‘Watchmen’ Director Nicole Kassell And Damon Lindelof Are Changing The “Pathetic” Manner In Which Female Perspectives Have Been Represented In Superhero Storytelling

The first thing you need to know about the 1986 graphic novel Watchmen is that it’s as close to a holy text as a graphic novel can be, especially among its legions of fans. Dark, edgy, and deeply critical of society and humankind overall, Watchmen was set in an alt-history where masked vigilantes and a super-human named Dr. Manhattan changed the course of American history. Specifically, one vigilante, a genius named Ozymandias, dropped a giant squid on New York City in order to trick humans into giving up the nuclear arms race.

Today, showrunner Damon Lindelof is bringing Watchmen to HBO in the most audacious way possible. Set 34 years after the events of the graphic novel, HBO’s Watchmen imagines a world that evaded nuclear holocaust (thanks to Ozymandias’s wild squid plan), but is still on the brink of self-destruction. Only now, the existential threat aren’t nukes: it’s racism. Lindelof even goes so far as to open Watchmen on the horrors of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, a real but not widely known event in actual American history where racists burned, killed, and firebombed an entire Black neighborhood out of existence. According to director and executive producer Nicole Kassell, it was this this stark and ominous beginning that lured her to the project.

“One of the things I loved about the script was I found it so bold that it started in a black and white film. If anything’s gonna say, ‘This is not what you might expect Watchmen to be,’ it’s the very first frame of the show,” said Kassell.

Nicole Kassell is no stranger to collaborating with Damon Lindelof, having directed two episodes of his last HBO series, The Leftovers; her other directorial credits include The Killing, The Americans, and HBO’s Westworld. This time, though, she also served as Watchmen‘s executive producer, hugely responsible for mapping out the visual language of the show. “It’s really a fluid conversation back and forth,” Kassell said, describing the way she and the show’s production designer would send ideas to Lindelof and his writers’ room, and they would volley stuff back.

“In terms of world building, we knew that the comic book was our American history, so then what does that mean for the rules of this world?” Kassell said, noting that since the events of the comic, liberal movie star Robert Redford had been elected president seven times. “If Redford was president for 30 years, then how would the world be different?”

It’s different insomuch that descendants of the Tulsa Massacre have earned reparations, squids regularly fall from the sky, and cops in Tulsa now wear masks to protect their identities from an alt-right terror cell who want to hunt them down.

HBO’s Watchmen doesn’t just tackle race head on, but it’s also offering women a much more prominent role in the story. The show itself focuses on an intrepid costumed female detective named Angela Abar (Regina King) and features Jean Smart as an older, more world-weary version of the lone heroine of the original comic, Laurie Blake (aka Silk Spectre). Damon Lindelof told Decider that there are more women in Watchmen‘s writers’ room than men, and called Kassell a “visionary,” noting they all helped with the story he wanted to tell.

“I feel like we’re having a long overdue moment in superhero culture because we have to acknowledge that there’s just been complete and utter under-representation [of women],” he told us. “This is a very politic way of saying it — [but] the percentage of women to men, the ratio in superhero storytelling, is just pathetic.” He wanted to change things. “Let’s not go in for tokenism here. What do women on a meta level, what do they have to say about superhero-ing?”

As the director of the show’s first two episodes, Kassell got to have that say. She not only set the tone for the series, but for a fictional show within the show called American Hero Story, which is a nod to the interstitial chapters that writer Alan Moore included in the graphic novel that helped flesh out his fictional world. In Lindelof and Kassell’s Watchmen, American Hero Story is a prestige show offering a juicy retelling of the history of masked vigilantes in their alternate universe. What little we see of that series happens to be a garish celebration of ultra violence, or if you will, a lower budget recreation of the tone director Zach Snyder applied to his film adaptation of Watchmen.

“American Hero Story was kind of our nod to, yeah, [our] Watchmen could be that, but it’s not.” Kassell said, adding that she wanted to lend Watchmen a real-world feel that was “very gritty, noir, but grounded in realism. That was a driving principle to me, that this world needs to feel real and familiar.”

So how do you make costumed cops seem down-to-earth? Kassell and Lindelof teamed up with Watchmen costume designer Sharon Davis to bring characters like Angela Abar’s alter ego, Sister Night, to life. The costume involves a black hooded habit, a black-airbrushed eye mask and a belt where Abar dons her police badge and a set of rosary beads.

“It was a real process to land on the costume. ‘Do we put a real mask on her face, do we paint it on? [Does she wear a] hood, no hood? [Are the colors] white, black?’ There was a lot to work out, and until it’s right, it’s very wrong,” Kassell said, explaining they analyzed every single aspect of the final look, right down to each rosary bead.

“The main thing that I really cared — not the main thing, but one thing that I was very adamant about — was I had to believe that the character of Angela could go in her lair and put this on. I didn’t want to think that there was some secret assistant somewhere, or hair, makeup, wardrobe waiting in the wings to help her out. It was really important to me that she created it and could do it,” Kassell said.

If Sister Night’s look was low-maintenance, Detective Looking Glass’s certainly was not. Played by Tim Blake Nelson, Looking Glass is another masked member of the Tulsa Police Force. He’s known for his eerie reflective mask and frightfully on point interrogation techniques. According to Kassell, while they did use a mylar silver mask in long shots, essentially, his look came almost entirely from “very expensive” visual effects.

“Literally when we’re filming, when we’re in close-ups, he wears a rig on his head. The actor, he’s not wearing anything silver, he’s basically wearing a green screen mask. And these two GoPro cameras — one in the front, one in the back — so he’s live action recording the scene. So that is what was taken and put in his mask,” Kassell said. “So in the first time we see him with Don Johnson, the footage of Don Johnson in the mirror of his mask, was taped from a GoPro on his forehead.”

Kassell also shared with Decider that she worked with Lindelof to ensure that there were as many nods to the original graphic novel as possible. She included Easter Eggs as a way to “pay homage” to Moore and Gibbons’s work. But the thing that Kassell really wanted to translate to the screen wasn’t a specific visual reference, but an emotion: anxiety.

Kassell said, “What really struck me [about the original Watchmen] was the tone. The moment in which it was being written and the anxiety it was addressing, I feel like has come full circle and we’re deeply living in that kind of tension now.”

Watchmen will be doing its best to make you feel anxious —and entertained, too— when it premieres on HBO this Sunday, October 20th.

Where to stream Watchmen