Billy Crudup reckons that the biggest hurdle he had to overcome during the filming of Watchmen was getting over the feeling that he looked ridiculous.
To create Dr Manhattan, the only person in Watchmen with superhuman powers, the 40 year-old star spent most of the time on the film set dressed in a pair of pyjamas.
Not the sort you’d wear to bed, but a hi-tech outfit that allowed the movie’s digital wizards to create the motion-capture process that was needed to bring Dr Manhattan to the screen.
This computerised trickery was essential because Billy’s character is the most bizarre in the graphic novel on which the movie is based.
After a laboratory accident scientist Jon Osterman’s atoms were smashed, but miraculously he reconstructed himself and emerged as Dr. Manhattan, a naked, blue-skinned superhuman who can do anything.
So state of the art motion capture was employed for Billy’s portrayal of Dr Manhattan. It was a procedure that impressed the actor who was getting his first taste of this special effects marvel.
“I did very little but put on a pair of intricate pyjamas and stand on boxes,” says the actor, whose roster of movies includes Sleepers, Almost Famous, Mission Impossible III and The Good Shepherd.
“For the practical process they took a lot of photographs and intricate studies of my physique and my face, and a scan of my face. So I had a mask that I’d put on every morning.
“They had about 140 holes drilled in the mask and they would tediously go about painting each of those holes. So at the end of it there was this map on my face, which the computer would recognise, and could calibrate to each of my facial muscles.
“And so basically I was manipulating the puppet that they had generated in the computer. Also the suit that I wore was elaborately fitted with lights, so essentially I was a lighting instrument for the other actors.”
Painstaking and time-consuming though it undoubtedly was, Billy insists that he became intrigued by the whole motion-capture procedure. “I have kind of an appetite for how things work, I am really interested in the technical aspect of it,” he says.
“So to watch these guys, who were so proficient and adept at their job, was a really exciting experience for me. They worked so diligently and capably in helping me create a performance for Dr Manhattan.
“Some of the tedious aspects were the fact that it was new technology, particularly with respect to the LED suit, so it took quite a bit of time to make adjustments to make this light suit work without shortening out and shocking me or over exposing to the camera. So there was a lot of tweaking and standing there.”
It’s clear as he pokes fun at his appearance in the motion-capture suit that Billy Crudup doesn’t take himself too seriously. When he’s asked if he ever felt foolish in the famous film pyjamas, he just laughs. “I feel stupid in general, so it did not take me that far down.
“Sometimes in a movie they dress you up to look really cool and they put you in circumstances so you seem really cool and you say really cool things and try to say it in a really cool way. But [in Watchmen] there was just no mistaking the fact that I was a 40-year-old dude trying to make a living dressing up. It was pretty obvious when you are sitting there in pyjamas. So after getting over the blow to my ego for the first week or so, I really appreciated that aspect of it.”
Billy also responds in a light-hearted manner when he’s asked if he found acting behind a mask an uncomfortable or disorienting experience. “It was mostly uncomfortable for my ego, because you finally get to play the super buff master of all matter, and you’re just standing around in saggy pyjamas and standing on boxes looking ridiculous.”
He adds that fellow cast members in Watchmen – Patrick Wilson, Matthew Goode, Jackie Earle Haley and Jeffrey Dean Morgan – were not averse to making fun of him when he was dressed in the pyjamas.
“The other actors were pretty relentless in finding ways to humiliate me, and that was mostly just out of jealousy because they had to wear all these really tight things, and they had to work out and watch what they were eating and stuff. I didn’t have to do crap, so getting over that was the big problem,” says Billy.
The handsome actor also reveals that initially he wasn’t exactly keen to be part of the epic Watchmen adventure, mainly because he had little or no knowledge of the original graphic novel. “I was sent the script and told that it was based on a graphic novel, and I had all my pre-conceived notions of what the script was going to be like,” says Billy, who adds that those misgivings were swiftly obliterated. “Within the first couple of pages it was clear that this was a different kind of endeavour with a lot of complexity and sophistication, and so I think that immediate surprise with the material ignited my interest pretty early on.”
To begin with Billy was also a trifle confused about which role he might play. Certainly he never imagined himself as the superhuman Dr Manhattan. “In fact I thought Rorschach was the part that they were interested in me for at first. I thought that was really a compelling idea, and so when I was at the meeting and director Zack Snyder kept referencing Dr Manhattan, I found myself mildly confused because I thought there was another actor already attached to that role and I was wondering why he was talking to me ad nauseum about what he was going to do with that actor. So as soon I discovered that Dr Manhattan was the role that he was interested in me for, it took no persuasion whatsoever.”
Although he was never an avid reader of comic books, Billy did not have to go far to find an expert who might confirm that Watchmen was going to be a film offer that he couldn’t refuse because his younger brother is a huge fan of graphic novels. “The Green Lantern was one of his favourites and he’s got a Green Lantern tattoo on his arm. When I first started reading the script [of Watchmen] he was the person that I called to validate my own interest in it, and his immediate response was it was clear that this was a seminal work. So at the very least, taking a job like this would impress him. So that was enough for me.”
The adventure of Watchmen is set in an alternative 1980s in which Richard Nixon is still the USA President and America won the Vietnam War but there remains the threat of a nuclear holocaust as tension continues between America and the Soviet Union. It’s an intriguing concept and Billy describes the story of Watchmen that author Alan Moore created as a re-imagining of the super hero myth in pop culture.
“It imagines what people who dress up to fight crime might actually be like. What, psychologically, would be going on in someone who decided to dress up in a costume and take on thugs? There are obviously some people who are mentally imbalanced and sociopathic, and they’re not all fighting for truth, justice and the American way. I thought that was a really exciting idea to start a super hero myth story and then he introduces into that an actual super-being [Dr Manhattan] who’s is completely amoral. He is unconcerned with human experience, and so it’s fun to watch him subvert the genre and at the same time re-write American history in that kind of text.”
As he has mentioned, the creating of Billy’s performance was complex and one of the key components was deciding on the tone of voice that he ought to employ as Dr Manhattan. “The voice was difficult to find; it was by far the biggest challenge,” he agrees. “It is a weird thing as an actor to not be able to connect the voice and the body, and so to never have been in possession of the body that this voice is supposed to come out of is a really strange balancing act. Zack was really clear about finding a voice that was developed by Dr Manhattan to put other people at ease, so that his physical authority was not so overwhelming to everyone. And so it’s fun to watch someone who has the abilities that he has, to try and relate in personal relationships and stuff.”
The film marks the first time that Billy Crudup will be an action figure in toy stores. “I am kind of worried about that aspect of it because fans of the book would just hate the idea of merchandising any of this,” he says. “I desperately want to see myself as an action figure and do not want to suffer the wrath of being part of that culture. You get a limited approval of the toy. The thing that I saw didn’t look at all like me, so I thought it was perfect…he’s hot, yes!”
Long before its release Watchmen, with its very different take on the super hero genre, was being talked about as a film that turns Hollywood upside down. That’s a description that Billy appears to like. “It aspires to a level of complexity and sophistication that appears infrequently in this genre,” he says.
“When a company is spending a lot of money on something, they want the best chance that it is going to be received in a predictable way, and the way to do that is to make a predictable movie. Obviously there are tons of examples of the opposite. But those are usually the movies that we remember because they subverted some part of the creative culture. This script certainly did it for me but there is no way of knowing how a script will translate into a finished product. For sure I am not a film maker and don’t have that ability so I don’t know how it will translate; but my suspicion is that they gave it a good chance.”
Watchmen is on general release nationwide from March 6th
Words by Johnny Millar
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3orQKBxiEg
