“Watchmen” director Zack Snyder sat down with Variety’s Anne Thompson for an exclusive chat this weekend at Comic-Con. The big “news” that came out of their talk was the fact the filmmaker is still battling Warner Bros. over the film’s running time and appears, by admission, to still be struggling with convincing them the film should just as long as “The Dark Knight,” if not longer.
WB wants the film, which currently runs three hours, to clock in around the 2 hour and 15 minute mark despite the fact that ‘TDK’ proved audiences were willing to endure the grueling 2 1/2 hour and and near exhausting grimness of the film and still call it a masterpiece.
Snyder is insisting the film run at least ‘TDK’ length. “If ‘Dark Knight’ got two and a half hours, ‘Watchmen’ should get fifteen minutes more. I’m trying to be reasonable.”
Despite the massive success of the lubed-up Spartan hunkfest “300,” the studio still seems to not entirely trust the director. But he has had some influence, convincing the studio that ‘Watchmen’ should be filled with lesser, non A-list actors who might distract from the story and should sport an R-rating. “I wouldn’t know how to do it otherwise. Fans should thank ‘300’ because there’s no way they would let me do it, no way, I’ve taken full advantage.”
Full advantage or not, Snyder, WB still thinks the film is “too long, too sexy, and too violent,” and Snyder keeps talking his escape pod: the Ultimate Watchmen” DVD, which is clearly his back up plan if WB rapes Watchmen’s theatrical running time. If fans get into an uproar about what’s missing in the film, he’ll have months to point to the DVD and say, “Before your cast judgement, wait for the full-story on DVD,” but he seems to be hinting at that card a lot.
Geeks note: Snyder said during the panel that his adaptation of “Watchmen” is more true to the source material than the Oscar-winning ‘‘No Country for Old Men,” was. He also said “Tales of the Black Freighter” (the story within the story) would be present on the “Ultimate DVD” and confirmed that “300” star Gerald Butler would be voicing the ‘Freighter’s Sea Captain.
It remains to be seen if Snyder will get his way, but considering the amount of positive buzz ‘Watchmen’ generated from Comic-Con, he should be able to get more pull if he can quantify the film’s geek popularity into some kind of metric that will impress and make sense to Warner. Though note, one geek site, Rope of Silicon says the new footage shown sort of “underwhelmed.”
Watch: ‘Watchmen’ Panel Pt. 1
