By Peter Debruge
Director Zack Snyder will shoot scenes on Mars in front of a green screen for his adaptation of Watchmen, but he wants to emphasize comics' bending of reality with real backgrounds, including this custom-built Owlship.
SAN DIEGO — The Dark Knight may still be king of the box office after another record-breaking weekend of superheroic proportions. But Hollywood still doesn't trust comic books, Zack Snyder said this weekend at Comic-Con, where PopularMechanics.com caught up with the director of last year's F/X-heavy 300 inside the Owlship, a full-scale submersible vehicle built for his upcoming adaptation of the uber-comic Watchmen.
"With Hollywood, their approach [to comic-based stories] is, this thing is broken, so how do you make it into a movie? The first thing you do is you take out all the pesky ideas," explains Snyder, who actually took the opposite approach on Watchmen.
Instead of focusing on plot, the director zeroed in on the subtext of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' seminal 1986 comic, which explores the notion of superheroes as real people cursed with the same insecurities and weaknesses as normal citizens. "If you look at the story of Watchmen, it's not that complicated, which is also the power of it. [Moore] just hung this extremely complicated character piece on that simple story," he says.
In its own way, The Dark Knight reflects the same evolution, emphasizing psychology as much as plot. "I think that's the thing that pop culture has to deal with now: Superhero movies, comic-book movies, whatever you want to call them, they don't exist just as summer popcorn mindless entertainment," Snyder continues. "Not only are they saying [that] these are serious topics, but serious filmmakers and serious actors are making these cool movies."
In the 30 years since Richard Donner's Superman, visual-effects technology has advanced to the point that filmmakers can now twist reality like a comic book—but do it convincingly. With 300, Snyder used green-screen technology to replicate the impressionistic look of Frank Miller's graphic novel. For Watchmen, he's limiting that trick to select sequences, such as those set on Mars, in an effort to recreate Moore and illustrator Gibbons's world using practical environments wherever possible.
Director Zack Snyder will shoot scenes on Mars in front of a green screen for his adaptation of Watchmen, but he wants to emphasize comics' bending of reality with real backgrounds, including this custom-built Owlship.SAN DIEGO — The Dark Knight may still be king of the box office after another record-breaking weekend of superheroic proportions. But Hollywood still doesn't trust comic books, Zack Snyder said this weekend at Comic-Con, where PopularMechanics.com caught up with the director of last year's F/X-heavy 300 inside the Owlship, a full-scale submersible vehicle built for his upcoming adaptation of the uber-comic Watchmen.
"With Hollywood, their approach [to comic-based stories] is, this thing is broken, so how do you make it into a movie? The first thing you do is you take out all the pesky ideas," explains Snyder, who actually took the opposite approach on Watchmen.
Instead of focusing on plot, the director zeroed in on the subtext of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' seminal 1986 comic, which explores the notion of superheroes as real people cursed with the same insecurities and weaknesses as normal citizens. "If you look at the story of Watchmen, it's not that complicated, which is also the power of it. [Moore] just hung this extremely complicated character piece on that simple story," he says.
In its own way, The Dark Knight reflects the same evolution, emphasizing psychology as much as plot. "I think that's the thing that pop culture has to deal with now: Superhero movies, comic-book movies, whatever you want to call them, they don't exist just as summer popcorn mindless entertainment," Snyder continues. "Not only are they saying [that] these are serious topics, but serious filmmakers and serious actors are making these cool movies."
In the 30 years since Richard Donner's Superman, visual-effects technology has advanced to the point that filmmakers can now twist reality like a comic book—but do it convincingly. With 300, Snyder used green-screen technology to replicate the impressionistic look of Frank Miller's graphic novel. For Watchmen, he's limiting that trick to select sequences, such as those set on Mars, in an effort to recreate Moore and illustrator Gibbons's world using practical environments wherever possible.
Models roamed The Spirit's booth over the weekend, but Frank Miller intends to go heavy on green-screen technology in upgrading the style of Sin City.
Snyder's approach to Watchmen stands in stark contrast with the strategy that Miller himself is emphasizing on The Spirit, an extremely stylized adaptation of Will Eisner's classic series of a masked vigilante. The project allows Miller to apply the lessons he learned collaborating with Robert Rodriguez on Sin City, once again pushing the palette nearly to black-and-white, then injecting bursts of color for effect.
Miller's approach results in artificial, even impossible-looking images, which may prove too avant-garde for audiences expecting to see their comic-book action grounded in some form of physical reality. To help excite Comic-Con attendees, Miller showed an underwater scene here this weekend in which he simulated Eva Mendes swimming by using an ultra-high-speed Phantom HD camera, then slowing down the footage to create the desired effect.
As producer Deborah Del Prete put it, "When you see somebody underwater in comics, they look great, their makeup's perfect—we wanted these characters to look like the drawing characters."
Jaime King, who plays an angel of death named Lorelei in the new film, found working on green screen to be quite liberating on both Sin City and The Spirit: "Essentially you're not having to stop all the time to reset the teapot in the background," she says. "It's just like going back to when you were a child and making up everything inside of you."
Still, Miller's approach privileges the visuals, just as Snyder's green-screen strategy did on 300. But if you want audiences to look past the digitally-enhanced abs or equivalent eye candy, Snyder believes you have to leave room for character—the blueprints for which can also be found in the source material.
"The cool thing about what's happened with my involvement in Watchmen is 300 gave me a lot of excuses to say, 'It's in the graphic novel,' and the studio will go, 'Oh, OK, I guess that's cool.' That's just my argument: If it's in the graphic novel, it should be in the movie. It worked for 300."
Original here
Miller's approach results in artificial, even impossible-looking images, which may prove too avant-garde for audiences expecting to see their comic-book action grounded in some form of physical reality. To help excite Comic-Con attendees, Miller showed an underwater scene here this weekend in which he simulated Eva Mendes swimming by using an ultra-high-speed Phantom HD camera, then slowing down the footage to create the desired effect.
As producer Deborah Del Prete put it, "When you see somebody underwater in comics, they look great, their makeup's perfect—we wanted these characters to look like the drawing characters."
Jaime King, who plays an angel of death named Lorelei in the new film, found working on green screen to be quite liberating on both Sin City and The Spirit: "Essentially you're not having to stop all the time to reset the teapot in the background," she says. "It's just like going back to when you were a child and making up everything inside of you."
Still, Miller's approach privileges the visuals, just as Snyder's green-screen strategy did on 300. But if you want audiences to look past the digitally-enhanced abs or equivalent eye candy, Snyder believes you have to leave room for character—the blueprints for which can also be found in the source material.
"The cool thing about what's happened with my involvement in Watchmen is 300 gave me a lot of excuses to say, 'It's in the graphic novel,' and the studio will go, 'Oh, OK, I guess that's cool.' That's just my argument: If it's in the graphic novel, it should be in the movie. It worked for 300."
Original here
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