History repeats itself for the WATCHMEN animated adaptation cast & crew
I don’t think anything more can be said that hasn’t already about Watchmen, the seminal 12-issue comic book miniseries from writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons that completely changed the superhero genre and the comics industry entirely. While the 2009 live-action adaptation was a noble attempt, it didn’t quite do justice to the original source material material. More than fifteen years later, Warner Bros. is trying its hand again adapting the superhero epic with a new animated movie split into two parts.
We had the chance to chat with some of the cast and crew of Watchmen: Chapter 1 including producer/director Brandon Vietti as well as voice actors Katee Sackhoff (Silk Spectre II) and Titus Welliver (Rorschach).
Taimur Dar: You’ve worked on some major projects over the course of your career at Warner Bros but directing an animated adaptation of Watchmen must be next level. When this opportunity came to you, was it something you had to take the time to think about or did you say yes immediately?
Brandon Vietti: It was a quick “yes” for me. I’m always up for a challenge. I love the depth of the material in Watchmen the story, the layers, and the complexity. I’m always looking for those layers. Anything I try to make I try to reach for as many layers and great levels of complexity. Every time you read it, you’re going to find a new layer and something different in the background. I love that craftsmanship. It’s an inspiration for me. Watchmen has been an inspiration for me. The chance to adapt the book into animation [was] an easy yes from me because I love that challenge of trying to create that level of complexity.
Dar: I think by his nature as a creator, Alan Moore casts a large shadow. Thus, it’s sometimes easy to forget how much of the brilliance of Watchmen is also owed to artist Dave Gibbons. Could you discuss the experience of having Gibbons involved in the production of this animated adaptation?
Vietti: First of all, one of the nicest human beings I think I’ve ever met and was very helpful in our early discussions to get into the book and our approach to the material. [He was] very supportive along the way. It was a lot of work but a lot of fun for our art team at Warner Bros. Animation and our animation studio, Studio Mir, to adapt Dave’s art. It was like going back to school for a lot of us. Dave’s art is so solid and strong and beautiful. A lot of us had to raise our art game to find a way to try to duplicate what he did seemingly so easy in the Watchmen book and all throughout his career. It was kind of a gift for a lot of us to go to the Dave Gibbons school while making this movie.
Dar: It goes without saying Watchmen is to comics what The Godfather is to cinema. Is it safe to assume you read or at least were familiar with Watchmen before working on this project?
Katee Sackhoff: A hundred percent. I visited many comic book stores as a kid. I remember when Watchmen was first placed in my hands. I remember thinking to myself, “What the hell is this?” A book like that changes the game. As fans of comic books age, they want the material to age with them. That is why the graphic novel is so, so successful.
Dar: Titus, as an unabashed collector of Sideshow Collectibles, I have a strong feeling it’s the same case for you.
Titus Welliver: A hundred percent. I was given the book right when it came out by a friend of mine. I’ve been a comic book collector since the ‘60s. I stepped away from the comics. I was given a copy of Watchmen. It completely blew my circuit boards. Not long after, that same friend gave me the Dark Knight Returns. That’s when I realized the universe had completely shifted. Like other people who loved the Watchmen, I put it up there with great pieces of literature. It just happens to have great illustrations in it. It’s deeply substantive. When I got the call that I was being offered a role to do in the film, I asked my manager, “Who is it?” [He said] “He wears a mask.” I said, “They all wear masks.” He goes, “It’s like a painting or something.” I ask, “Is it Rorschach?” “He went, “Yeah, that’s it.” I had to pause to exhale and scream like I just won the Miss America contest. I’m thrilled to be a part of it. I think the animators and producers and directors have done an incredible job at doing a true rendering of the book.
Dar: Because Watchmen is so dense, you obviously had to cut out some things. Thus, I was pleasantly surprised to see you were able to incorporate the Black Freighter comic in the film. I’d love to know what went into crafting that Black Freighter sequences?
Vietti: That’s such a beautiful texture that Moore and Gibbons came up with in the original book. We really wanted to try and honor that. Our script writer who helped us adapt this, J. Michael Straczynski, came up with some really great ideas to incorporate Black Freighter [and] how things happening in the comic would echo what’s going on within the story and with our characters. For me it was fun to come up with a way to incorporate the visuals of the book and even the narration in a way that had a poetic resonance with the filmmaking as we tell this story.
The artist for our comic is Francesco Francavilla. He did a tremendous job capturing the intent of the comic pages that Dave Gibbons drew within the original book. But we had to adjust the page layouts to work with our filmmaking. That’s why we brought in Francesco who I think has a very classic comic book style that I thought fit the Black Freighter material very well. We went to great pains within our own art department so when we get nice camera closeups on those comic book pages you see the printing dots that you would’ve seen in the 1980s in comic books. You see the pulp of the paper so it feels like a real comic book experience. That was a big goal for the project overall in adapting Watchmen to maintain a comic book reading experience even though you’re watching an animated movie.
Dar: An important aspect of Silk Spectre is her relationship with her mother. Now that you have a daughter yourself, Katee, did that have deeper meaning for you?
Sackhoff: I love my mother. My mother is a wonderful, strong, and complicated woman. I tried so desperately to not be my mother. I am my mother and my father. The goal is to be the positive sides, not the negative sides. My mom always used to me, “You’ll never know how much I love you until you have a kid.” It’s true. I love my children. I didn’t even dream it was possible. I’m consciously aware that I will screw her up. There’s something that I’m going to do at some point in her life that will require years of therapy. I don’t know what it is and I’m trying desperately not to do it. I just hope she grows up and doesn’t feel compared. That is such a complicated thing that Laurie is going through with her mother. That constant comparison to your mother and not feeling comfortable in your own skin and not feeling enough ever. And the self-fulfilling prophecy of the relationship she’s in and not feeling enough in that. It’s quite tragic.
Dar: On the surface, Rorschach appears unhinged but he’s really a complex layered character. As a performer were you able to find humanity in the character?
Welliver: He’s a product and survivor of severe mental and physical abuse and trauma. It’s within that that he enacts his own form of justice. He is unhinged. I was asked by another journalist if I thought he was insane. I said I wouldn’t stigmatize the character by calling him insane. There’s a deep lucidity to that character. While he is “unhinged” to a certain degree, his compass does have a very distinct direction.
Dar: Despite being set and published in the ‘80s, I think it’s safe to say that the themes of Watchmen are more relevant than ever. Did the current world landscape resonate for you during production of this Watchmen animated movie?
Vietti: I think so. I think that occurred to all of us as we were making the movie. There are certainly reoccurring headlines in terms of the Cold War that’s happening in the comic book echoing headlines that we’re seeing in our own newspapers today. Certainly many of the characters and many of the events with individual characters were echoing into today’s headlines. We’ve heard this before, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” That resonated while making this movie and re-exploring this story from the ‘80s.
Sackhoff: It’s funny. I had this a lot when we were filming Battlestar Galactica and the prevalence of 9/11 in the back of our minds and the subject matter we were touching on. This is no different. I find that for me as a performer, if you tap into those kinds of things, it becomes too real. Not to make this about Battlestar Galactica, but all of this has happened before and will happen again. We’re supposed to learn from history and sadly we continue to repeat it. You’re right, this is no different. That’s why art like this continues to be topical and prevalent because we continue to make the same mistake we made in the ‘80s.
Welliver: Full disclosure, I did not. But that was something I found about the book when I read that it is dealing with real world issues. But it is timeless because it’s really about the human condition. You have these people with super powers and they are driving what they consider to be right but it gets corrupted, which is where I think it becomes even more timeless because of that. In this day and age, the world we’re in right now feels very turbulent in the same way when I was a child in the ‘60s. I was very aware of protests. Every night there was news on the Vietnam War and Kent State. It’s very familiar. The book will always be relevant.
Watchmen Chapter 1 is available now on Digital and arrives on 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray Discs online and in-store at major retailers on On August 27.
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