Terry Gilliam on Snyder’s Watchmen: I thought Zack’s Film Worked Well

During a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” interview in support of his upcoming film Zero Theorem, filmmaker Terry Gilliam told a fan that he “was happy to avoid” the problem of squeezing Watchmen into the constraints of a single feature film, but that in the end he though director Zack Snyder’s film “worked well,” and that its faults were more or less what Gilliam expected, having worked on the film himself.Asked what he felt about Snyder having made the film “to save it from the Terry Gilliams of the world,” Gilliam said, “Charles McKeown and I wrote the script. I always felt it was not the best way to treat it because trying to squeeze it into 2.5 hours is an unlikely thing. I think we wrote an interesting version of it, but I think it needed more time to really work. I thought Zack’s film worked well, but it suffered from the very problem that I was happy to avoid by not making the film.”According to producer Joel Silver, who was attached to the film for years and worked with a number of directors, but was ultimately unable to come to an agreement with Warner Bros. as to how to move forward with the “unfilmable” comic book series, Gilliam’s version would have involved a time- and reality-bending twist ending wherein the characters would rewrite the past and, upon returning to the future, find out that their world was simply a fictional construct and that they are all comic book characters.