‘WATCHMEN’ SHOW AIMS FOR GREATNESS
Writer Damon Lindelof says adapting the iconic graphic novel was nerve-racking
Damon Lindelof didn’t take lightly the challenge of adapting the most acclaimed graphic novel of all time. The Lost and The Leftovers cocreator was a fan of the revered Watchmen book ever since his father handed him the first few issues when he was 13 in the mid1980s. So agreeing to spearhead HBO’s new adaptation didn’t come without a bout or two of nerves.
“There was immense trepidation and it was never overcome,” he said. “Trepidation is actually our greatest asset.”
Lindelof will see how he’s done as the first of his nine-episode Watchmen follow-up has debuted and the fanboys and fangirls can weigh in. They will find many things created in their honour.
“The end result is something that is hopefully accessible to people who don’t have an intimate familiarity with Watchmen, but there’s constant love letters and acknowledgements that we are building upon the foundation of this masterpiece,” said Lindelof.
The creators have managed to lure an eclectic list of actors, including Regina King, Jeremy Irons, Louis Gossett Jr, Jean Smart, Tim Blake Nelson and Don Johnson.
It proved a formidable task to build on writer Alan Moore’s and illustrator Dave Gibbons’ dark superhero tale, which follows a group of masked vigilantes who uncover a vast conspiracy after one of their own is killed in an alternate history America. Superheroes are banned and have gone underground.
Before they wrote a line of script for the new series, Lindelof and his team of 12 writers carefully plotted over 10 weeks what happened to that alternate world in the decades until 2019. “It’s a history that’s just adjacent to our own with some significant major aberrations,” he said.
In the original series, America won the Vietnam War and turned that country into a state. President John F Kennedy is still assassinated on November 22, 1963, but Richard Nixon remained president until 1988 after successfully abolishing term limits. Actor Robert Redford was running for president against Nixon. Lindelof and his writers took all that and expanded it to a new universe. The series begins with Redford as president, and adds Henry Louis Gates Jr as Treasury secretary and John Grisham serving on the Supreme Court. The original Watchmen was built around the dread of the Cold War and so the creators of the HBO series also looked for a unifying theme. While they worked, the culture was wracked by images of white nationalists rallying in Charlottesville, Virginia, and black men being shot by police. “When we started talking about moving the story into 2019, we wanted to say, ‘What is the cultural anxiety that we are now facing?’ Obviously, there is danger out there in the world, but all around us was this idea of a reckoning with race in America,” Lindelof said.
The original comics also were bursting with social and historical references, with plenty of varied musical allusions. Lindelof and his team have matched that ambition, with references to everything from Greek tragedies to Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals. The soundtrack includes the Bee Gees, Beastie Boys, Eartha Kitt, Devo and Tchaikovsky.
It’s a challenging work and complex to watch. No wonder adapting Watchmen well has long eluded Hollywood. But Lindelof and his team have avoided one pitfall of director Zack Snyder’s Watchmen movie of a decade ago — being too reverential to the source material. This new series isn’t scared by its legacy.
“There is something almost freeing about saying, ‘This is supposed to be impossible. If we attempt this dive and we end up breaking our neck or, halfway down, we realise there’s no water in the pool, that’s sort of what everybody expected from us anyway,’” he said. “That became liberating.”