Watchmen director Zack Snyder first storyboarded the entire film, as is his method, figuring out how to turn an unfilmable book into a film. All images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures. ™ & © DC Comics.

Zack Snyder always knew that making Watchmen was going to be a difficult journey: part fanboy exercise, part artistic indulgence. Yet strict fidelity to the landmark graphic novel was never the goal.

Production Designer Alex McDowell will grant that much. "For Zack, it was really important to hit the 30 images that the fans carry with them from the graphic novel. And for himself: to know that those big beats would be respectful. But we made some big changes in the threads between those. One of the huge contributions Zack made to this -- which will really be apparent when you watch the film -- is that there are layers and layers of pop cultural reference on top of the Watchmen reference and on top of the pop cultural references already embedded in [the graphic novel]," he says. "Because we have the hindsight of 20 years and the knowledge that Apocalypse Now is embedded in the consciousness of the audience, if you want to play "The Ride of the Valkyries" over Vietnam, you've added an entire other reference layer that puts you in another space."

McDowell says they were empowered by Snyder to go deeper and deeper into the pop cultural references and to even add their own, including Taxi Driver, Dr. Strangelove and The Man Who Fell to Earth (whose table tennis room was McDowell's personal contribution to Dr. Manhattan's baroque abode but which did not make the theatrical cut).

It was important to the filmmakers to hit certain iconic beats in Watchmen, paying respect to the source material, but also adding their own pop culture references. 

"What we were able to do was extract all of that richness from the graphic novel and really put it in… There are all of these Easter Egg clues and I think it's going to be a way of reading this film that is going to last for years: there are clues that are deep, deep, deep within it. It's going to be a frame-by-frame analysis of it."

To begin with, Snyder conjured an ingenious main title sequence that embeds the Watchmen into an alternative history from 1939-1985, which foreshadows the decline of the superheroes along with the rise of social unrest.

"From the very beginning I wanted to do a cool title sequence for the movie and it was actually the thing that got me started drawing Watchmen because they were trying to figure out how much this movie was going to cost," Snyder explains. "And I said it's really impossible to say until I start drawing the movie and get a sense of what the movie is... So, I said, 'Look, to get a handle on some of the things, maybe I'll draw the title sequence so we can see how much that is.' But I literally went to the beginning of the movie and started drawing. It was funny because I had the music -- I was pretty positive that it was going to be Bob Dylan's 'The Times They Are A-Changin'.' And then it started to take shape for me as we really find out where we are in the world, and that's how that sequence came about, tracing the alternate history. There's a bunch that I shot that we didn't use because it got too long like The Comedian raising the flag on Iwo Jima by himself and Nixon being sworn in."