Terry Gilliam Trashes Snyder's Watchmen Movie
Posted 08.24.09 by reelz
While speaking to AICN about his next big screen offering The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Monty Python alum Terry Gilliam gave his opinion about Zack Snyder's Watchmen movie — the same movie he himself had spent years trying to get made before deciding that the comic book was unfilmable. So what did he think of Snyder's attempt?
It got trashed, but there are great sequences in there, but the overall effect is kind of turgid in a certain way ... the pace is wrong. I was glad our version didn't get done, the one that Charles McKeown and I had wrote, because we had reduced it down to about two hours and five minutes I think and we lost so much. Comedian was cut down to next to nothing. So [Snyder] did a good job, but it just felt ... I think Watchmen really bothered me, because I thought it should be better. It was all there. It looked right, but to me it was pace. It didn't have pace. It needed a bit more quirkiness in there. Dr. Manhattan was getting boring, frankly, and then Ozymandias by the end I thought "Oh, come on!" They lost me by the end, frankly, but it was certainly looking better than what I was going to do!
Despite the controversy such a criticism will surely start, Gilliam's own movie is getting some morbid buzz simply because late Heath Ledger was working on it during his untimely death in 2008. Seems like these days Gilliam can't walk down the block without starting another media blitz.
Next Showing: Terry Gilliam's
The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus opens December 25th, 2009.