"They'll ask me questions like, 'What are Dr. Manhattan's weaknesses?,' " he said incredulously. "I'm like, 'He used to be a man. ... He's God! His only weakness is that he was a man, and that still haunts him.' ... They're like, 'Should the Comedian be so bad all the time?' And I'm like, 'Yeah, he should!' "
With "300" garnering enormous buzz, and "Watchmen" being made by the same studio, Snyder said such questions are increasingly dwindling, and his autonomy is growing. "I promise it's going to be all actors," Snyder said defiantly, revealing that Manhattan, Nixon, Kissinger and others will not be CGI. "I like makeup. I don't want it to be this slick, glossy studio movie where everything's perfect.
"I [now can] say, 'That'll be cool where Rorschach handcuffs the child molester to the wood-burning stove and gives him a hacksaw," Snyder said of another scene that will be in his movie, featuring the masked character who is arguably the most heroic — and most mentally deranged — of the group.
"It's gonna be this summer," Snyder said of when the cameras will begin rolling. "The studio really wants to make it, and I've got — I can't say right now which actors — but I've got actors interested. ... If an actor doesn't know 'Watchmen,' it takes me an hour or so to get them to drink the Kool-Aid and realize it's not a summer tent-pole superhero movie. It's not 'X-Men.' ... When 'Watchmen' came out, your basic comic book collector had maxed out on comic book heroes. Here comes 'Watchmen,' you buy it and boom! Your brains get blown out of your head."
Snyder said the timing couldn't be better for his down-on-their-luck do-gooders. "That's the same thing that's gonna happen to your average moviegoer when they say, 'Oh, cool, "Watchmen." What's that? A superhero movie? I'll go check it out.' ... When Nixon sends the super-being to Vietnam, and he's walking through the jungle ... you'll know you're in another kind of movie."
