Last week, producer Joel Silver made some surprising comments about the 2009 adaptation Watchmen, stating that director Zack Snyder was too much of a "slave" to the original graphic novel by Alan Moore, while revealing that he preferred Terry Gilliam's original take on the project.

Today, Zack Snyder himself responded, claiming that Terry Gilliam's ending was "completely insane."

"It's funny, because the biggest knock against the movie is that we finally changed the ending, right? Right, and if you read the Gilliam ending, it's completely insane."

In the original graphic novel, an alien squid attack is the event that brings all the warring nations of Earth together, but in the movie adaptation, Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup) was perceived as this world-altering threat. In Terry Gilliam's ending, Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) convinced Dr. Manhattan to go back in time and prevent his own creation, which caused several different changes to the story.

Producer Deborah Snyder added that she believes the fans would not have responded well to Terry Gilliam's ending.

"The fans would have been thinking that they were smoking crack."

Zack Snyder elaborated that Watchmen is his favorite movie, and that he made it to save the beloved graphic novel from "the Terry Gilliam's of the world."

"Yeah, the fans would have stormed the castle on that one. So, honestly, I made Watchmen for myself. It's probably my favorite movie that I've made. And I love the graphic novel and I really love everything about the movie. I love the style. I just love the movie and it was a labor of love. And I made it because I knew that the studio would have made the movie anyway and they would have made it crazy. So, finally I made it to save it from the Terry Gilliam's of this world. It's just using elements that are in the comic book already, that's the only thing I did. I would not have grabbed something from out of the air and said, 'Oh, here's a cool ending" just because it's cool.'"

Deborah Snyder added that it's impossible to please all of the original graphic novel's fans with a movie adaptation.

"But it's interesting because, you're right, it's damned if you do, damned if you don't. You have people who are mad that the ending was changed and you have other people saying, 'Oh, it was a slave to the graphic novel.' You can't please everybody."

Zack Snyder elaborated that the immense fan base built in for an adaptation like Watchmen is one of the biggest problems of the comic book genre.

"That's the problem with comic book movies and genre. And I believe that we've evolved -- I believe that the audiences have evolved. I feel like Watchmen came out at sort of the height of the snarky Internet fanboy -- like, when he had his biggest strength. And I think if that movie came out now -- and this is just my opinion -- because now that we've had Avengers and comic book culture is well established, I think people would realize that the movie is a satire. You know, the whole movie is a satire. It's a genre-busting movie. The graphic novel was written to analyze the graphic novel -- and comic books and the Cold War and politics and the place that comic books play in the mythology of pop culture. I guess that's what I'm getting at with the end of Marvel's The Avengers -- in the end, the most important thing with the end was that it tells the story of the graphic novel. The morality tale of the graphic novel is still told exactly as it was told in the graphic novel -- I used slightly different devices. The Gilliam version, if you look at it, it has nothing to do with the idea that is the end of the graphic novel. And that's the thing that I would go, 'Well, then don't do it.' It doesn't make any sense."

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