Thursday, March 16, 2006

give me moore

"The Watchmen," of course, rocks and I enjoyed some of the ABC Comics (especially "Top 10"). I haven't read "V For Vendetta," but it sounds like I must (even though I haven't read comics regularly for years). Choice excerpts from an Alan Moore interview (for mtv.com, of all places):

"I mean the police inspector in 'From Hell,' Fred Abberline, was based on real life: He was an unassuming man in middle age who was not a heavy drinker and who, as far as I know, remained faithful to his wife throughout his entire life. Johnny Depp saw fit to play this character as an absinthe-swilling, opium-den-frequenting dandy with a haircut that, in the Metropolitan Police force in 1888, would have gotten him beaten up by the other officers.

"On the other hand when I have got an opium-addicted character, in Allan Quatermain [in "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen"], this was true to the [original] character — he showed a fondness for drugs on several occasions. But Sean Connery didn't want to play him as a drug-addled individual. So the main part of Quatermain's character was thrown out the window on the whim of an actor. I don't have these problems in comics.

(...)

"CGI makes me spit vitriol and bile and venom. When it comes to films, give me someone like [surrealist filmmaker] Jean Cocteau. When he wants to have somebody reaching into a mirror, he spends all of about five dollars on the special effect: He gets a tray, fills it with mercury and then turns the camera on its side. That is poetry. That is magic."

(...)

"I've read the screenplay, so I know exactly what they're doing with [V For Vendetta], and I'm not going to be going to see it."