m unlikely to phone him up and say, hey Alan, it’s really great, why don’t you see it?
Even in the backwoods of England where I come from it’s inescapable. In my little corner store are all the movie mags with Watchmen and Dr. Manhattan, so I suppose he won’t be able to escape it completely.
Q: How do you think the film came out? The book has been called been called “unfilmable” before.
Gibbons: I think it came out really well.
I think to (director) Zack (Snyder), unfilmable is a challenge rather than an, ‘oh, well let’s not bother.’ I think to say anything is undoable shows a lack of vision.
Clearly the movie is a different beast than the comic book. The story in its purest primal form is the comic book. But I Think the movie has a lot of the virtues of the comic book and is an exciting translation of it.
Do you think it was faithful to the book?
Gibbons: I did. In a way, I’m the worst person in the world to ask. Because when I was drawing the comic book, I would sit in my room and close my eyes and see a little movie, and then think, oh yeah, that’s the one - and then draw that. And seeing the movie was to see that for real. …
Certainly a lot of my favorite scenes are there more or less intact. A lot of Alan’s wonderful dialogue is more or less intact. Many of the compositions and set ups that I did are there.
I thought it had an incredible emotional weight as well. The scenes with Rorschach toward the end, you can’t believe it’s going to happen, really.
On every level, the amount of detail, the moral ambiguity, I couldn’t imagine being happier.
Q: What did you think of Rorschach’s inkblots moving on the screen?
Gibbons: That was chilling; we always had an idea that that would be a really scary thing to see in real life. In the comic book of course we could only approximate that by showing it changing. I have met people at comic book convention masquerades with a static mask, and that’s unsettling enough. It’s like running into somebody with really dark glasses, you can’t see what they’re thinking. So to have it moving as well is really eerie and unsettling.
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