For a certain section of movie fans, it will be another six months before there's a a film worth seeing. That film is Watchmen, and despite an awards season that boasts probably a dozen really compelling movies, some people waited months for Iron Man and The Dark Knight this summer and are willing to put the rest of 2008 to bed.

For those people specifically and for any casual fan who is excited to see what director Zack Snyder can do with arguably the greatest graphic novel of all time, we have an update from Dave Gibbons, animator and co-creator of Watchmen (with Alan Moore).

Gibbons was at the British Film Institute last week, and The Times was in attendance to hear him speak about companion book, Watching the Watchmen (due out October 21st), but because he took questions from the crowd, the subject quickly turned to next year's highly-anticipated film adaptation.

The basics: Gibbons has seen a two-hour forty-five minute rough cut of the movie. That's excellent news to me as a fan of shorter movies. I personally don't believe you need much more than two hours in most cases (The Dark Knight, for example, could've been 20 minutes shorter and it wouldn't have lessened the overall impact). Having said that, Watchmen does qualify for being longer because there's simply so much going on.

So, the fact that it's not even three hours tells me that the graphic novel was either gutted or Snyder found a way to get to the heart of every scene quickly and didn't waste too much time on action sequences, which big budget movies have been known to do. And since we know Snyder hasn't gutted the comic because he has too much respect for it, we'll presume he's just found a way to keep almost everything in the movie. That's very encouraging.

Elsewhere, Gibbons says Watchmen is "very sexy, very violent" and that in England, the film will likely get the equivalent of an R rating. Last weekend, when we discussed the rape scene, we wondered how a PG-13 movie could pull that off effectively. Maybe a PG-13 movie won't need to. Could this exist in the marketplace as an R-rated comic book movie? The first Punisher did it (more or less unsuccessfully).

Gibbons also delved into the history of the project's long road to the big screen and even admitted that his dream casting for The Comedian would have been Burt Reynolds. Ouch. Stick to the colors, Dave.

Oh, then there's this from The Times' Michael Moran:

"The highlight of Dave’s Q&A was the aforementioned 'super-trailer' - a 10 minute assembly of shots from Watchmen with an orchestral soundtrack. On the big screen the action is a colossal adrenalin rush and level of attention to detail is breathtaking."