Interview: Watchmen: Chapter 1 Director Brandon Vietti on Adapting Iconic DC Graphic Novel

SuperHeroHype Senior News Movie Editor Brandon Schreur spoke to Watchmen: Chapter 1 director Brandon Vietti about the new animated film . Vietti discussed adapting Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s iconic graphic novel, what fans can expect from Watchmen: Chapter 2 , and more.

Watchmen: Chapter 1 is now available to purchase digitally on Amazon Prime Video, AppleTV, Google Play, Fandango at Home, and more. It will also be available to purchase on 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray on August 27, 2024.

“In an alternate world history set in 1985, the murder of a government-sponsored superhero draws his outlawed colleagues out of retirement and into a mystery that threatens to upend their personal lives and the world itself,” the synopsis for Watchmen: Chapter 1 reads.

Brandon Schreur: I wanted to say congratulations on Watchmen. I got a chance to watch it this past weekend, and I thought it was great; I loved it and had such a great time with it. So congratulations, first and foremost.

Brandon Vietti: Thank you very much!

So, question for you. You’ve worked on a number of DC animated projects now from Batman: Death in the Family to all the work you’ve done on Young Justice. Now, you’re developing what’s arguably one of the biggest, most influential, and important comics of all time. How does it feel getting to work on a project like that? Is it daunting or were you immediately in?

I mean, both. It’s an honor to sort of retrace the footsteps of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. [John] Higgins colors, I mean. There’s so much to love and appreciate about that book. To have the opportunity to dive into all those textures and layers, I mean it was like going back to school. I keep saying this. I think we all had to raise our art game, whether it’s filmmaking, design, lighting, or color. It really forced us to step up to rise to the level of Watchmen and, hopefully, make a great adaptation that is unique to the animation medium.

Sure. One of the things I loved about this movie, too, is that it felt really faithful. You adapted a lot of parts of the Watchmen story that don’t always get in there, like the Tales of the Black Freighter part. Was that your goal when you were making the movie? Did you always want to make a super faithful adaptation or were there conversations about adding stuff in there?

No, no adding. My bosses at Warner Bros. Animation, Sam Register and Peter Girardi, brought the project to me. From day one, the idea was to make the most faithful adaptation possible and, on top of that, try to really make the experience feel like a comic book experience. Again, we’re trying to embrace the unique voice of animation and the strengths of animation in adapting that material. At the same time, for fans of the book, make it feel like you’re in the book. Like, actually in the book.

It’s one thing to be outside and read the book from a traditional reading-a-book point of view, but it’s another to immerse you into that world, which is what we were able to do with 3D animation and being able to take the amazing design work of Dave Gibbons and all his amazing line work and detail and graph that onto a 3D space. Then bring a camera into that space, make choices about the focal length of the lens, choices about lighting and atmosphere, [all to] bring to life the book in a way that’s never been done before.

Yeah. I think you can really see that, too. One of my favorite parts of the movie was the Doctor Manhattan TV interview, the way you cut it with the action scene and everything. I thought that was so cool. Like you said, it’s like a comic come to life, but from a whole different angle. You can experience it, or take it in, in a different way. I thought that was awesome.

Great. I’m glad.

So now you’ve adapted Watchmen. You’ve got the second part coming out later this year. Is that going to be a more straightforward adaptation like the first part, or are there any surprises coming for fans?

There are small surprises. Inevitably, when you adapt anything, certain choices have to be made. Obviously, we had to make some trims because our runtime wouldn’t accommodate the entire twelve issues of the story. That sucked for us. Like, we hated cutting. But, in some ways, it was also liberating because then we had to solve problems to sew up the gaps from which we had to pull things. Sometimes that created a new scene that wasn’t in the original book, something that worked better for the pacing of a movie format versus a book format. Through the process of adaptation, there are some little twists and turns, some new things that were not in the book by necessity. Anything added was always, hopefully, following the spirit of the book and will feel like something that could have happened. This will hopefully help bring sort of something new with what we’re bringing to the table. Whether you’re an old fan or a new fan, you’re going to find something new in our adaptation.