MONDO EXTRAS

Zach: I think it's the easiest thing in the world to duplicate, but I'm not so sure it was actually cut from the film. I think when the footage we saw begins, they were already in the process of discussing the rescue. I think he'd already broached the subject with her and she'd already thought about it, because she was having a rational discussion about it. So I think there's more footage that we didn't see.

Dan: Well, I hope you're right. I'd love somehow for that great pause to be reflected in the movie. One of my other favorite moments in the entire comic is the line, "What did you expect? The Comedian is dead" from the first issue. Even if they use all of the dialogue exactly as it was originally written in the movie, I still don't feel it's going to have the same kind of impact as the comic book. He says that line and then that's the end of the chapter. You, the reader, marinate on that. And with movies, by their nature, there's no time for marinating; the movie has to keep going. So that's another example of how the movie is its own beast; it doesn't have the same beats and rhythms as the comic book.

Zach: Absolutely. To anybody who expresses doubt about this, I would say: no movie will ever be as good as the comic book, especially this comic book. A movie can never capture the nature of a comic book -- the subtlety , the timing, the monthly installments. You're never going to get that unless you're doing some sort of miniseries on HBO. And that "Comedian is dead" line is definitely a great line that they could include in the movie. If the next scene starts in a slow way, the line can linger there for a moment before you get launched into another conversation about something. I think it's a great line for closing a scene, where the two of them are just hanging out on the rooftop where they're maybe starting to fall in love.

Dan: It suddenly occurs to me that something like Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill movies have sort of a comic-book structure, with chapters in the movie and breaks between the chapters. And I could see having those great moments at the end of each chapter, but I have the feeling that Watchmen is not a chaptered movie -- it just starts and it goes.... So the last footage that Zack showed us, which I was a little underwhelmed by, was a montage of random shots. Some of them was stuff he'd shown at San Diego, but not everything he showed there was in this montage, which surprised me. For example, that great scene with Rorschach discovering that Edward Blake is the Comedian and looking through his stuff was missing. Was there anything in that montage that particularly stood out for you?