 | « Back to article | Print this article |
The bearded genius lambasts the movies
This time, we take one of the most outspoken and unfettered of those writers, graphic novel pioneer Alan Moore, and check out a few of his quotes -- taken from various interviews over various years -- about Hollywood's bastardisation of his work.
Moore, the creator of Watchmen, From Hell, The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen and V For Vendetta, among others, is a tremendously relevant voice in an alarmingly pro-Hollywood time.
Here's what the bearded maestro has to say:
"I find film in its modern form to be quite bullying. It spoon-feeds us, which has the effect of watering down our collective cultural imagination. It is as if we are freshly hatched birds looking up with our mouths open waiting for Hollywood to feed us more regurgitated worms. The 'Watchmen' film sounds like more regurgitated worms. I for one am sick of worms. Can't we get something else? Perhaps some takeout? Even Chinese worms would be a nice change."
'I hate the movie industry'
"I hate the movie industry [because] if I make a bad comic, it does not cost a hundred million dollars, which is the budget of an emergent small third world African nation. And this is money that could have gone to alleviating some of the immense suffering in this world but has instead gone to giving bored, apathetic, lazy, indifferent Western teenage boys another way of killing 90 minutes of their interminable and seemingly pointless lives."
'The only reason the comic book industry now exists is to create characters for movies'
"There are three or four companies now that exist for the sole purpose of creating not comics, but storyboards for films. It may be true that the only reason the comic book industry now exists is for this purpose, to create characters for movies, board games and other types of merchandise. Comics are just a sort of pumpkin patch growing franchises that might be profitable for the ailing movie industry."
'Things that we did in Watchmen on paper could be frankly horrible through the medium of cinema'
"There is something about the quality of comics that makes things possible that you couldn't do in any other medium. Things that we did in Watchmen on paper could be frankly horrible or sensationalist or unpleasant if you were to interpret them literally through the medium of cinema. When it's just lines on paper, the reader is in control of the experience -- it's a tableau vivant. And that gives it the necessary distance. It's not the same when you're being dragged through it at 24 frames per second."
'I decided to refuse to accept any of the money for the films'
"Originally I was content to just simply accept the money, that was offered when people had adapted my comic books into films. Eventually I decided to refuse to accept any of the money for the films, and to ask if my name could be taken off of them, so that I no longer had to endure the embarrasment of seeing my work travested in this manner. The first film that they made of my work was From Hell which was an adaptation of my 'Jack the Ripper' narrative, in which they replaced my gruff Dorset police constable with Johhny Depp's Absinthe-swigging dandy."
"The next film to be made from one of my books was the regrettable League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, where the only resemblence it had to my book was a similar title. The most recent film that they have made of mine is apparently this new V For Vendetta movie which was probably the final straw between me and Hollywood. They were written to be impossible to reproduce in terms of cinema, and so why not leave them simply as a comic in the way that they were intended to be. And if you are going to make them into films, please try to make them into better ones, than the ones I have been cursed with thus far."