Don’t Fuck It Up: An Interview With Alex Tse
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Give me Alex Tse’s law of superhero movies.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. You say that about a lot of things, but you look at something like fucking League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. If you read that graphic novel, it is set up already to be a fucking movie. You know what I’m saying? Look in the book, and when you first see Nemo’s ship, that’s a fucking movie. When they find Allan Quatermain, that’s a movie. You’re reading that and you can see it in your head.

Even down to the illustrations! Why would you change that? For your own ego? Why ruin what’s already totally cinematic? With stuff that does have a huge fanbase, you have to get down to the core, decide what it is, and either protect that or quit.

Sometimes you might have a different idea, but is it better? And even if, arguably, it is, you have to think of the core. Sometimes the sum is greater than the parts and you have to see what functions as a narrative as a movie.

You have to be very careful about that sort of thing. You have to understand why something is as popular as it is. And you have to approach it as a fan. Approaching something as a fan is different than approaching something as a fanatic.

(With bad adaptations), you see something and you just don’t understand why they don’t want to keep it. It’s not like an idea that wouldn’t work on screen. Some things wouldn’t.

Like what?

Look at V for Vendetta. I understand why they didn’t do the guy who was in love with his computer. I understand that. You might lose some people in the audience who think it’s too weird an idea. And you can still keep the core themes without that.

What are the other considerations when you adapt a property into a film?

Sometimes it’s practical. If there’s some weird cult audience that you’re making the movie for, well guess what? The studio won’t pay $150 million for that movie. Assuming you take a job because you’re not only a fan of the material, but because there’s something that broader there that deserves to be shown to a wider audience that’s not familiar to the graphic novel, that may not be familiar with comics at all.

Editing is part of deviation. You might not change things; sometimes it’s just omission. You might not need a scene that’s repetitive. You have to be economical. You establish who a character is, you don’t need another scene to do it.

Now if people start losing track of who the characters are—if they don’t understand the Comedian, you’ve deviated too far. If they don’t understand Laurie’s struggle, you’ve deviated too far.

If it worked in the book, why edit it out? Why dilute it?

You have to do things in a more economical way in a film. It’s not like in a comic book where it’s pen and paper, or a novel where you linger, just hang out with characters in a way that may or may not necessarily move the narrative forward.

In movies, everything has to push the narrative forward. With that in mind, you may have to change events. Obviously, the big one for Watchmen is the ending.

You can change the events as long as you’re confident that the audience will walk off with the same feeling and the same idea that they would have if they’d read the source material.

The ending of Watchmen is pretty dark. Did the studio want you to change it?

Here’s the thing with Hollywood, and I don’t want to get into a studio-bashing thing. It would be ignorant to say, “They’re stupid and don’t know what they’re doing.” Look: it’s a different business model. These guys are corporations and the problem is that they’re being inundated with projects, so they treat things like product as opposed to art.

Moviess are a balance between art and commerce and now, with how media conglomerates are structured, it’s more commerce. Back in the day, heads of studios might just like a movie and say, “All right, let’s do it.” I’m not saying people don’t want to make good movies, but there’s the bottom line and there’s more groupthink.

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