Who should've directed 'Watchmen' circa 1990?

Which auteur could have done justice to WM back in the day?

  • Total voters
    45
Magniac

Magniac

I've just seen the movie, after having first read the collected comic. While I'm still mulling over Snyder's adaption, I was interested to read about the first attempt to film Watchmen:

In August 1986, producer Lawrence Gordon acquired the film rights to Watchmen for 20th Century Fox, with producer Joel Silver working on the film.[34] Fox asked author Alan Moore to write a screenplay based on his story,[35] but when Moore declined the studio enlisted screenwriter Sam Hamm. On September 9, 1988, Hamm turned in his first draft, but said that condensing a 338-page, nine-panel-a-page comic book into a 128-page script was arduous. He took the liberty of re-writing Watchmen's complicated ending into a "more manageable" conclusion involving an assassination and a time paradox.[35] Fox put the film into turnaround in 1991, and Gordon set up the project at a new company, Largo International, with Fox distributing the film. Although Largo closed three years later, Fox was promised that they would be involved if the project was revived.[36]

Gordon and Silver moved the project to Warner Bros., where Terry Gilliam was attached to direct. Unsatisfied with how Hamm's script fleshed out the characters, Gilliam brought in Charles McKeown to rewrite it. The second draft, which was credited to Gilliam, Warren Skaaren, and Hamm rather than McKeown, used the character Rorschach's diary as a voice-over, and restored scenes from the comic book that Hamm had removed.[35] According to Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons, Silver wanted to cast Arnold Schwarzenegger as Dr. Manhattan.[37] Filming was to take place at Pinewood Studios.[38] Because both Gilliam and Silver's previous films, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Die Hard 2 respectively, went over budget, they were only able to raise $25 million for the film – a quarter of the necessary budget.[35] As a result, Gilliam abandoned the project, and ultimately decided that Watchmen was unfilmable. Gilliam explained, "Reducing [the story] to a two or two-and-a-half hour film [...] seemed to me to take away the essence of what Watchmen is about."[39] When Warner Bros. dropped the project, Gordon invited Gilliam back to helm the film independently. The director again declined, believing that the comic book would be better directed as a five-hour miniseries.[40]
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Hmmm, I don't know if a Gilliam Watchmen would have been such a good thing.

If, as the wiki article suggests, he wanted to stay faithful to the GN, then the man who made Brazil could have pulled it off. However, if the man who directed The Fisher King and the Sean Connery sequences in Timebandits had had his way, I fear we might have ended up with an absolutely mawkish travesty.

Anyway, I thought I'd compile a list of every high profile action/genre director from the eighties I could think of. Each one of these people could have directed a Watchmen circa 1990. So, who do you think should have brought AH.com's favourite comic to the big screen back in the day?
 

Geekhis Khan

I like Gilliam when he's on target (Brazil, Fear & Loathing, and Fisher King (I for one liked it)), but when he's off-target you get Münchhausen at best, Brothers Grimm at worst. I'd say flip a coin:

Heads: a brilliant, but very surreal and disjointed movie that has serious cult potential, but not too much box office hope, even with Schwarzenegger as Dr. M (shudder).

Tails: W...T...F?!?!?!?!?! Aiiiigh!

I voted Burton just for the what the hell factor. Dark and gritty he'll definitely manage. Possibly something like the OTL movie, but with more bizarre "gadgetry", a creepy art-Gothic feel rather than the OTL somber-Gothic, and less anime/Matrix-style action (obviously).

Gods forbid the Wachowski's get a hold of it seeing what they did to V for Vendetta.
 
Redem

Redem

Heh I'm not sure it would have been technically feasable in the 90's

as for the Wachowski for V for Vendetta I heard they had a more faithful script but were force to change it over time (I for one think it a bit of undeserve flak considering the book pretty in a way about Tatcher England or at least issues at the time, so the movie just changed it to GWB america, still the book was better at it)
 

Geekhis Khan

Emperor Norton I said:
Damn, I didn't see Ridley Scott.
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Yea, I nearly picked him. He'd do a great job. Dark, brooding, subtle, and noir.

Not Spielberg, though! :mad: Next thing you know there'd be a cute sweet kid added for woobie factor, over-the-top cartoony action, soundtrack-overload, black-and-white morality, and the blatant jerking of emotion strings with no regard to subtlety.

You know, all the stuff that worked great for Indiana Jones but not-so-great for AI.
 

Enigmajones

Tim Burton was the guy with the Dark vision so him. Wish they had done it back then. I know he was really old at that point but I always imagined the old Comedian as the perfect role for Chuck Heston.
 

Troyer IV

Not, I beg of you all, Tim Burton.

I like him as well as the next creatively-loony director, but after he butchered the Batman comic, how would he go about butchering what is possibly THE best graphic novel of all time?

I was actually quite displeased with the movie version, though it made sense in a way, because I am a purist.

Tim Burton, upon criticism for his Batman take, replied with something to the effect of "How should I know? I don't read comics." Why would you have someone direct a story he doesn't fully appreciate?
 

SRT

Do any of you really think the director of Blade Runner shouldn't be allowed to make Watchmen?
 

ArKhan

An early 90s version of watchmen might be subject to executive meddling on an epic scale, trying to make fit more with the "Grim and Gritty" style of the Dark Age.
 

Hadley

August 1986? The story hadnt yet been fully released yet (it ended sometime in 1987), and they were ALREADY talking film rights?
 

Dan Reilly The Great

Banned
Troyer IV said:
Not, I beg of you all, Tim Burton.

I like him as well as the next creatively-loony director, but after he butchered the Batman comic, how would he go about butchering what is possibly THE best graphic novel of all time?

I was actually quite displeased with the movie version, though it made sense in a way, because I am a purist.

Tim Burton, upon criticism for his Batman take, replied with something to the effect of "How should I know? I don't read comics." Why would you have someone direct a story he doesn't fully appreciate?
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Watchmen is overrated, V for Vendetta was better, Alan Moore has little to no understanding of the history of the cold war, he ignores that Nixon would probably never have become president in the watchmen Universe, and ignores butterflies alltogether. The message of "would we be better off without super hero's?" is irrelevent in this case because of the dozens of superheros in the story, only three actually seem to do any harm, hell ozymandias doesn't save the world at all, he simply emperils it, then brings it back from the brink by killing 2 million people.

Anyways I put Gilliam, think of 12 monkeys, it has the right kind of atmosphere and tone to make a convincing Watchmen adaptation.
 

Desmond Hume

Enigmajones said:
[snip] I know he was really old at that point but I always imagined the old Comedian as the perfect role for Chuck Heston.
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That would have been awesome!

I voted for Ridley Scott, because I think that among the directors listed he would have made the best Watchmen film. However, WI David Lynch had directed it? What do you think that would be like?
 
Magniac

Magniac

I went with George Miller, partly out of parochialism, partly because he alone out of all these directors had made a superhero-ish movie on the smell of an oily rag--the first Mad Max (the second one didn't exactly cost a fortune to make, either).

At IMDb there's a reference to Gilliam saying that Watchmen would've cost a million dollars a page to film. Even in the big spending late eighties that is prohibitively expensive. For that reason alone, I think either Miller or the Roger Corman-educated Joe Dante are the ones most capable of getting the most out of a standard Hollywood budget in that era.

Also, George's blockbuster Hollywood movie at that time was The Witches of Eastwick. Does anyone else dream of Big Jack as the perfect Comedian?;)

Troyer IV said:
Not, I beg of you all, Tim Burton.
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Heh, Beetle Juice is '87, so it's entirely possible that if Burton had gone straight to work after that on WM then he can never make the first Batman movie, as the studio will give the project to someone else if it wants an '89 release.

Now there's a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't scenario for fans of both Moore and DC who hate that particular film maker.

Desmond Hume said:
However, WI David Lynch had directed it? What do you think that would be like?
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Jeez, I totally forgot about Lynch! He was a famous genre director in the eighties... because of Dune. Hmmm, perhaps I wouldn't have added him to the poll if I'd remembered that. If you put him up there you might as well add Robert Altman for his movie adaption of Popeye the sailor man.:D

Kevin Renner said:
The one, the only Stanley Kubrick
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I thought having a Kubrick option would've been a bit too much.

He's not a director of entertainments, regardless of the fact that 'Clockwork Orange' is very comic book-ish.

The one true highbrow director I should have added was Francis Ford Coppola. Cotton Club is actually a real visceral treat, it moves along as fast as any super hero movie.
 

Andrew Iosef Roosevelt

Batman 1989 was great, I don't see why it's getting any hate; it's my second favorite batman movie and definitely better than that nonsense they're making now.I'd say Burton could do a good job; though I voted for Carpenter.
 
Redem

Redem

Andrew Iosef Roosevelt said:
Batman 1989 was great, I don't see why it's getting any hate; it's my second favorite batman movie and definitely better than that nonsense they're making now.I'd say Burton could do a good job; though I voted for Carpenter.
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Heh well Batman 89 kinda badly age visually (that's what you get when you mix 30's and 80's ) plus you feel its a bit sketchy in term of storyline (The Joker has three different plot going on none of them really connected) and well its clearly goes for a strickly golden age interpretration of Batman leaving (killing criminal and all) but that's probably as to do with some timing issues
 

G.Fieendish

The only snag with the poll, is there are not enough auter type directors in it...
For example, how would a Mike Hodges (Flash Gordon & Get Carter), Alec Cox (Repo Man) or Paul Verhoven (Robocop & Starship Troopers) versions of Watchmen have done, cimematically in the 1990's...?
 
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