Alan Moore’s best adaptation also receives corresponding insults from the author: "this embarrasses me"

Alan Moore doesn’t like adaptations of his works. It is quite an incontestable fact that the creator of ‘V for Vendetta’ hates that the audiovisual industry seizes his creations and regurgitates them at will. Also, with franchises like ‘Watchmen’ or his contributions to characters like Batman, he doesn’t have the slightest control. Which pisses him off even more.

Not even the acclaimed miniseries that Damon Lindelof made for HBO based on his ‘Watchmen’, far superior to Zack Snyder’s clone film, has made him bite his tongue. For Moore, it is on the same level as the adaptations of ‘The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’ or ‘From Hell’ (which is saying something), and he has shown it in a few statements for ‘GQ’where he reveals the withering response he gave Lindelof when he wrote to pay his respects.

“I received a sincere letter from the showrunner of the television adaptation of ‘Watchmen’, which I did not know existed at the time”, He says. “But I think the letter started with, ‘Dear Mr. Moore, I’m one of the bastards ripping up Watchmen.’ It wasn’t the best introduction. Then it went into what seemed like a lot of neurotic rambling.” Lindelof’s icing on the cake, according to Moore (admittedly, he wasn’t very fine): “Can you at least tell us how to pronounce ‘Ozymandias’?”

Moore’s response was not to bury the hatchet, precisely: “I responded very abruptly and, probably, hostilely, saying that I understood that Warner Bros. knew that neither they nor any of their employees should contact again with me under no circumstances”. And he had his reasons: “I explained to him that I had repudiated the work in question, and it was partly because the film industry and the comics industry seemed to have created things that had nothing to do with my work, but were associated with she”. The bottom line: “I told him, ‘Look, this embarrasses me. I don’t want anything to do with you or your show. Please don’t bother me again.”

Moore is not even softened by the extraordinary critical reception of the HBO production (for example 11 Emmys, including best series): “When I saw the awards he’d won, I thought, ‘Oh god, can a good chunk of the public think this is what Watchmen was?’ Do you think it was a dark, gritty, dystopian superhero franchise that had something to do with white supremacy? Didn’t they get ‘Watchmen’?”

What is clear is that ‘Watchmen’ has already been left far behind for Moore, who prefers to focus on other things: “It is almost 40 years old and it was a relatively simple work compared to many of my later works. What probability was there that Would they have understood anything since then? This makes me feel less fond of those works. That they mean a little less in my heart.”