How do you adapt a book that has been compared to Citizen Kane into a film? How do you honor a dense literary work while making it digestible to the mainstream public? The answer, I learned at a press event today, is carefully and faithfully. To follow-up his mammoth hit 300 director Zack Snyder decided to direct an adaptation of Watchmen, the seminal graphic novel by writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons.

As he explained it, the script originally modernized the story, bringing it to contemporary times and focusing on terrorism. But Snyder wanted the original book, an alternate history that occurred in the 80s and frequently flashed back to the events of the 50s, 60s, and 70s. He wanted Richard Nixon running America in his fourth term and dealing with a Cold War where the only deterrent against Russia’s nuclear program is a god-like superhero.

Read the full article at Fast Company.