'I can't believe I get to make this come alive'

Burnaby, British Columbia -- On a wintry day here last year, Zack Snyder hunkered down in a dank prison cell, peered between the bars and watched bloodthirsty inmates run riot. All the smoke and screams only made him smile; the fiery cellblock he saw before him looked nearly identical to the one in the hand-drawn pages of " Watchmen," the landmark 1985 graphic novel. The director didn't have to rely on memory -- he had a rolled-up copy of the comic book on the set with him.

"Every day I think, 'I can't believe I get to make this come alive,' " said Snyder, who was a prisoner of the page long before that chilly afternoon outside Vancouver in an old paper mill that had been turned into a penitentiary for the director's $100-million film. "Watchmen" finally reaches theaters Friday and will arrive as the most controversial superhero film ever made. Snyder, an affable, 43-year-old father of six, has been the picture of patience in the face of private setbacks and public challenges to the film, but while filming that bloody riot last year he let a wicked grin cross his face.

"We're killing the comic-book movie, we're ending it," Snyder said. "This movie is the last comic-book movie, for good or bad."

Really ???