David Hayter Shares Heroic Effort Behind Getting Watchmen Made

By Stacey Harrison

Which version of the movie, before the one that actually got made, came the closest to fruition?

The Paul Greengrass version came very close. Paul had pre-vizzed about forty minutes of the movie, which is somewhere on computer. I still have a booklet by the side of my bed with all of the costume designs. We were building sets and we were pretty close to going -- we were just getting into casting, we had done tests on Doctor Manhattan -- and then there was a regime change at Paramount and that was the end of us. That was really devastating, because we had spent about $7.5 million at that point, and that's a lot of money to put against a movie that you want to get picked up by another studio. We were fortunate in that Warner Bros., as far as I understand it, I may be hearing false rumors, but they had the ancillary rights, the toy rights and such to Watchmen through their deal with DC, so it sort sort of made sense for them to pick it up financially.

Tell me about how Zack Snyder and Alex Tse came aboard.

After the Paramount version collapsed, I was really despondent. I was afraid they might go off the rails and I didn't know what they were going to do with it, and I sort of stepped aside. Warners picked it up, they wanted to do work on the script and they hired Alex Tse, who came on board and he was on for a few weeks before Zack, then Zack signed on and then he and Alex worked the script and put it back to 1985, and did scenes of their own and developed things that Zack wanted to see in particular.

Were you at all involved with the day-to-day production at that point?

I was having secret phone calls with the producers just to follow up on it. I was really just watching as an invested observer at that point. I did go up to visit while they were shooting, and they were extremely nice and extremely appreciative of my efforts. I got to walk the New York street and meet all the actors and I watched a bunch of dailies. It was very cool, very exciting.

You must have had mixed emotions, though, after shepherding this mammoth production for so many years only to watch someone else's version get made?

At that point, you don't even know if you're going to get credit or not, and it came from all that work. You know, because it was just dead before I picked it up, it had been dead for almost a decade and so yeah, it was stunning and it was inspiring but it was also inwardly horrible and frustrating as moviemaking can be so often. It was a very strange and emotionally fraught visit, but still, I've been working in the movies awhile now, and I'm used to the way these things go, especially the very big projects are very erratic processes. I tried to just look at it as a fan who had played some role in this. But just to see the Owlship, to see Rorschach, to sit and talk to Rorschach was really quite amazing. But yeah, it was bittersweet.

What are your thoughts on the changes they made to your version?

I was really thrilled that they went back to 1985. It eventually became clear, especially when I was attached to direct, that what we really needed here was a very hot director who was able to just sort of impose his will and say, "Look, I'm a fan of this material and I want to do it right," and that was clearly what we got in Zack. And Alex. I thought they did amazing things with it. They were able because of Zack's clout to take it even further than I was willing to take it. I am immensely proud of the film and my role in it and really thrilled that we had such great people -- Zack, Alex, all of the cast, to come together on it. I think the fans need to understand, there are many, many versions of this film that could have been made that would not have come close to this. And there are other versions that may have been incredible, but I'm very happy with the way it turned out.

The knock on Zack Snyder is that he's all style and no substance, that he wasn't dramatically up to Watchmen's level.

That's an opinion. I think 300 is amazing. Its characterizations are great -- I love the king, I love the queen, I love the whole thing, and I don't think it was style over substance. I think Watchmen is an obviously far more complex piece of storytelling, but I think he handled it pretty well. Just the choice of Jackie Earle Haley, Patrick Wilson, these are pretty amazing pieces of casting and I think he did extremely well.

It's crazy that he got away with keeping all that stuff from the book.

Completely crazy. I had fought all those battles for many years and just came away beaten and bruised and he was actually able to pull it off, so I give him massive respect for what he did. I think in terms of fan support vs. fan backlash that there is an inherent difficulty in being a Watchmen fan, being a fan of the book and then seeing the movie for the first time. You have run this movie in your head a million times and so you're always going to be taken out of it on your first viewing by a number of the choices -- "Does Bubastis look right?" or "Where's the vivarium?" You know, there's just so many thousands upon thousands of details that may go the way you expect, may not go the way you expect, but it is only in the fullness of time that people will fully come to appreciate the amount of work and respect and love that went into this movie and be able to get past their own prejudgments of what it should have been and get down to what it actually is, which is a pretty remarkable, original piece of filmmaking.

Next: You wrote a letter asking fans to come back and see the movie again on the second weekend, saying the future of adult-oriented, thoughtful comic-book movies depended on it. How did people respond to that, and what do you think the future holds for Watchmen-type movies?

(WARNING: SPOILER toward the end of the next page)

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