io9's Nisha Gopalan has a great interview with Watchmen director Zack Snyder up at Nylon Guys. Snyder spills his guts about his secret past - as a jock! How does he reconcile his jock side with a mega-geek movie like Watchmen? Here's a funny bit from the interview where Nisha says, "You’re both jock and geek. Aren’t they supposed to be mortal enemies?" Snyder answers:

It’s true. I’d been making movies since I was about 11. It was very Rushmore-ian. I needed the parts to be played by all sorts of characters, so I needed jocks and geeks alike. It was good that I had both in my camp. My senior year, I kind of quit sports after meeting this supercool bodybuilder named Jim Arden [who was a teacher at his school]. He had a big, gray beard and his hair in corn rows—I’d never come across anyone as eccentric. He had a gym in the basement of the school; I went and trained with him for about three years.

To learn more about the jock who dared to turn one of the biggest nerd literary classics of all time into a movie, read the whole interview.

Send an email to Annalee Newitz, the author of this post, at annalee@io9.com.