A scene featuring the superhero Rorschach from the D.C. comics book Watchmen

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Fantastic Four, they ain’t. One superhero can’t get it up, another is a fascist psychopath, another is a sadistic rapist, and then there’s naked one, who glows blue and couldn’t care less about the human race. This antiheroic cast is one of many reasons that Watchmen, Alan Moore's legendary twelve-part 1986 comic series about a group of retired crime-fighters (and one superbeing), is one of the most celebrated, subversive, anti-Hollywood graphic novels ever written.

But that hasn't stopped filmmakers from trying to adapt it anyway. Producer Joel Silver tried to turn it into an Arnold Swarzenegger action vehicle during the ’80s, while more recently, directors such as Terry Gilliam, Darren Aronofsky, and Paul Greengrass have also sought to tackle the “unfilmable” project. That Zach Snyder, who last directed the wildly successful adaptation of Frank Miller’s 300, has finally succeeded in making Watchmen into a movie is itself a remarkable feat. That he made the film true to the source material’s iconoclastic spirit is a near miracle. Snyder pitched it to Warner Bros. as a superhero movie that “doesn’t give you the same old thing,” he says. But the studio still asked for significant changes, including PG-13 rating and moving the story from an alternate 1980s reality (where Richard Nixon is still president) to the present. Snyder’s biggest challenge was convincing Warner to commit to Moore’s dark, unrelenting vision.

“To the studio’s credit, they really embraced it,” Snyder says, though he admits that the $450 million global box office of 300 might have helped. “Once they started to see tonally where I was going, that it deals with adult subject matter, and it’s also an indictment of our mythologies, our heroes, and the intellectual property of pop culture, they got behind it. The undeniable achievement of what we’ve done so far is that it’s an R. And not just an R, but a hard R.”

Early drafts had a “typical Hollywood ending, where the good guy kills the bad guy and rides off into the sunset with the girl,” recalls Dave Gibbons, the artist behind the original Watchmen comics and a consultant on the film. So he was glad to see Snyder grapple with the story’s more provocative elements, including a rape, the murder of a pregnant woman, and a harrowing, apocalyptic climax—not to mention superhuman Dr. Manhattan’s refusal to wear clothes (“Watchmen has more full-frontal nudity than any mainstream movie ever made,” Snyder says). The director committed himself to following the story into even the darkest corners. In one scene, Nite Owl and Silk Spectre, two members of the masked avengers, make love after rescuing citizens from a towering inferno. “I didn’t want it to fade to black,” Snyder explains. “I wanted the fetishistic aspect of it to be clear. They just saved these people from a fire, but that's not why they did it. They did it because it turned them on. They needed to get their fucking juices flowing.”

If Watchmen's sacrilegious take on masked heroes weren't risky enough, Snyder and his team also tried to faithfully capture the elaborate visual landscapes, including a glass palace on the planet mars, and the iconic characters of the comics. Veteran special effects supervisor John “D.J.” Des Jardin says Dr. Manhattan’s glowing naked blue body and Rorschach’s ever-evolving inkblot mask were among the production’s biggest challenges. With a total of 964 visual effects shots created by a technical crew of four hundred, Des Jardin says, “It’s amazing the amount of different stuff in every reel.”

Snyder acknowledges that some might dismiss the final product as self-indulgetn. But after a certain point, he says, there was no turning back. “Maybe we were a little too fearless,” he adds. But when it comes to a challenge as daunting as Watchmen, fearless is the only way to go.

WATCHMEN IS OUT THIS MARCH FROM WARNER BROS.