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Snyder On Why DVD Companion Pieces Are Important To Watchmen

Written by Ian Cullen on February 24, 2009 – 10:07 am -

SciFi Wire were in attendance at a press event held at the tail end of last week where Zack Snyder and Dave Gibbons explained why the DVD Companion pieces, which will pre – empt the movie release of Watchmen play an important role in your overall enjoyment of the movie.

Snyder offered new details about the upcoming releases: Watchmen: The Complete Motion Comic, due March 3, and Tales of the Black Freighter, an animated short based on the popular pirate comic book from within the Watchmen world, due March 24.

The motion comic includes the complete 12-part iTunes version of the graphic novel. Black Freighter stars Gerard Butler as the voice of the captain.

Snyder also plans to release an ultimate cut of Watchmen that will integrate Black Freighter into the film, but you can see the short by itself first. Also included in the Black Freighter package will be a short mockumentary  titled Under the Hood, which is based on the fictional autobiography of Hollis Mason the first Nite Owl. The mockumentary will feature much of the movies cast.

Snyder and Gibbons spoke with a group of journalists on Friday in Beverly Hills, Calif., about the companion discs. The following Q&A features edited excerpts from that interview.

How involved were you in the DVD spinoffs?

Snyder: We were pretty involved in The Black Freighter. Eric [Matthies] basically spearheaded the Under the Hood mock documentary. Because he was doing the [electronic press kits] and all the behind-the-scenes stuff, he put together this proposal. It’s basically a TV show called The Culpepper Minute, which is a magazine show that started in the ’70s. … When the original book Under the Hood first came out, they did a story on it. This is supposedly a follow-up story to their original story, like a “Where are they now?” kind of thing. So they interview all the cast in character that they can. I think the Comedian [Jeffrey Dean Morgan] is like, “Get that f–king camera out of my face.”

Snyder went on to reveal that though the Under The Hood mock documentary, was all in good fun. The cast did go away and do much of their own research for it, to better enable them to ad lib in character.

Dave Gibbons who collaborated with Alan Moore on the graphic novel on which Watchmen is based takes great joy in the fact that Snyder has thought to include may of the extras, which were also available to readers of the original graphic novel series.

How will the final extended version integrate Black Freighter? The comic book had it intercutting with scenes from the main story.

Snyder: It does that a little bit. Not as much as I would have liked, to be honest, but because most of it’s bookended by the Bernies [characters at a New York newsstand]. I feel like it does kind of flow and go in and out in kind of a nice way. We did these things where when the kid’s looking at the comic book, we drive into a frame, and it starts to animate, so there’s cool stuff like that. I had wanted to be either Rorschach’s [Jackie Earle Haley] voice over a picture from Black Freighter or hearing Gerry talking over it. It does have a little bit, but I think it could have been a little bit more. It’s one of those things that when you’re designing the movie and you’re kind of sneaking this thing into it; it’s a little bit difficult to engineer these scenes for the film that can kind of do both. One’s going to compromise the other in some ways.

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Tags: DVD, Watchmen, Zack Snyder
Posted in Comic Book Corner, SF-TV & Movie News | 3 Comments »