Don’t Fuck It Up: An Interview With Alex Tse
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How specifically did this affect Watchmen?

In the case of Watchmen, I can’t say there was anyone who was a real fan of the graphic novel. That’s not saying they’re bad people, but I didn’t come across anyone who said, “Fuckin Watchmen changed my life!”

With Watchmen, we would get notes that were asking us to make this into Justice League. Well, then just do Justice League! Some of these notes defeat the point of Watchmen. Why doesn’t Silk Spectre have powers? That kind of shit. Why would you even be involved with this, if that’s not what you want to do?

So how’d you reconcile keeping the studio happy and remaining faithful to the book?

Zack had the leverage because when he came on, the buzz on 300 was good. They had some trust. The movie started tracking well, so he had more leverage. And when the movie came out, he had a ton of leverage. So he said, “Let’s make it R-rated, let’s move it back to 1985.” That didn’t change the studio’s belief in terms of what they thought the movie was.

So how did we manage to keep the ending? It’s because they had to trust Zack. Zack made them a shitload of money. At the end of the day, that’s what it was to me. You can have the same project, same script with Joe Blow director and they’d be “Fuck this shit, no.”

Did the success of The Dark Knight—both in its length and its tone—influence the way in which Warner Brothers viewed Watchmen?

No, Watchmen was already going on prior to that. At this point, the only influence of Dark Knight, and I’m making an assumption here based on a few conversations I’ve had, the only shit we got was on length. Fucking Dark Knight is like 2:48. And that’s not a bigger story than Watchmen. Give us some slack.

Talk to me about the process of adapting Watchmen. Does the fact that Watchmen is a self-contained comic, with the blocking and the stage direction essentially indicated in the panels, affect the way you wrote the script?

Well, yeah. Just in terms of being true to the story. What’s the important information? Opening scene, there’s a fight between the Comedian and his unknown assailant. Now, we can change the way that fight is in the panel, but that doesn’t change the movie if you want to prolong the fight or make it cooler, whatever, that doesn’t change the movie so—

That fight wasn’t in the comic.

You see flashes and it doesn’t happen in real time. The detectives come, they break it down, and you see essentially a flashback: as they say what happened, you see it. So you don’t see it in real time. In the movie, you do.

So in the panels, you get your cue and sometimes you do exactly what the panels say, and other times (you distill it). What’s the important information? That Rorschach picks up the pin and there’s blood on it.

In many cases, Zack just used the comic like storyboards. There are frames of movie that are pulled straight from the novel.

How do you handle the supplementary material? It’s rumored that Black Freighter, the comic-within-the-comic, will be in the Watchmen DVD as a short animated film, but how about—

That’s actually going to be a separate DVD, I believe.

You mean I’m going to have to buy both?

The week Watchmen opens, and this is the plan, you’ll be able to buy the Black Freighter story. Which will be animated.

Will it be packaged when Watchmen is released on DVD?

I don’t know. Black Freighter will be released, then there will be that super four-hour version in which they intercut...I don’t know, actually. That’s a Zack question. But there will be a director’s cut. And Black Freighter will be there.

(Tales of the Black Freighter will be released March 24 in Blu-ray and DVD -- the editors)

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