The posters for Watchmen herald “the visionary director of 300,” but many of the visions in Zack Snyder’s latest directorial feat owe just as much to the efforts of production designer Alex McDowell. A veteran of projects as far reaching as Fight Club and Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, McDowell applies a deeply calculated, undeniably intellectual methodology to his projects, making him the perfect world-builder for a dense project like Watchmen. “Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore built this very realistic but stylized version of realism in the graphic novel,” McDowell says. “We looked to do the same.” In this gallery, he elaborates on his meticulous design work.

The War Room

In one of the more interesting visual embellishments on the source material, Snyder and McDowell designed a presidential war room reminiscent of the one in Dr. Strangelove. “It was actually very good that the film took so long to be made,” reasons McDowell. “There was a recontextualizing of the story with regard to everything that occurred in the past twenty years — culturally, historically, but mostly pop-culturally, so that you know now the context of Dr. Strangelove’s war in respect to contemporary history of what was going on.”

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