Media power, Watchmen, films

Excerpt from Sequential versus Cinematic Art, an interview by Chris Gore from Film Threat n. 12, published in 1987.

[...] Gore: In Watchmen you make references to media and its power in today's society.  Do you feel one must become media-literate to survive in the eighties?
Moore: Certainly.  I'd go further than that... I think there's a need for people to understand that the media is reality in the twentieth century. Everything we do or think or feel is in response to our media, so that in effect we have become a function on the media. The vocabulary of attitudes we use when fucking are largely derived from porno. Our moral and social attitudes come from bad films and crappy comic books. If you watch a brutally insensitive T.V. news interview with a woman who's just lost three children in a bus crash, you'll find it difficult to avoid the awful conclusion that the tearful woman's emotional responses are not totally derived from soap operas. The media is the world. I wish more artists understood this, the sheer scale of what they're fucking with. I wish they treated it with more respect... not in the arse-kissing fashion, but in the way the lifeboatmen respect the sea. The media is bigger than the sea, having no shoreline. It can take you to fabulous places or kill you without noticing, and we should at least bear that in mind.

Gore: There are also elements of self-reflexivity, the pirate story within the story seems to be a direct address to the reader- WAKE UP THIS IS A COMIC BOOK!!!  Comments?
Moore: With Watchmen being the most controlled project I'd ever attempted, I wanted to exploit the virtue of comic books I noted earlier... namely, that one can create material that is as (if not more) dense and intricate as a fairly complex novel, while retaining the visual appeal and flow of a film. Since the reader is in control of the "playline time", they are able to take in levels of complexity that other media would have difficulty in matching. The pirate story grew out of this... a device which reflected the main story obliquely while adding a whole new level of depth and interplay to the narrative. In a different setting it could easily have been, say, a T.V. show, so really I wouldn't say it was attempting to be self-referential. If it did constantly remind viewers they were reading a comic, then I made a serious cock-up and I apologise.

[...] Gore: Do you want to write film scripts?
Moore: No. I wrote "FASHION BEAST" for Malcolm McLaren, just to see what it was like, but I personally feel that comics are a much more exciting and vital as a medium. As I said earlier, unless you really want to do it all yourself, like Clive Barker's doing with "HELLRAISER", then the film industry is so incredibly compromised that, to me at least, it seems to have little future.

[...] Gore: Watchmen reads like a good film, many cinematic devices are used: cross-cutting, flashbacks, even devices involving sound.  Do you have an interest in films that goes beyond a mere novice viewer?
Moore: Not really. The relationship between comics and cinema is fairly obvious, and over the years it's been seen as the height of comic storytelling to be "cinematic". This strikes me as a dated attitude that can at best produce films that don't move and are harmed by the comparison. I'm much more interested in exploiting the differences between comics and cinema, in locating those effects that are unique to the medium and thus helping to stake out the artistic territory that belongs to comics alone.

[...] Gore: What do you think of current cinema?
Moore: I don't see very much. Most of what I see doesn't interest me.

Gore: Any favorite films?
Moore: If you mean recently, I enjoyed Repo Man, Brazil, Insignificance, and a couple of others. Jim Jarmusch looks interesting, but I imagine that most of the really interesting stuff passes me by completely. Oh... I'm looking forward to Brian Eno's video accompanying the ambient piece "Thursday Afternoon"... it sounds like a moving painting that shifts very slowly and very subtly. Obviously, this has a completely different function to most cinema, or indeed most music videos, but I'm fascinated by the thinking behind it.  As far as older films go, any list would be fairly random... O Lucky Man, Spider Baby, It's a Wonderful Life, Eraserhead, old Fleischer and Iwerks cartoons, The Phibes movies, Scorpio Rising, 5000 Fingers of Dr. T., King Kong, The Tingler, Dr. Caligari, Dead of Night, The Tenant, Night of the Hunter, Daniel and the Devil, Videodrome.

Gore: What films have influenced your work?
Moore: All of them, including the bad and dull ones. Bad art, really bad useless shit art, is important as a negative influence, and as such is probably more important as an influence than good art, which can only lead to emulation. Bad art shows you what not to do. And that's absolutely vital.

Gore: What films do you make reference to in Watchmen?
Moore: Not many, and they aren't of much importance-
This Island Earth, Things to Come, Day the Earth Stood Still, and an old Outer Limits episode, "Architects of Fear" with Robert Culp. If there's more, I've forgotten them.

[...] Gore: What is your involvement with the Watchmen film, currently in progress?
Moore: They asked me to write it, but I was too busy with comic work and had to say no. Also, since in my limited experience it's practically impossible to ensure creative control over the work unless you have the energy and the inclination to direct the thing yourself, which I don't, then I wasn't very keen to work in the film industry anyway. In comics, I write a script, it goes to the artist, the letterer and so son, but what comes out the other end is what the artist and I wanted to see there. In films this doesn't seem possible. A script will go through numerous rewrites by different people, will be furthered altered by the director or the cast, and what finally appears on the screen will only have accidental similarity to what was originally written. Thus, it doesn't really matter who writes the thing- the end result will be a committee decision, and I don't do art on that basis. Watchmen, if it gets made, may be a wonderful film or a complete fuck-up. The outcome seems fairly random to me, and if it's the latter result, I'd rather it was somebody else who fucked it up and not me. [...]