Artist Dave Gibbons' Gut Feelings on the Watchmen Movie
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Video: Dave Gibbons on Watchmen's Big-Screen Transition
Wired: Before we start, I've been a fan for a long time—of Watchmen, but I loved The Originals and your work on Green Lantern.
Dave Gibbons: Oh, thanks. I'm even more happy to talk to you in that case.
Wired: My secret plan is working ...
Gibbons: Good.
Wired: So, in reading Watching the Watchmen I was struck by the reprints of your sketches of the intersection where a lot of the action in the comic takes place, and the exterior of the brownstone, where you drew the whole elevation. Is that a standard approach to drawing a comic?
Gibbons: Well, I don't know if it is a standard approach in comics, but the thing with Watchmen was that we were always revisiting the same locales, and I was going to have to draw them from lots of different angles under lots of different lighting conditions, different times of day, with different stuff going on. So, particularly with the intersection, which was one of the major repeating locations, I wanted to know and have clear in my head exactly what it was like. Now, before I started in comics I used to be a building surveyor. So, I've always thought in terms of feet and inches and plans and elevations. So, it was no great difficulty for me to kind of draw some, if not actually scale drawings, then drawings that had measurements marked on them. And I found that once I'd done that fairly comprehensively, I really didn't have to refer to the drawings because, you know, just by processing it I'd actually internalized it.
That happened to me once before. Alan [Moore] and I did a Superman Annual that had a character in it called Mongul, who had this really peculiar head that nobody ever seemed to draw consistently. So, I actually made a model out of clay. But the irony was, once I'd made the model I'd so internalized it I never really had to look at it. So, yeah, those kind of things seem to take a lot of time when you're doing them, but actually they save you time in the long run.
Wired: It just struck me that it did seem a little bit like the process of building a set to shoot the action on—another parallel between doing the comic books cinematically versus making a real movie out of them. You were building the location, in a way.
Gibbons: Well, that's true. One thing that I've always liked in comic books, right back to when I was a kid and I used to read a strip over here called Dan Dare, which was a science fiction strip drawn by a wonderful artist called Frank Hampton. They had enough budget and enough people working on it to actually build these models, so, when you read the strip you knew there'd be something that was fairly incidental, like a bunch of guys in a car going through some, you know, space fleet headquarters. So there was this subliminal feeling that this place really existed, that it was consistent. No matter where you looked it would all make sense. And that's the kind of feeling that I wanted to have with Watchmen.
You know, because this is such a dense book, and it runs backwards and forwards in time, Alan had gone to a lot of trouble to make sure that all the storylines married up and that time-wise everything was consistent. So, it seemed only right to make it three-dimensionally consistent in space as well. And although probably some of the stuff I did, like that blocking out of the front of Moloch's townhouse, people wouldn't check it and say, "You know, that's exactly right. This fits with that." I think there still is on a subliminal level the fact, the feeling that it does exist somewhere. And the opposite of that is the thing that's always annoyed me in comics is where characters will be talking in a room and it will suddenly become apparent that one of them has to walk out through a door. So, all of a sudden the artist will draw a door where none had existed before. It just breaks the spell. It's like seeing a magic trick done badly. You know, comics is all about making it believable and helping people to get completely lost in a fictional world. All those things are really all in service of doing that.
Wired: Well, do you think that that plays out on screen in what Zack Snyder is doing? Is there a relationship between the believability of the world or the concreteness of the world and being able to make a movie out of it? Being able to move it to another medium?
Gibbons: I think so. I have seen a rough cut of the complete thing, and I've been on sets, and I've seen lots of set photos. Everything is done exactly like the comic book. I mean I guess in some ways by having such a comprehensively drawn comic book, they had a really good basis to build everything on. But certainly the amount of detail and the consistency of the characters aging or the way the action takes place in a given setting does have that ring of absolute believability.
Obviously it goes beyond that, because there is motion and there's sound. But I think that the film does have the same richness as the comic book. Certainly, because I've been to a few press screenings, I've seen the opening 10 minutes of the movie maybe five or six times, and I'm still seeing things that I didn't see the first few times. So, I think it's going to be a great thing to click through on your DVD players, just as the graphic novel is something that you can read and then go back and find all the Easter eggs.
Source:http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/17-03/ff_gibbons_qa
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