The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) gives Sally Jupiter (Carla Gugino) an ear full in WATCHMEN(2009).
© Warner Bros
Mania Exclusive Interview: Watchmen, Part II
By: Rob VauxDate: Sunday, August 03, 2008
Carla Gugino is no stranger to comic book movies, having appeared in Robert Rodriguez's adaptation of Sin City as well as his Spy Kids franchise. She takes the role of Sally Jupiter in Warner Bros' upcoming version of Watchmen. Malin Akerman plays her daughter Laurie, aka Silk Spectre II, having made a splash as Ben Stiller's unhinged wife in the remake of The Heartbreak Kid. Patrick Wilson has had a wide variety of prominent roles, from William Travis in The Alamo to a stay-at-home husband in Little Children to a pederast who bites off more than he can chew in Hard Candy. He's been cast as Night Owl II in Watchmen. The three of them sat down during the film's chaotic press day at the San Diego Comic Con to talk about their characters.
Q: Carla, you really don't look only enough to be playing Malin's mother.
Carla Gugino: Thank you. No, we're more or less peers, which makes for an interesting acting challenge. I remember when Zack [Snyder] first approached me about playing Sally Jupiter, I said, "it sounds amazing, but wouldn't you want an older actor for that?" In the graphic novel, there's so much more of older Sally than younger Sally--there's just the flashback to the rape and a couple of other moments. But Zack felt it was really important to show the passage of time, and to see how this world progresses from the 1940s to the 1980s. That entailed a lot more images of her as a younger woman. Also, I think you need to see Sally Jupiter shine in her own right to understand why she tries to impose that life on Laurie. That's a vital part of both their characters. But no, we had to use prosthetics for the scenes when Sally is older. Otherwise, it never would have worked.
Q: It's a unique relationship between mother and daughter.
Malin Akerman: Absolutely. There needed to be a really natural connection there, both positive and negative. We were up in Vancouver for about three weeks, just hanging out together and getting to know each other. We have a lot of similarities in our lives and our families, and that helped us relate these two characters to things that had happened in our lives. Sharing those things with each other helped us get into the mindset of these characters much more readily. There was a real advantage to having that time, and because of the magnitude of this material and what it's about, it was really necessary. We all had the time to get to know each other and understand each other. Screen time is at a premium for such a big story, and you need to establish that familiarity very quickly.
I think every daughter would say that her relationship with her mother is complicated on some level, probably like any son and his father. It's one of the most intense and complex relationships out there, and it was great for us to have a chance to talk about all of that early on, because it does bring things to life.
Q: Laurie's other key relationships are all romantic ones, especially with Night Owl. And there's that marvelous bit of playfulness involving the costumes as a turn-on . . .
Patrick Wilson: It was funny. We wanted to be very specific about what Dan and Laurie saw in each other. Because we knew where it was going, it was important to establish what the relationship was like during their first few meetings. I remember us setting things up during that first meeting of the Crimebusters--just a look. Her look is swayed by Manhattan, and then Night Owl sees her, and there's something there. Then later Rorschach comes in and reminds Daniel of that part of himself . . . but it's Laurie who initiates it and gives him a call. That dynamic is all there.
The great thing about this project is that the graphic novel has the answers to all those questions, so any time we had any concerns about the characters and their relationships, we just had to open it up.
Q: Each character has a different reaction to the overarching line at the end of the book. Did you find your own stances on the issue differing from those of your characters?
MA: You know, I'm still undecided on that. There's so many arguments for both ways. I love the way the novel maintains that ambiguity all the way to the end, and if we do our jobs right, the movie will capture that same ambiguity. I love the notion that an audience can walk out of the film after that ending and ask themselves, "Is it right? Is it wrong?"
PW: It turns everything on its ear. I mean your "villain" is outwardly striving for world peace. Do those ends justify such means?
Q: How challenging is it to convey a story so elaborate in cinematic terms? Fans of the book are going to be okay because they know it, but how do you convey that to people coming to this material for the first time?
PW: We've lived with this for so long that, if anything, we need little sparks to reignite it. But the script is very faithful to the graphic novel . . .
GC: And we're very aware of the pressures and the obligations of living up to that. We know how important the graphic novel is to so many people, and now for us too. We've all become fans in the course of doing this. I think when you live it and you breathe it for six months straight, you can't forget it. Not a lot of people have that opportunity, and yet someone else who's read the graphic novel for the last ten years straight has so many different views and insights that will take me another ten years to figure out. You have to read this book about twenty times to get every single moment out of it; it's so dense. All we can do is give our feelings as to what it's all about, having gone through the experiences we did in making it.
Q: The density is often cited as the reason this project took so long to reach the screen. You could do a five-hour movie and not break a sweat. With a three-hour time limit on it, was there any material you can recall that was condensed, or maybe some scenes that were combined to keep as much material as possible intact?
MA: That's really a question for Zack.
PW: Yeah. I mean, we don't know what's in there now. But there were some combinations sometimes. Dialogue mostly. I remember one in particular--there were so many times in the graphic novel when either Dan or Laurie would say, "This is getting heavy." I loved that. It's just a 70s thing to say. I loved that Dan and Laurie met on this sort of 70s level, because that was their heyday and that's how things worked back then. It wasn't in the script, but I remember we were shooting a scene in the Owlship, and we needed some random dialogue to help break up the flying scenes. I said "we need to throw one of those 'getting heavy' lines in there." So that was put in there: not on the flight to Antarctica, but somewhere else. I hope it ends up in there now that I've told all of you about it. There were a few changes like that, but all of the dialogue comes from the graphic novel. The language is very precise and we wanted to preserve as much of it as possible.
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