Zack Snyder

Zack Snyder
Zachary Edward "Zack" Snyderis an American filmmaker, best known for his action and science fiction films. Snyder made his feature film debut with the 2004 remake of the horror film Dawn of the Dead, which earned a good box office return and positive reviews from critics. He has gone on to be known for his comic book and superhero films, including 300and Watchmen, as well as the Superman film that started the DC Extended Universe, Man of Steel, and its...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth1 March 1966
CityGreen Bay, WI
CountryUnited States of America
Twenty years ago my parents wouldn't know who the X-Men were, and now everybody knows that stuff. It means that deconstruction of the superhero is something you can do. All those movies have led to a point where we can finally have 'Watchmen' with a Superman character who doesn't want to save the world and a Batman who has trouble in bed.
Yeah, I mean, I think I'm obsessed with tone in the movies. Tone has always been the main thing that I go after with a movie.
don't mean to sound weird but I get so immersed in the source material when I'm working on a movie that I kind of lose the line between what I thought of and what was in the book.
You can't teach anyone. You can't tell anyone. That's the thing you have to sit down and experience in order for it to mean anything. You can't intellectualize it. It's like why movies are cool. It's a combination of pictures and design and acting and music can create an experience that is outside of the experience that you can actually have in reality, which gets to my motion picture philosophy. People are like, 'aren't you trying to make the movies as real as you can?'
I mean, like, I can go in a room and say, look, 'Watchmen' should be at least 15 minutes longer than 'Batman.' I mean, that's, like, any geek will tell you that.
I mean, it's weird because people lately have been coming up to me and going, 'Oh, my God. '300' is huge.' I'm like, 'Really? It's not done yet!
We can't just go, like, oh that'd be cool then not do it. So it's one of those weird things. You gain all these things on your journey. You get smarter. It's interesting how you are who you are in high school in a lot of ways. When I look at my friends, I feel no different about them than I did when I was in high school. I mean that in a great way. They've taken on a micro scale what they were doing and making it bigger.
We didn't shoot in 3-D. They've talked about doing a conversion and there's been a lot of talk about us doing 'Sucker Punch' in 3-D, but I'm still waiting to see.
'Watchmen' is like the music you feel is written just for you. 'That's my song, no one else gets that but me.' That's why the fan base is so rabid, because they feel personal about it.
We tried to approach this as though there's never been a Superman movie before, but at the same time respecting the canon and mythology. There are the pillars that you have to respect, and I'm not about to break them. But it is fun for me to bend them and mess with them.
We've tried to make a Superman movie where he does stuff and you go, 'Yeah, if I was Superman, that's what I'd do.' Even though he's an alien, he's more relatable, more human.
We do like digital projection. We like shooting on film, finishing digitally, and projection digitally. That's what I like best. It's still a movie. It's not someone's camcorder and it got projected. That's mean, I know.
To go back, the mistake that Universal Studios made with 'Dawn of the Dead' was that they didn't have enough money or cared enough to make a soundtrack.
The cool thing about Watchmen is it has this really complicated question that it asks, which is: who polices the police or who governs the government? Who does God pray to? Those are pretty deep questions but also pretty fun questions. Kind of exciting. It tries to subvert the superhero genre by giving you these big questions, moral questions. Why do you think you're on a fun ride? Suddenly you're like how am I supposed to feel about that?