In a new interview with The Huffington Post promoting Warner Bros.’ 300: Rise of an Empire, Man of Steel director Zack Snyder responded to producer Joel Silver’s recent comments that his Terry Gilliam-directed Watchmen idea would have been a superior film to the one Snyder eventually made. While Silver criticized Snyder for being too slavish to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s comic book series, Snyder noted in the interview that one of the more persistent criticisms of his film is that he dramatically altered the bizarre ending — one that numerous filmmakers and producers over the years had declared “unfilmable.” Gilliam’s version would have altered it even further, using a time-travel storytelling device to retroactively turn the entire film into a fictional construct and the heroes of the movie into comic book characters.”What [writer Charles McKeown] did was he told the story as-is, but instead of the whole notion of the intergalactic thing which was too hard and too silly, what he did was he maintained that the existence of Doctor Manhattan had changed the whole balance of the world economy, the world political structure. He felt that THAT character really altered the way reality had been,” Silver explained. “He had the Ozymandias character convince, essentially, the Doctor Manhattan character to go back and stop himself from being created, so there never would be a Doctor Manhattan character. He was the only character with real supernatural powers, he went back and prevented himself from being turned into Doctor Manhattan, and in the vortex that was created after that occurred these characters from Watchmen only became characters in a comic book.…So the three characters, I think it was Rorschach and Nite Owl and Silk Spectre, they’re all of the sudden in Times Square and there’s a kid reading a comic book.. and he’s like, ‘Hey, you’re just like in my comic book.’ It was very smart, it was very articulate, and it really gave a very satisfying resolution to the story, but it just didn’t happen. Lost to time.”
