British Invasion
Watchmen is set in New York, but it’s “two Englishmen’s view of New York,” says production designer Alex McDowell, referring to the graphic novel’s creators, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, so McDonald’s becomes Gunga Diner, an Indian fast-food chain. “When you read Watchmen, there’s something inexplicable and impossible about the design of it,” says director Zack Snyder. “We wanted to capture that feeling.” To McDowell, that meant taking iconic locations from the graphic novel—like the Gunga Diner—and transplanting them to the screen.
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British Invasion
“When you read Watchmen, there’s something inexplicable and impossible about the design of it,” says director Zack Snyder. “We wanted to capture that feeling.” To McDowell, that meant taking iconic locations from the graphic novel”like the Gunga Diner”and transplanting them to the screen.
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Perfect Imperfection
“With due diligence, we definitely looked into shooting in New York,” McDowell says. But recreating Watchmen’s New York in the real New York would have been prohibitively expensive. So instead, a crew of almost 100 workers built three full city blocks, including “Porno Street,” the crew’s name for the seedy avenue where the Gunga Diner sits, in Vancouver. When McDowell first saw the site, it was a working sawmill. “We brought in the same outside contractors who lay streets in Vancouver, and said, ‘Don’t try to level the street.’ It was bumpy and there were certain amounts of mess; we took advantage of the uneven terrain. You can’t do that on a soundstage. A soundstage is built for TV shows, and needs to be perfectly flat. We dug a subway entrance. We even dug potholes.”
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Making History
McDowell concentrated on making the buildings look like they had existed for decades, inside and out. “I told the painters that they are going to be painting three or four times, so budget accordingly.” With layers of paint,he says, “you can create 60 years of history in four days. There’s a lot of embedded narrative in this set.” Adds Snyder, “Our philosophical mindset was that you should be able to see yourself in the movie. It’s fantastic, but it looks like a place that’s vaguely familiar.”
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Color Correction
Snyder and McDowell decided to stick with the color pattern Gibbons developed for Watchmen”a radical departure from most superhero books. “Primary colors had always been used to represent heroes,” McDowell says. “Gibbons and Moore used tertiary colors [lots of browns and purples], which said We’re not in the comic-book universe anymore. These aren’t real superheroes, they’re vigilantes putting on costumes.” The primary-color exceptions? “Dr. Manhattan [the one true superhero in the group], smiley-face badges, and blood.” (And, apparently, taxis.)
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Easter Egg Hunt
“Zack wanted some iconic set pieces from the graphic novel in the film, and this street corner was a fundamental location,” McDowell says of the movie’s newsstand, familiar to fans of the comic even if its significance is lessened onscreen. “We wanted to replicate the density of Easter eggs in the graphic novel. Zack felt strongly about that. It became like a second-movie quantity of work to build all the Easter eggs” – like the Rumrunner bar, behind the newsstand, and the Pale Horse concert poster above the subway entrance.
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Super Hero Central
In addition to borrowing from Taxi Driver (McCann’s Bar, right, was lifted directly from that film), Snyder drew inspiration from his own memories of eighties New York. “I grew up in Connecticut and graduated high school in 1985,” he says. “I spent a lot of time messing around in the city. You couldn’t set Watchmen anywhere besides New York. It’s all about the iconography of superheroes, and New York is the environment of choice for superheroes, whether Gotham or Metropolis or real New York.”.
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