There was this interesting quote: try and live your life without fear and desire. It's this concept that's like when you look at a painting in a museum and you are held in aesthetic arrest. So the I, the ego, is stripped, is gone. The observer and thing become one. That's where fear and desire come in because you don't want to own it, possess it, desire it, and it's not moving you to fear. It's like you're in this harmonious state with the object.

My personal success would be that people understand what I was trying to do. It was the most palatable when I watchmen_7_mdid Dawn. With Watchmen, too, I feel the same way. The movie's ironic and satirical and it's funny and serious and that's kind of the same way I felt about Dawn. Like I really was making a movie that knows it's a zombie movie and enjoys that and wants the audience to say, yeah, that's okay.

Of course it would depend on the project, but I don't think I could ever separate myself from my aesthetic.

The difference between 'Watchmen' and a normal comic book is this: With 'Batman's Gotham City,' you are transported to another world where that superhero makes sense; 'Watchmen' comes at it in a different way, it almost superimposes its heroes on your world, which then changes how you view your world through its prism.

Look, if you have a problem with distilling the Battle of Thermopylae down to freedom versus tyranny, you need to read Herodotus because he's the one. It's his fault, not modern culture's fault. He did it.' [Victor Davis Hanson] references a lot of things like that because he feels like the spirit of the book and of the movie ["300"] are very close to the Spartan aesthetic. That's really kind of what he feels."

Music has that ability to be a magical thing, and I was like, maybe music is the vehicle that transports us to that other world.

I heard one time that the Superman glyph is the second or third most recognizable symbol on Earth after the Christian cross.