ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You haven't enjoyed any comics adaptations? Even the indie films?
ALAN MOORE: There are none that leap to mind. I hear that the American Splendor film was pretty good. I didn't go and see the film; I waited until Harvey [Pekar] and [his wife] Joyce came over to our house — so I got the live talk. We got to show them all around town — that was, for me, better than the film.
Has Warner Bros. tried to contact you about Watchmen?
No, they've all been told not to. They get the message.... I don't want anyone who works for DC comic books to contact me ever again, or I'll change my number.... And I only started to get upset when I found out they [DC Comics] were trying to rob me of a couple thousand pounds. It was over the Watchmen merchandising back in the '80s, and they kind of eventually said, Oh, yeah, I suppose you do deserve this money. But by that time the damage was done. The only reason I ended up working for them again, during the ABC period from '99-'04, [was because] I had already signed the contracts. [Editor's note: DC Comics President and Publisher Paul Levitz responds: ''We've had our disagreements with Alan over the years, but we remain great fans of his talent and would be happy to work with him in the future if he's ever inclined.'']
Is there anything anyone could offer you — possibly outside DC and Warner Bros. — that could interest you in Hollywood?
There's nothing that could get me interested in Hollywood again. And, increasingly, there's nothing that could get me interested in the American comics industry again. I'm going to be doing more comics bits in the future, but that will most certainly be with [his new publisher] Top Shelf or [an indie] company like Top Shelf. Hollywood and American comics, I have given them a chance, and I think 20 years is long enough. If they were going to deliver, they would have done it by now.
You, yourself, wrote a movie script in the '80s, Fashion Beast.
I did, which was mercifully never itself brought to the screen. I was doing it to see if I could write a screenplay, and to hang out with Malcolm McLaren [the Sex Pistols impresario, who commissioned it]. Which is always a fun prospect.
What is it like when Alan Moore and Malcolm McLaren hang out?
It's kind of about as amusing and cynical as you might expect.
He's considered by some to be the great evil music Svengali.
I'm not saying that other people may not have completely different relationships with Malcolm — and, indeed, from reading most of the Sex Pistols biographies, I assume that that's probably the case. But speaking only of my relationship with him: He was an awful lot of fun, he seemed full of ideas, and I got paid for a film which never came out, so I was very happy with the arrangement! But the thing is, Malcolm was also coming up with original ideas for these movies, which is something else that attracted me to him.... I see a kind of degeneration, if you like, in terms of the imagination that those pioneers back in the 19th century were gifted with, and kind of recycled ideas that we tend to get served up today.... So often any film that comes out is going to be a sequel or a remake of a film that's previously existed — and I've said this before, that we will see Johnny Depp playing Cap'n Crunch. It will eventually get down to breakfast cereal mascots!
NEXT PAGE: Moore spills details on the latest League of Extraordinary Gentlemen installment and his novel, Jerusalem
