[lounge music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - The best response you can have to a payoff in a thriller is someone goes, "Oh, right, I forgot, of course..." [multiple voices chattering] [Narrator] On Story offers a look inside the creative process from today's leading writers, creators, and filmmakers.

All of our content is recorded live at Austin Film Festival and at our year-round events.

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[waves] [kids screaming] [wind] [witch cackling] [sirens wail] [gunshots] [dripping] [suspenseful music] [telegraph beeping, typing] [piano gliss] From Austin Film Festival, this is On Story.

A look inside the creative process from today's leading writers, creators, and filmmakers.

This week's On Story, "Watchmen" creator Damon Lindelof.

- One of the things that we had to deal with when you're talking about "Watchmen" is it's fiction, but it's a different kind of fiction than the superhero comic book storytelling that we're used to.

It's supposed to be more grounded.

It's supposed to be more realistic.

And yet at the same time, it's happening in an alternate history.

[paper crumples] [typing] [typewriter ding] [Narrator] In this episode, award-winning writer and producer, Damon Lindelof discusses the process of creating the ambitious and challenging television series, "Watchmen."

Lindelof talks about genre conventions, adapting a graphic novel and breaking apart and assembling the story.

[typewriter ding] - You and Cord did an extraordinary piece on this season of "Watchmen," This Extraordinary Being, which I found to just be a mind-blowing piece of not just TV, but media in general, and storytelling.

Can you just talk to us a little bit about maybe working on that episode and crafting that, but also how you developed the overall flow and structure of the episodes throughout the course of that "Watchmen" series?

- In the interstitial space between "The Leftovers" and "Watchmen," I just started identifying individuals who I was a huge fan of and wanted to work with.

So I saw an episode of "Master of None" that was called, I Love New York.

It sort of broke the form of television.

I was like, who wrote that?

And it turned out to be this guy, Cord Jefferson, who is now working on "The Good Place" with a colleague and friend of mine, Mike Schur.

And then Mike introduced Cord and I, and he and I started talking, and just I was a huge fan of his writing.

And then when "Watchmen" came along, I was like, "I've got to get Cord to be a part of this."

The first thing that we talked a lot about was, "What is our Watchmen's relationship to the source material?"

- We called it the Old Testament because we held it in this incredible, almost borderline religious esteem.

But at the same time, understanding that the writer of that material, Alan Moore, the genius Alan Moore didn't want us to adapt it.

Nothing personal, he doesn't want anyone to adapt it.

But just the very idea of adapting it was hubris.

It's another religious term.

And so This Extraordinary Being, the sixth episode of the season, was really going to be the sort of apex of all these ideas, where we were drawing real connections back to the original Watchmen.

Because of this idea that the first costume superhero, the first vigilante, the first masked adventurer was this guy, Hooded Justice.

And there was a door left open in the Old Testament because Hooded Justice's identity was never revealed.

We sort of felt like, "Well, if we're going to do ret-con, retroactive continuity, if we're not going to change anything from the Old Testament, and we're going to treat it all as canon, this is the one space, the one crack in the door that we can try to squeeze through."

And so if we're going to unmask Hooded Justice, we have to be bold with it.

And we also have to answer a question that's really at the core of this, which is, "Why would Hooded Justice hide his identity from his own teammates?"

I've talked ad nauseum about Ta-Nehisi Coates, but I have to mention again here because his writing was such a primary inspiration for this season of "Watchmen," particularly between The World and Me and his article, The Case for Reparations in the Atlantic, where I first learned about the Tulsa massacre.

But this idea of erasure was really flying through my mind.

And I was like, "Oh, Hooded Justice was sort of erased from history.

He's the alpha.

He's the first person to put on a mask and fight crime."

And it was something I... Obviously, all conversations in the writer's room are built on what everyone is contributing, but I'm pretty sure it was Cord who essentially said, "It didn't make any sense for white people to be vigilantes in the 1930s, because you're a vigilante because the law is not working for you."

And so it made a lot more sense, this idea that I was bringing into the writers room that Hooded Justice, was a Black man who was hiding his identity, because he knew that if people knew that he was a Black man, they'd stop treating him as a hero and start treating him as a villain.

And so that idea was really the cornerstone of all of the work that we did.

And This Extraordinary Being was the episode where we revealed Hooded Justice's identity.

We wanted to make sure that it didn't feel like a twist.

We wanted the audience to understand that this was the foundational idea of the entire season.

And more importantly, he didn't choose to be a vigilante to fight crime.

That's the story that we always hear, but vigilantism was almost foisted upon him.

He was a victim and he didn't want to see himself as a victim and so Hooded Justice became the way that he turned his own pain into power.

And so all of those conversations became this emotional bedrock of the season.

But that episode is really where we shared all of that thinking with the audience.

I think up until episode six, there was a fair amount of audience that was like, "I don't know where they're going with this, but if they're going to start the season with the Tulsa massacre, it better not be exploitative.

It all has to connect."

And so episode six is the first part where we're coming down the other side of the mountain, and we're starting to stop asking questions, but we're starting to answer them.

- You mentioned the idea of this is coming down the other side of the mountain.

We started that trip up the mountain, obviously, with the first episode and starting with that initial scene where you see that massacre taking place.

What was it like crafting that piece of it?

How to get out of the gates and in that sort of way?

- I definitely knew that I wanted the show to be set in Tulsa and that reparations in a Robert Redford administration stemming from the massacre of 21 were sort of baked into the central idea, but we didn't yet know how we were going to show the massacre, or whether or not the massacre was something that should be shown versus something that would be historically referred to.

One of the things that we had to deal with when you're talking about "Watchmen" is it's fiction.

It's supposed to be more grounded.

It's supposed to be more realistic.

And yet at the same time, it's happening in an alternate history.

And so this idea of actively saying to the audience, "We're in a world where there can be giant extraterrestrial squids used as hoaxes against the American public, but at the same time Vietnam happened."

Where Vietnam is not something that's going to be discussed in a Batman story or a Superman story, or a Marvel story.

Marvel has New York City instead of Metropolis or Gotham City, but they also have Wakanda, which is not a real country.

And so the idea of saying to the audience, "We want you to be able to make the distinction between what's real and what's not real."

We started applying that same conversation to history.

We began to realize that if I didn't know about Tulsa 21 until I read Ta-Nehisi Coates's article, that probably most white people didn't know about it, who fancy ourselves illuminated, even with a college education.

And therefore there would be many people who would watch "Watchmen."

And if we presented Tulsa 21 to them, they might think that it was pretend that it was made up, or that we were just using it the way that, you know, a Marvel movie uses an opening sequence as ahistorical, they're not talking about 9/11.

And so we started talking about when this had been deployed and effective.

One of the places was in Bryan Singer's X-Men movie, the first one where they show us Magneto's origin story in the context of the Holocaust.

Which everyone knows that the Holocaust is a thing that actually happened.

And so we went into it going, "We have to make it clear to the audience somehow that Tulsa 21 is a thing that really happened."

And pivoting off of that conversation, it felt like the most effective way to do that was to open the series with it, to make it an origin story for our main character, the granddaughter of the little boy who we are introducing in that main sequence.

[film narrator] The Tulsa massacre resulted in profound loss of life, not to mention the property and treasure pillage from its victims.

For far too long, this horrific chapter in our nation's history went untold and unacknowledged.

On behalf of the entire United States government President Redford offers his sincerest condolences for the trauma you or your family may have suffered.

[typewriter ding] - It's interesting, you referenced history and fiction and how it clashes specifically here with regards to your rendition of "Watchmen."

I'm curious with regards to how the team overall saw that challenge, or took that challenge on.

Not only from the storytelling perspective, but particularly with regards to characters.

Obviously Adrian Veidt, AKA Blonde Man, as he's credited sometimes in the episodes, is internally holding onto one thing and one idea of himself, and then obviously dealing with the overall concept of him that exists within the real world.

- There's two paths we took.

Path one was with the characters that were, that predated us, so Adrian Veidt, as you mentioned.

Laurie Juspeczyk we reinvented as Laurie Blake.

Silk Spectre the daughter of The Comedian.

These were characters... and Dr. Manhattan, of course.

These are characters that we inherited.

And then there were characters that we created.

And so job one was making sure that all these characters, both the new and the old, felt like they occupied the same tonal landscape.

And in doing so, it required a degree of reverse engineering.

Part of our process was going through the Old Testament, and reading a chapter at a time, an issue at a time, and discussing it so that we could start to get it into our bloodstream of what made something "Watchmen."

And at the same time, understanding that the audience, even the most devout fans of "Watchmen," they don't want to hear the same songs over and over again.

So we had to have our own specific identity, and our own themes and ideas.

And that's where I think that the idea that there's 30 years that separate the original "Watchmen" and our "Watchmen."

And so if we're doing an alternate version of 2019 versus an alternate version of, of 1985 or 86, the question becomes culturally, what's happening in the moment now?

What do we want to be talking about?

And race was the pervasive idea.

This is something that the original, the Old Testament didn't really deal with at all.

And so when we were talking about our new characters, and our old characters bringing in this new element of, "Okay, how is this character going to drop into Tulsa at the time that racial tensions are running incredibly high?"

Because we're telling the story about the fundamental idea that there's systemic white supremacy in law enforcement, not just in the police, but also in the FBI and whatever's above the FBI.

And so when you start to add the idea of hiding your face, covering your identity, this understanding that the Ku Klux Klan viewed themselves as vigilantes, you get to get into the core idea that there's not that much separating vigilantism and superheroism as a cultural idea and race.

And basically re-examining everything that we were doing through that lens.

And then trying to define our characters as, "What makes somebody want to hide their face?

What makes somebody want to conceal their identity or behave in an anonymous way?"

They always say that they're doing it for the right reasons, to protect their loved ones.

But there's also this weird, "I can get away with whatever I want to get away with because no one knows who I am."

And a certain degree of intense narcissism.

In some cases, when you're talking about Adrian Veidt, and everything that you write is through the lens of narcissism through the, "I changed the world, or I saved the world, but it's eating me inside that I can't tell anybody that I did it, that I just want people to thank me and love me all the time."

Let's put Adrian Veidt in a situation where he's just adored, and that will be his own personal hell in the Rod Serling kind of Twilight Zone modality.

But when you're talking about someone like Angela Abar, she dresses up like Sister Night, we sourced why she chose that guise.

It all connected back to a degree from when she was a child that a video box where she saw someone who looked like her, that was powerful.

But more importantly, there's this idea of genetic trauma that works into her character, where the pain that was inflicted upon her grandfather, pain that we see happen at the very beginning of the series that she is literally carrying in her DNA.

There was a know thyself part of our storytelling, where the characters are struggling to understand why they do the things that they do.

And we know that Angela was going to go on a journey of self discovery with her paternal grandfather functioning as sort of a guide.

[phone recording] Hello, Will, your DNA sample submitted to: The Greenwood Center for Cultural Heritage has been processed.

Congratulations, you are eligible to be a beneficiary of the victims of racial violence act.

You should also know that we have identified two ancestors and two descendants in your family tree.

If you know their names, we can confirm their relationship to you.

If you'd like to try, please say their names now.

- Angela Abar.

- Will, Angela Abar is your granddaughter.

[dramatic music] - Your parents.

Did they tell you anything about me?

- And so you get to tell a story about America and you get to tell a story about a family, all in the same fell swoop.

That was the ambition.

[typewriter ding] - Obviously Watchmen has a particular god in it, if you would.

And he doesn't show up until really, in actuality, the second to last episode which I thought was such an interesting and dynamic creative choice, because it seemed like it allowed you all a lot more leeway and afforded you the chance to develop those characters a bit more.

So can you just speak to what went into making that decision for you and perhaps within the writers room.

- I could speak for an hour about Dr. Manhattan and all the iterating that we did in the writer's room, in terms of figuring out a range of he'll be in the pilot and be sort of a prevalent force throughout the show.

To he shouldn't be in the show at all.

Let's just park his [bleep] on Mars.

And that guy it's, it's far too complicated to have a god as a character on his show who experiences all time at once, because he's already seen the show.

So he's like, "Oh, I've already seen the finale.

What am I doing here in the pilot?"

So that was a highly problematic character, but somehow Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons were able to deploy a character like that in their original "Watchmen."

He was a main character and his own internal struggle to be dealing with everything that he knew, and the fact that he was slowly separating from his mortality, what it was to be human, that's the struggle that that character is having.

And at the same time, Dr. Manhattan is completely inapt.

He has no in the... and by design.

In the original "Watchmen," he doesn't do anything.

He's on Mars for the back half of the climax, he arrives back on Earth after Veidt has deployed his plan and killed millions of New Yorkers.

And then he goes to confront Veidt about it.

Veidt tries to kill him and fails.

And then he murders Rorschach, who is probably the one person who could expose the entire plot.

- You know, you have a god in your story, and really all he does is murder the hero.

That's cool storytelling.

And so for us, we knew that to avoid having Dr. Manhattan in "Watchmen" would have been a huge mistake because we, as fans, wanted to know what he had been up to for the previous 30 years.

But we also understood that we had a "Jaws" problem.

And by that, I mean you can't show the shark until the end of "Jaws," you can only show the fin.

Because the shark gets a lot less scary and less impactful if you're seeing too much of it early on.

And so the pitch that we eventually fell in love with was, "Oh, Dr. Manhattan is actually going to be in the show the whole time.

You just don't know it.

He's hiding in plain sight."

[soft music] - Hmmm.

You might be pretty good looking if you didn't cover yourself in blue makeup, - It's not makeup.

- You're naturally blue.

- That's right.

- I thought that Dr. Manhattan glows.

- I could, if I wanted to, but it would attract too much attention.

- Come on.

Nobody in here is going to notice.

Just glow a little bit.

- I'd rather you remain unsure before you agree to have dinner with me tomorrow night.

- My blue friend, you think you may know all about me, but you have made a critical error in your approach.

I hate Dr. Manhattan.

- And then on the heels of that, the idea that Dr. Manhattan himself didn't know that he was Dr. Manhattan, that way we could solve for the fact that he is omniscient.

What does Dr. Manhattan look like if he is mortal?

And then we started talking a lot about Superman 2, which is a movie where for some reason, Superman feels like it's a good idea to give up his super powers so that he can be with Lois.

And I understand that that's the reason, right?

Which is if you want to be in a relationship with someone, you probably can't have super powers because you'll constantly be flying around the world, saving people's lives and stopping natural disasters from happening and all that.

So Superman's just like, "I'm just going to turn it off."

And so that actually became the inspiration for Dr. Manhattan falls in love with Angela.

And after a certain period of time, they both realize that it's not really a good thing to be in a relationship with someone who knows everything that's going to happen.

And so they mutually decide that the best way moving forward is for him to erase his memory and for them to start over, and for her to choose his form.

- How do you make things feel tonally consistent when you're mashing up so many genre conventions?

- There's nothing more exciting than watching a story that is tonally all over the place.

Sometimes though it then suddenly becomes utterly cohesive and sticks the landing.

And other times you can never get your arms around it, but you have to sort of foray through that very dangerous space of chaos.

And so all I'll say, as it related to "Watchmen," was Nicole Kassell articulated this much better than I could, but she said when she first read the pilot, and then subsequent to the pilot, went and read "Watchmen" for the very first time.

So her in to "Watchmen" was the new material, was Tulsa 21.

And then she went back and read the original 12 issues.

She described "Watchmen" like Bohemian Rhapsody.

She's like, "It's a Queen song that doesn't feel like it should work."

It's, it's mashing up all sorts of different musical genres.

And it's silly.

Bohemian Rhapsody is silly.

It's ridiculous.

But then you get to the end of it and it's beautiful and it's emotional.

And it shouldn't work, but it does.

And that's how she described Watchmen, not just the pilot, but the entire thing.

Because if you talk about those original 12 issues and you say, this is what the story is, by the time you have to explain what Adrian Veidt's plan-- You're like, "It's a murder mystery.

The Comedian gets murdered and Rorschach is trying to solve the murder."

And so, in a traditional murder mystery, it's like a who done it?

"So who did it?"

"Oh, well, Adrian Veidt did it."

"Okay.

And what was his motive?"

"Well, his motive was that there was a nuclear standoff between the United States and Russia, and the entire world was about to be destroyed unless Adrian Veidt could convince the world that there was an extra dimensional invasion by a giant squid.

And that would therefore get America and Russia to stand down, and hopefully work together towards achieving some level of lasting peace because he's created a fictitious enemy.

And that's why he killed The Comedian."

People's eyes literally cross.

That is not something that should traditionally work in a who done it.

And yet, somehow, Alan Moore pulled it off.

And so when the bar is that high for wacky town, anything goes.

And I'll tell you, there were a lot of ideas, insane ideas, that we did in our season of "Watchmen."

I mean, but there were even more insane ideas that we wanted to do and realized that we shouldn't do, because they were somehow out of bounds.

They were too far, or not enough.

And you can't really tell the difference until you litigate the pitch.

That's my best answer.

There's a lot of luck involved.

[typing] [typewriter ding] - You've been watching Watchmen: A Conversation with Damon Lindelof on On Story.

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