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Excellent interview
Neither Billy Crudup nor Matthew Goode had much experience with comic book adaptations before being cast in Zack Snyder's Watchmen (as Dr. Manhattan and Ozymandias, respectively). Crudup was known for his devoted work in films like Without Limits, Almost Famous and The Good Shepherd, while Goode cut his teeth on period pieces like Brideshead Revisited and crime thrillers such as The Lookout. Both considered their work on Watchmen to be a singular challenge, which they discussed during an interview with Mania at the film's press day last week.
Question: The book is very coy about Ozymandias's powers. Technically, he doesn't have any, and yet he catches bullets and performs other acts that can be construed as superhuman. Was it important to you to define that more clearly? To know exactly what he can do and why?
Matthew Goode: So much of Adrian is not defined at all. You could say that about a lot of the characters, but even more so for Adrian. Really, Adrian exists as a sort of literary conceit. The idea that Germans are guilty for what happened to the Jews, or that Americans don't see the guilt in dropping the A-bombs on Japan. But to answer your question: yes. He's on the cusp of being superhuman, but as Zack [Snyder]'s taken it, he's not muscled. He's all about speed, and that links nicely into the fact that he's simply so intelligent that maybe his reactions are going to be swifter than anyone else's.
Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan masters the world at the sub-atomic level
© Mania
Q: Billy, how tricky was it to perform beneath this layer of motion capture? You didn't know how it was going to turn out while you were filming it…
Billy Crudup: It was an exotic and interesting job to undertake. There was something unsatisfying about playing somebody who was lost in terms of their own motivation. The disconnect from humanity. Most things that are written to be filmed are dramatic in some way, so you have a catharsis. There's a narrative to follow in each scene. There's an event that happens. But Dr. Manhattan lives in a kind of nether world. He knows what's going to happen. He's just sort of going through the motions with things. So there's no catharsis in playing most of the scenes. I remember turning to the CGI guys each time and saying, "good luck with that one." But at the same time, it led to a kind of levity being involved with that collaboration. I felt really lucky to enjoy that part of the process.
Q: Did it take a while to find that precise tone of passivity that Dr. Manhattan needs?
BC: It was never something that we kind of settled on. One of the problems with ADR--looping--is when you know that that scene has been dubbed. It usually happens when there's a disconnect between the voice and the body. But there was always a disconnect between the voice and the body for me, because this guy was six-foot-four and 240 pounds. Finding a voice for that body was a difficult thing. It wasn't really until post-production that I found what it was we were after.
Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan in WATCHMEN
© Warner Bros. Ent. Inc.
Q: What was it about your respective characters that made you want to do it?
BC: I was curious about it. I wasn't sure how you could accomplish playing someone like that, both in the practical sense and in the psychological sense. Whenever there's a problem to be solved in creating a character, it piques my interest. I guess that was part of the excitement and exhilaration for me: trying to figure out Dr. Manhattan.
The actual process was quite constrictive. The suit I was wearing was constricted, and it was also a lighting instrument. I was there to light the other characters. Dr. Manhattan glows blue, so when I move my hand, they want to see the blue move across the other character's face. The way they accomplished that was with about 1200 blue LEDs that were all over my body. It was really elaborately wired so that they could dim the LEDs based on what the camera could accept and what they needed to do for lighting. It was powered by battery packs that I wore on my head. This is not technology they had used for anything before. They built the suit for this, so there was a lot of trial and error. It was not as free an experience playing the character as it may have seemed from his nudity.
Matthew Goode as Ozymandias keeps an eye on everything in WATCHMEN
© Warner Bros. Ent. Inc.
MG: I was cast fairly late. I knew Billy was involved, and obviously Zack had done 300, so there was that. For me, I seemed to be so wrong for Adrian, and… "curious" is absolutely the right word. I wanted to find out why Zack thought I should do it. Then I read it, and thought, "That's going to be hard." I've done the villain thing before, and sometimes people get pissed when you make your villains human and intelligent. They want two-dimensional. With this, there was a chance to answer that. That scared me a little, and I like to work on things that scare the shit out of me. With this one, there were literally no bowel movements left.
Q: This is a case where the text is sacred, and Zack really wanted to get the book as close as possible. How did that factor in to your work on the film?
BC: I kept returning to the book. It was great to have the depth of that kind of source material, particularly on something that was so challenging. Sometimes I would solve the problem of a scene in my head, and then when it came down to playing the scene, I was left frustrated. Having the source material to go back to in order to articulate motivations or nuances was really helpful.
MG: That's one of the other things about a text that's laid out. There are so many great gesticulations and things that shape the character. Like catching the bullet, thinking, "Let's try to absolutely get that right."
Matthew Goode as Ozymandias in WATCHMAN
© Warner Bros. Ent. Inc.
Q: Were there influences beyond Watchmen, outside of Watchmen?
MC: This is the best of the best, I think, though Christopher Nolan really helped with the redoing of Batman. It had become quite bastardized before he came along, not as dark as the original material. That's one of the great things that's come back into superhero movies: the adult sensibilities. Dark things happen, it's not like The A-Team.
BC: To me, this book was enough. It was a big enough task to try and accomplish what it was asking of me. I didn't have time to pull references from elsewhere… though I don't do that so much anyway. I tend to use the text and my imagination, for better or worse. Some actors are really great at associating their character with somebody they've seen before or a piece of music or what have you. I'm not really that kind of actor. I'm not smart enough for that.
Watchmen arrives in theaters March 6th.
Looks like Matthew Crudup answered a question there, near the end of the interview.
two words...
AWE SOME!