Zack Snyder on the Altered Ending of ‘Watchmen’
Zack Snyder spoke with Dark Horizons about the recent sneak of The Watchmen and the audience’s reaction, especially to the altered ending.
"We had the best test scores in the history of Warner Bros. with 300 and I kept telling them look the movie is not like 300, don’t think that it is – it’s not going to be the same experience,” Snyder said. “Some people are going to go ‘what the f**k is this’ and I go that’s ok. That’s the thing that you fight… The one thing that was cool was that anyone who had read the graphic novel who was at the screening rated the film ‘excellent’, for me I’m like ‘I’m done’."
So about the squid and the ending?
"The fans, god love ’em, they’re all up in arms about the squid,” he said. “What they should be up in arms about are things like shooting the pregnant woman, ‘God is real and he’s American’, whether that‘s in the movie. That’s my point of view, maybe I’m crazy.
"The squid was not in the movie when I got the script, the squid was never in any draft that I saw. My point is only that there was this elegant solution to the squid problem that I kind of embraced. I’m a fan of the thing as much as anyone, I was saying what are we going to do about this before I even read the script."
He confirmed a second trailer will be released this coming Friday when Quantum of Solace hits theaters in America. "I just saw the final version of it this morning… it’s a little bit more story, a teeny bit more like a full trailer. This is much more like ‘someone’s picking off costume heroes’. You’ll get a sense of the characters plight you know, ‘we were supposed to make the world a better place… what happened to the American Dream’."
A third trailer will be released in early 2009, prior to the March 6 release date.
"The film’s pretty much done in my book. There’s still some visual effects shots which I’m reviewing… there’s probably close to 2000 effects shots in the film" he added.
Snyder’s next film will be his first animated project, Guardians of Ga’Hoole, coming in 2010.
I love Watchmen. I've loved it since I read the first issue of the mini-series and more with every issue which came out. Having said that, I always felt the squid ending was the weakest part of the story. While it would be nice to stay as close to Moore/Gibbons original story as possible (and I believe they have), I won't have a problem with altering the ending so long ast it works at least as well as the original.Of course, my opinion means nothing here (especially since the movie is finished), so all I can do is hope the film will be as good as the trailers indicate it will be.
Has the lawsuit between WB & Fox been resolved? If not, no March release.
Needs more Cthulhu monster. Stick it in the director's cut, Snyder.Why alter the ending? No one ever has a good reason for changing it, they just insist it had to be altered. Here once again there is no reason given for changing it, simply his opinion that the altered version is as good.Well, regardless, if it isn't space lasers like in the Hayter script I guess I'll give it a chance…I suppose he'll kill off Ozymandias, too, right? So it's a happy ending?
I keep flashing back to a contemporary review of Watchmen that quoted Adrian Veidt's line, "I'm not a Republic serial villain, Dan," and followed it with, "Well, he sure does act like one." Anyway, of all the things going on in the original work, the ending with the squid always seemed to me to be the one that wouldn't survive the transition to the screen. It was always far too easy to imagine some executive getting to that point and reacting with "What, seriously? He teleports a giant squid into the middle of Manhattan and that provokes world peace?"