Certainly, because I've been to a few press screenings, I've seen the opening 10 minutes of the movie maybe five or six times, and I'm still seeing things that I didn't see the first few times. But I think that the film does have the same richness as the comic book. Obviously it goes beyond that, because there is motion and there's sound. But certainly the amount of detail and the consistency of the characters aging or the way the action takes place in a given setting does have that ring of absolute believability. I mean I guess in some ways by having such a comprehensively drawn comic book, they had a really good basis to build everything on.

Everything is done exactly like the comic book. I have seen a rough cut of the complete thing, and I've been on sets, and I've seen lots of set photos. Wired: Well, do you think that that plays out on screen in what Zack Snyder is doing? Is there a relationship between the believability of the world or the concreteness of the world and being able to make a movie out of it? Being able to move it to another medium? All those things are really all in service of doing that. You know, comics is all about making it believable and helping people to get completely lost in a fictional world. It's like seeing a magic trick done badly. So, all of a sudden the artist will draw a door where none had existed before. And the opposite of that is the thing that's always annoyed me in comics is where characters will be talking in a room and it will suddenly become apparent that one of them has to walk out through a door. This fits with that.' I think there still is on a subliminal level the fact, the feeling that it does exist somewhere. And although probably some of the stuff I did, like that blocking out of the front of Moloch's townhouse, people wouldn't check it and say, 'You know, that's exactly right.

So, it seemed only right to make it three-dimensionally consistent in space as well.

You know, because this is such a dense book, and it runs backwards and forwards in time, Alan had gone to a lot of trouble to make sure that all the storylines married up and that time-wise everything was consistent.

Dave gibbons watchmen