You may have noticed that Alan Moore isn’t doing a lot of press in support of the Watchmen movie. If you’re familiar at all with Moore and his usual m.o., this doesn’t surprise you. Moore has distanced himself from pretty much all the previous adaptations of his work, including From Hell, V for Vendetta and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, so why should Watchmen be any different? But maybe we’re looking at this all wrong. Maybe Moore is actually employing some reverse psychology, some of the mind-bending trickeration that makes his comic book work so compelling, in order to convince us all to see the Watchmen movie. Let’s examine this new Wired interview with Moore for clues.
“I think that adaptation is largely a waste of time in almost any circumstances,” says Moore. “There probably are the odd things that would prove me wrong. But I think they'd be very much the exception. If a thing works well in one medium, in the medium that it has been designed to work in, then the only possible point for wanting to realize it on ‘multiple platforms,’ as they say these days, is to make a lot of money out of it. There is no consideration for the integrity of the work, which is rather the only thing as far as I'm concerned. I've got enough money to be comfortable. I live comfortably, I can pay the bills at the end of every month. I don't want a huge amount of money by diluting something that I happen to be rather proud of at its outset. That pretty much describes my attitude toward the idea of any of my works being realized in another form, really.”
OK, so maybe he’s building his way up to telling us that Watchmen is one of the rare exceptions? “With a comic book you can dart your eyes back to a previous panel, or you can flip back a couple of pages to check whether there is some reference in the dialog to a scene that happened earlier. You can also spend as much time as you want absorbing every image. This is especially true of something like Watchmen, where I was trying to take advantage of Dave Gibbons' brilliant capacity as a former surveyor for including incredible amounts of detail in every tiny panel, so we could choreograph every little thing. The little symbols and signs appearing in the background, every little touch could be choreographed to the last detail, and we knew that the audience—because they'd be reading at their own pace—would be able to study each panel and to take in these almost subliminal details. Even the best director in the world, even a person as talented as Terry Gilliam, could not possibly get that amount of information into a few frames of a movie.”
Surely the twist is coming now. He’s about to tell us how it could actually be done. “When we did meet—which was mainly just because I thought it would be really good fun to meet Terry Gilliam, and so it proved—Mr. Gilliam did ask me how I would go about translating Watchmen into a film, and I said to him, ‘If anybody had asked me, Terry, I would have advised them not to.’ I think Terry is an intelligent man and came to that conclusion himself. And I think he said something to that effect, that he thought it was something probably best left as a comic and shouldn't be made into a film.”
Oh, well. So much for that theory. If you want to read more from Moore, including some tidbits on his upcoming novel Jerusalem, check out the Wired interview.
