Terry Gilliam Thought Zack Snyder’s ‘Watchmen’ Worked Well

Terry Gilliam has admitted that he actually liked Zack Snyder’s version of Watchmen, even though the Man Of Steel filmmaker had previously stated that he directed the film “to save it from the Terry Gilliams of this world.”

Gilliam looked to diffuse the situation during a recent Reddit Q&A to promote his latest film, The Zero Theorem. After being asked by the user Modest_Matt what he thought of Snyder’s abrasive comments, Gilliam admitted, “I thought Zack’s film worked well, but it suffered from the very problem that I was happy to avoid by not making the film.”

The main issue that Gilliam alluded to was that there was simply too much source material to squeeze into a 2-and-a-half-hour film. The Monty Python man added on his own attempt to bring the comic to fruition, “I think we wrote an interesting version of it, but I think it needed more time to really work.”

Everyone has been a little tetchy surrounding Watchmen recently. At first, Joel Silver insisted that his version of the graphic novel, which he had planned to make with Terry Gilliam, would have easily usurped Zack Snyder’s film, which forced Snyder himself to then make his own strong comments.

Previously, Silver had insisted Gilliam’s film, which he worked on with Charles McKeown, the co-writer of Brazil, would have been “a MUCH much better movie … Zack [Snyder] came at it the right way but was too much of a slave to the material.” However, in the end, Silver still conceded, “I did like [Snyder’s] movie, very much. Zack did great stuff in it!”

It’s very easy to criticize Snyder’s approach to blockbuster cinema, which is often seen as stylish yet hollow. However he definitely knows how to put bums on seats and while there are issues with his Watchmen film the final product almost certainly possessed more mainstream sensibilities than a possible Gilliam adaptation.

Of course that’s not to say that Gilliam’s effort wouldn’t have been the better film though, and Silver’s admission that their film would have involved a time-and reality twist conclusion that featured Rorschach, Nite Owl and Silk Spectre rewriting the past before learning that in the new future they’re simply comic book characters does sound rather immense. But in the end we just have Snyder’s blockbuster, and I’m satisfied with that.

Did you like Zack Snyder’s Watchmen? Or would you rather have seen Terry Gilliam’s version of the comic instead?