So did he ever bother going to see the film version [of From Hell]?
“Nah, Melinda (Gebbie) went to see it and said, ‘Not a bad film. She found Johnny Depp’s performance a little bit tepid. She thought if they’d focused more upon Ian Holm it would’ve perhaps been a much better film. Me daughters thought it was okay. Nobody said it was actually a really bad film. Iain Sinclair gave the most succinct summing up of it when he said, ‘It’s not a bad film in it own right, but it does kind of represent this American colonization of the imagination.’ Without having seen it obviously I’m talking through me hat, but that sounds like a likely accurate verdict.
“I was never sure why they actually bothered to buy the rights to ‘From Hell’, because you take away all of the ruminations upon architecture and history and mysticism and all the rest of it, you’re pretty much left with the original story done by Michael Caine, Christopher Plummer, all of these people in various productions.” Still, at least ‘From Hell’ and ‘V For Vendetta’, while seriously flawed, were broadly sympathetic to the author’s vision. The way Moore tells it, it could have been much worse.
“I remember when ‘V For Vendetta’ was optioned,” he says. “The story is set in a near future bleak grim Britain, it’s after a limited nuclear war that happened elsewhere in the world, the weather’s been screwed up as a consequence, there’s been breakdowns of society everywhere, and there’s been a fascist takeover in Great Britain, and you’ve got this very romantic anarchist guy fighting against the forces of fascism.
“Now in the first screenplay that I got for ‘V For Vendetta’, because this anarchist dresses up in a Guy Fawkes costume, of course people in America have no idea who Guy Fawkes is, so they were going to change it to Paul Revere, and it wasn’t going to happen in London, ’cos that’s just gonna confuse Americans who can’t remember that there’s more than one country in the world, so perhaps it’s going to be set in New York. And that political stuff about fascism, that doesn’t really play, so we’ll have an America that’s been taken over by the commies. So you’ve got this true American dressed as Paul Revere fighting against the commie takeover.
“Eventually I think they realized that was a stupid idea. So I got the second draft of the script where I think to justify the special effects budget, they decided that having Britain taken over by fascists was just not exciting enough, and they’d used the fact that I mentioned a limited nuclear war to say, ‘Right, there’s mutants everywhere!’ So instead of it being fascist policemen that are patrolling the benighted streets of this enslaved London of the future, it’s half-goat mutant policemen. You’ve got these people that are policemen down to the waist and have goats’ legs. And as I said at the time, if you wanted to do a film about goat policemen, then why the fuck didn’t you just buy the option to Rupert Bear?!!
“But there’s something about the Hollywood thought process that I think will forever elude me. The reason that things are done or not done never seems to have any connection to any sort of reality that I recognize. That’s why I actively dissuade any contact with Hollywood. (Producer) Don Murphy is a nice bloke who phones me up and asks if I’ve got any more projects that could be turned into films, any laundry lists that I might have forgotten about, but I’ve never had any interest in actually writing for Hollywood. I had a brief fling when Malcolm McClaren asked me to a screenplay for one of these film properties that he’d got, and I did that to see if I could write a screenplay and also to hang out with Malcolm McClaren, who’s a great laugh, but that was it really.
“Of course they shot ‘League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen’ with Sean Connery, and to make it more acceptable to American audiences, which is of course a prime consideration, they had Tom Sawyer as one of the cast, so I imagine there was a completely riveting picket fence painting scene shoehorned into the story at some point.”
There wasn’t, but that didn’t stop Connery from clocking the director – or the film from being an absolute dog. Of course, the Holy Grail of un-filmed Moore stories is ‘Watchmen’, recently included in Time magazine’s list of the 100 greatest novels since 1923, a meta-masterpiece so epic in scale and fiendishly complex in construction, filmmaker Terry Gilliam famously described it as “the ‘War And Peace’ of comic books”. Is it true Moore once convinced Gilliam that Watchmen couldn’t be filmed?
“Well, I don’t know if I convinced him. I mean, we went to dinner and he asked me how I would go about making ‘Watchmen’ into a film, and I told him if anybody had bothered asking me earlier, I would have said, ‘I wouldn’t.’ Because I’d written ‘Watchmen’ to exploit aspects of comic book storytelling that couldn’t be duplicated by any other medium, to try and show off what comics are capable of. Which I think we kind of succeeded in doing. That was the last time I actually saw Terry – Terry as I call him, did you notice I just slipped that in there? Tel! – and I heard later that he seemed to have come to similar conclusions, that he wasn’t sure you could actually make a film of ‘Watchmen’ without taking out all the things that made the book work in the first place.
“But on the other hand, I do hear that at the end of every second or third Terry Gilliam interview he’ll sometimes have these little wistful moments where he’ll say that maybe his next film will be ‘Watchmen’, because he’s always felt sorry that he didn’t add that to his list of accomplishments.
“But I’m a great believer in the theory that the more work the audience has to actually do, the more they enjoy it ’cos the more they’ve invested. Cinema tends to be an immersive experience that just kind of rolls over the audience like a wave and they sit there and take it. That’s not to say that there can’t be good cinema, but for me there’s not much to beat a good book where you’re having to do all the work yourself. That’s my idea of interactive entertainment.”
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