David Hayter Shares Heroic Effort Behind Getting Watchmen Made

By Stacey Harrison

David Hayter didn't get to where he is in show business by backing off from a challenge. Nearly 10 years ago, the actor-turned-screenwriter first pitched Watchmen to a producer and said that he wanted to direct.

Never mind that he had never directed before, or that Watchmen was long called unfilmable, even by much of its die-hard audience and its creator, who refused to have his name associated with any possible screen adaptation.

The subversive superhero epic takes place in an alternate version of 1985, in which Richard Nixon is still president and masked crime-fighters had been an integrated part of society until Congress outlawed their existence. Heroes like Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson), Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman), Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) and Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) are left with conflicting emotions about their pasts and how they fit into the world. But when one of the old gang -- a brutish lout known as The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) -- is murdered, the remaining heroes reunite to investigate, and end up uncovering a conspiracy that threatens the entire world.

Hayter worked on the project for six years, conceiving it first as an HBO miniseries, then as a film that went through a cavalcade of scripts and directors. It wasn't until the studio hired Zack Snyder, fresh off the mega-success of another comic-book adaptation, 300, that cameras began to roll. By that time, Hayter's day-to-day involvement with the production was limited, but he did visit the set and is given credit on the screenplay.

Hayter shared with us his long history with the project and why he believes the film won't be fully appreciated for several years.

Watchmen is now available on Movies On Demand, with the Director's Cut premiering Aug. 4. The theatrical version debuts on Pay-Per-View Aug. 20.

You spent six years of your life on this movie, in one form or another. How often did you think it was just never going to happen?

Every day. I would say every other day, but I think that's overly optimistic. But that's really the nature of movies in general, you just keep plugging away and every day there's some horrible problem that may capitulate the whole thing. With Watchmen, it was like that times ten. It was always a daunting prospect for the studios, and just to get it done in general was quite a challenge.

Were there a lot of fallow periods, when you wouldn't touch it for a while?

For the years that I was on it, it was constant work. The studios all recognized the vast potential here. Nobody wanted to let it go, but it was sort of a matter of them continuing to give me notes to try to stake them to something they could envision without actually having to move forward and start spending major amounts of money. Anytime there was a vacancy in the director's chair, it would get filled pretty quickly. A lot of top directors wanted to take this on. It was really a matter of getting it into production that was the real difficulty.

At one point you were slated to direct it.

Yeah, initially I was very concerned about translating it into a two-and-a-half-hour movie, and I was afraid that if I didn't oversee it in that regard it just wouldn't get done correctly. I felt it needed a champion who was a true fan, and since I was, I thought I would be excellent for that position.

You did get to shoot some test footage as director, though. Does that still exist?

It's right over in my DVD case here. Guillermo del Toro saw it and he told an interviewer that he thought it was very, very good. It's very close to the movie, but the scene that I did was the scene where Dan Dreiberg comes home and finds Rorschach in his kitchen. It was really all we could afford to do, we had one day to shoot. We built a set and did the whole thing and I got some really amazing actors. We got Ray Stevenson [as Rorschach] and Iain Glen [as Dan Dreiberg], and I got the director of photography from A Room With a View, and it was really a cool thing. It's a very quiet scene for a big, complex movie and I think it just wasn't enough to allow them to appreciate the scope of what I wanted to do.

Next: Your version was not set in 1985, right?

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