Crave Online: How the heck do you sit down and adapt an Alan Moore work as dense as Watchmen?

Alex Tse: You begin with David Hayter.

David Hayter: You begin with David Hayter and if you don't, you're barking up the wrong tree. Here's what I did. This is always the question. How do you adapt something so dense, so complex? Well, the unsatisfying answer is it's not terribly difficult. The story is so good and so well constructed and it's really just 12 comic books. It's not Lord of the Rings which that will never be adapted probably into a film. I'm just kidding. If you can adapt Lord of the Rings into 12 hours, you can adapt Watchmen into two and a half. I discovered that by the process. What had been done before was how can we take the essence of Watchmen and turn it into something else and put it up on screen? Well, you can't. Watchmen is not only the characters but it is the story, it's the details, it's the dialogue, it's everything. So my first pass, I just copied it all out verbatim. It's amazing that they pay me what they pay me for this but I copied it all out verbatim into Final Draft, gave all the characters their dialogue, put in simple action sequences. My first draft was 178 pages. Now that's too long for a movie script but not crazy long. It just needs to be edited. I had cut Tales from the Black Freighter from the beginning because I knew that would put us over three hours and I was never going to be able to get that past the studios. But apart from that, my second pass, I said, "Okay, let's edit and tweak and cut it down without losing any of the scenes and see where I get." The next pass was 134 pages which if you go by the common wisdom of a minute of screen time per page, that's two hours and 14 minutes. That's about what a Watchmen movie should be as far as I was concerned. In fact, it's a little shorter than I thought it would be. So the adaptation was not difficult. You so rarely get a story so intrinsically amazing and perfectly constructed as this to work on. What is difficult is then taking it, I went to four different studios, and just being met with the same notes, the same desire to turn it into something else, to develop it and tear it to pieces. Protecting it from that sort of assault is difficult.

Crave Online: Was the squid in your first script and who came up with the new ending?

David Hayter: Well, I did. The squid I don't think was in it because I first started pitching this in 2000. Some journalist reminded me that apparently I signed my first contract with universal on September 10, 2001. So that was a difficult time to end the movie with scenes of bloody torn apart bodies just littering Times Square. Not only for the studio's sake but in empathy with the rest of America and the world, I thought I just don't know that I want to end a $100 million plus movie that way. So from the beginning, what I had initially done, my initial ending was that Adrian was using accelerated solar power to be able to direct beams. There's a whole thing about him being a sun god and comparing himself to Alexander, that that's what he was using and then eventually, because we had taken out the squid, which is a very difficult thing to spring on an audience at the end. You have to understand that that takes a lot of setup to explain why an interdimensional space squid is popping into the middle of Times Square in the end of your movie. It's a lot of setup and a lot of time we didn't have. So the goal was can we really find something already woven into the story that is an element of power that can be used as a weapon of mass destruction and bring us to the same story elements that make the ending so amazing in the book. Eventually that became Dr. Manhattan.

Crave Online: Alex, did you massage that ending?

Alex Tse: No, no. That was in his script.

David Hayter: It wasn't in my first script. That came together at Paramount, so about 2004 or so is when that became the ending. I was working with Paul Greengrass at the time. He was the director and we were living in London and doing that particular version of the movie. Paul said a great thing about it. He said, "What this ending does is if Dr. Manhattan had never existed, if he had never been brought into existence, Adrian would be the most powerful man in the world. Once Dr. Manhattan comes along, everybody else, it's like he's the most powerful insect in the world. There's no comparison." So what Paul loved was the idea that Adrian, by using Dr. Manhattan as his weapon, puts himself back on top again. That really appealed to me because what Watchmen is about is it's about powerful people imposing their own moral codes on the world. Yet they're not purely moral people. They're intensely flawed people with these huge egos. It's really acting out of ego to impose your will on the world, so I felt that that all sort of tied together. Like I said, the most important thing was that it brings you to the same sequence of events and sets off the same character responses as in the book.

Crave Online: Then where did you come in, Alex?

Alex Tse: When the project moved to Warner Brothers at the end of '05, beginning of '06 and David stepped off the project. They were looking for a new writer so I came aboard.

Crave Online: It sounds pretty well thought out already. What was still left to be done?

Alex Tse: The main thing I did was resetting it in 1985 which is what Zack wanted, which Zack, certainly after 300, had the leverage to do.

David Hayter: Yeah, without 300 you wouldn't have the same movie.

Alex Tse: The same version of it, no.

David Hayter: You know, for many years, it was just me, Lloyd Levin and Larry Gordon the producers. You can be the biggest screenwriter in the world and they don't care. They just said that on 30 Rock. There was a great thing where they were watching Entertainment Tonight and the guy said, "This movie has Steven Spielberg and Julia Roberts and the biggest screenwriter in the world, whoever that may be." So there were certain things that I would give up to the studios to try to buy the things I really needed which were the complexity, the six character structure, the flashbacks. So I would give them things that I felt I could give up and still retain the integrity of the book, like setting it present day, like not softening the ending but de-gorifying the ending if you will. So then, he's lucky enough to be working on it with Zack Snyder when 300 comes out. Then Zack Snyder says, "Well, I want it to be R rated and I want Nixon to be president and I want it to be set in 1985." Warner Brothers goes, "No, you can't do that." And Zack says, "Okay, well, I'll talk to you later" and then it's done. So Alex and Zack really did the work of not only putting it back to the integrity that I really wanted in the beginning, but even being able to take that further. That's where the movie went.

Alex Tse: I mean, we did work on versions where, my first version was still in present day. Then there was a lot of discussion of what we were losing there. We talked about different iconic people being president, could it be Reagan? We even said maybe there's a version where Arnold Schwarzenegger's the president, but he was very much drawn to Nixon because he's such an iconic figure. Then it was just like okay, well, if it's present day, Nixon would be like 109, some ridiculous thing. There was a version we talked about where then it was also losing the Cold War aspects of it because there's something important there. What if we still set it in modern day but it was still the Cold War because the existence of Dr. Manhattan just ramped up this dissention in the world where people were so afraid of him that it isolated them more. They created more nuclear weapons. There was a version like that. At the end of the day, certainly once 300 started making money, he was just like, "No, we'll just set it back in 1985."

Crave Online: David, who was the president in your version?

David Hayter: Oh God, I can't even remember. I think he might have just been "the president." I feel bad that I didn't come up with Arnold Schwarzenegger. That's pretty brilliant. That's not just because I'm a bad writer.

Alex Tse: There's no reason. It's nothing that he needs to justify.

David Hayter: But I have very specific concepts, filmmaking concepts as far as it's very difficult to pull off the president in a film because either they're James Cromwell and you're like, "Oh, that's the guy from Babe." Or they're an extra who's looking presidential but doesn't really say much.

Alex Tse: Or Morgan Freeman's voice.

David Hayter: Or they're Morgan Freeman's voice or they're somebody who is doing a character. So I think Reagan, if you set it present day and you say that Reagan eliminated term limits and remained president, that would be thematically true. But, then you've got to get an actor and make them into an old, old Reagan and that's a difficult thing. So I was a little concerned about that. I think they did a great job with Nixon and Nixon really typifies thematically what Watchmen is which is here's a powerful guy who imposed his moral code on the world but he was an egomaniacal jerk. That's not good for the world. So I'm glad that they went back to that.

Crave Online: When did you add fight scenes to the movie?

Alex Tse: There was actually even a couple more that got cut because of just for money. The thing about this movie which is different than a lot of the other "comic book" movies is it was actually note we had: There aren't any real action set pieces. There's plenty of action in it, so the exec might read it and kind of miss it. "Well, I don't know, in this scene Comedian is burning someone with a flame thrower. That's kind of an action beat." That's not like, say, the car chase scene in Dark Knight which is the impulse of a studio to want those kind of scenes, set pieces which we didn't have. So there's some stuff that it wasn't just to indulge the studio, but to see the Comedian and his at the time unknown assailant fight in real time as opposed to the graphic novel which is you just see flashes of it when the detectives investigate, that can satisfy a studio. That's something cool for an audience to see and it does not in any way compromise the graphic novel so I think in instances like that, when Dan and Lori get jumped by the gang. The fight's over pretty fast in the graphic novel. You're just expanding the beats like that so you can somehow justify spending $130 dollars on this movie and say, "Wait a minute, there's not a lot of killing going on here."

David Hayter: I mean, it is a sequence. You just don't see as much of it in the comic book because you're sort of going frame by frame. In a movie you have to follow it through and you see a lot more action. I can tell you, the first draft I sent to Alan Moore, he read it and he said, "Oh, David, I think it's very well done. It's very close to the book and I really appreciate that. I don't remember as much action being in the story before." I was like well, you know. I'm still writing a movie.

Crave Online: That's something, that you even got to work with Alan Moore.

David Hayter: Yeah, it was great. He doesn't like movies but he does like writers. I think he does appreciate people that really respect his work and everything he went through to do it. He was always very kind to me. He just doesn’t like watching $100 million being spent on one film and I sympathize with that.