Don’t Fuck It Up: An Interview With Alex Tse
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How important is author approval to you when you’re adapting a work?

Hehe. It depends. Obviously, when dealing with Watchmen, getting Dave Gibbons’s approval made me more happy than any personal success. No matter what we do, Alan Moore isn’t going to be happy(1). You know that going into it, and you have to give up on it. But for things that I revere, it’s super-super important.

But if you’re adapting things where you’re not a huge fan of the source material, or the source material wasn’t that popular, but there was a good idea, you just take that concept and run with it. Then you can deviate all the hell you want. Run hog wild.

What was Dave Gibbons’s involvement?

Zack (Snyder) approached him off the bat. I think Gibbons even gave Zack some panels that were drawn during Watchmen that weren’t in the actual graphic novel. It was really important to get Dave’s approval. He saw every version of the script. We showed him everything.

What was the biggest challenge in adapting this specific property?

For everyone, it was how we not compromise the Watchmen story while making a broad audience understand everything. We have to introduce superheroes totally unfamiliar to people as well as handle a drawn-out, complicated plot.

There was an initial attempt to make it present day, and even that world would’ve been a lot different. How do we (show) this world and have (the audience) understand everything that’s going on?

Alan Moore has said that he believes Watchmen is impossible to faithfully adapt. What’s your take on that statement?

If you’re talking about faithful as in every frame of the graphic novel, then yes, I would certainly say that. If you want to show the guy at the newsstand and the kid reading Black Freighter for forty minutes, then yeah, that’s impossible.

But if you’re talking about telling the core story and keeping consistency with the characters, then I would say no. I don’t believe the core story of Watchmen was impossible to film. I don’t believe that at all, and I know Zack didn’t believe that. And the first writer on it, David Hayter, when he laid it down, he literally put everything from the graphic novel into the script, and it wasn’t as long as he thought it was going to be. That’s when he said, “Hey, this is doable.” If you’re telling the story of the Minutemen, or of Rorschach, Comedian, Adrian, then it’s totally doable.

Neil Gaiman’s law of superhero movies is: The closer the film is to the look and feel of what people like about the comic, the more successful it is. Do you completely agree with this?

...Yes. I do. I pause only to try to find an example of a comic book whose look and feel just didn’t work.

Gaiman mentioned The Spirit, which looked like Sin City, as something that didn’t work, and Iron Man as something that did.

That makes sense. I haven’t seen the film, though. I’ve seen the trailers and know what it looks like and I know what the comic book looks like. I know the visuals of the movie were completely different. I’d be curious why Frank (Miller)(2) made that decision. He obviously has complete reverence for the material.

But yeah, if you look at the comic book movies that have been successful, I think there are a lot of consistencies with the look and feel of the source material.

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