For Alex Tse, co-writing Zack Snyder's Watchmen is the biggest coup of his career - and given his long-standing love affair with the material, a personal triumph.
The San Francisco-born writer, who moved to Los Angeles a decade ago to break into Hollywood, and whose father emigrated from the mainland, says he has been a fan of Watchmen for as long as he can remember.
And when he heard that Warner Brothers was looking for a writer to have another go at David Hayter's original script, he jumped at the opportunity to present his vision.
'I went in there with a 15-page outline, everything detailed scene-by-scene,' he says. 'It was obvious I was a real fan.'
Tse had a good relationship with the studio on prior projects and they signed him. As far as Tse was concerned, all he had to do was 'not screw it up'.
Given the film's box office success, the assignment will no doubt propel Tse to another level. He has since completed the screenplay for another Snyder production, The Illustrated Man, an adaptation of Ray Bradbury's 1951 collection of science fiction short stories.
A graduate of film communications from Emerson College in Boston, Tse (right) began working as an office temp in Los Angeles, taking part-time admin jobs at some of the studios in town.
