Damon Lindelof: Real conversations about race are long overdue -- Watchmen is 40 years too late, not prescient

Variety

“I think people of color have been wanting to have this conversation and been shouting from the rooftops to have this conversation for decades, if not centuries,” Lindelof tells Variety. “I just keep returning back to something that Yahya (Abdul-Mateen II) said. We were getting asked, ‘How do you feel about how prescient the show was?’ And Yahya was like, ‘I think the show maybe came along about 40 years too late.’” Lindelof adds: “As someone who’s been talking about these issues now at least in the context of Watchmen, in that (writers') room for two years, I said the wrong thing constantly. And thank God I was in a space where the other writers could say, ‘You just said the wrong thing'....I think that there are these words, like ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion,’ that again, have the best intentionality behind them, but at the end of the day, if the writers’ room was just me and seven writers of color, but I don’t listen to them, that’s not inclusion. Oftentimes I was just programmed to say, ‘I’m the showrunner and this is my room, and I’m going to either say thumbs-up or thumbs-down.’ But the Watchmen room didn’t work that way. As I was beginning to lose control and power, I was like, ‘I don’t like this feeling.’ And so the first six to 10 weeks of Watchmen were rough on all of us. And then we started trusting one another, everybody. And instead of saying that I was going to listen, I actually started listening.”