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| image courtesy DC Comics/Warner Bros. |
Director Paul Greengrass says his pitch for the 2009 Watchmen movie was very different from the Snyder vision. By now we've had a couple iterations of Watchmen in the movies and television. But the idea that Greengrass had for the legendary comic book characters was not one that Warner Bros. liked at the time. The 1986 graphic novel by Alan Moore has spawned one movie by Zack Snyder and the later HBO limited event series that served as a continuation or sequel to the original story. Now, Greengrass has discussed his idea for translating Watchmen to the silver screen and says that it was similar to the themes of last year's Joker movie.
Greengrass is mainly known for his action films like The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum and Green Zone. The director was going to step outside his comfort zone to make his own Watchmen film that could have been tonally compared to Joker. He says that his version would have been a more gritty, "real world" approach. When speaking with the podcast Happy Sad Confused, Greengrass had this to say:
“I wanted to believe these characters lived in the real world and that a lot of what they were thinking and doing was delusional. There was something in Joker that had a similar quality to it.”
While Greengrass was considered to take up the project for Warner Bros., the job ultimately went to Zack Snyder continued on to other DC projects like Man of Steel, Batman V Superman, and Justice League (which he is currently in the final phases of finishing his completed vision). All in all, it seems that Paul Greengrass may have not been the best director pick since his style is usually more reality based. His current film News of the World has some early Oscar talk.
-CG