V For Vendetta: Anarchy In the U.K.

Director James McTeigue and Natalie Portman on the set of V for Vendetta

The Matrix team has realigned for this politically charged comic-book fantasy starring Natalie Portman.

By Matt Mueller

(This feature was originally published in the March 2006 issue of Premiere.)

A cool June night in London, hundreds of masked and ebony-cloaked figures mass behind concrete roadblocks in front of that enduring symbol of Western democracy and tourism, the Houses of Parliament. Dressed in the 17th-century getup of their leader, a mysterious and charismatic vigilante named V who ignites revolution in a near-future totalitarian society, they face off against government militia in a barnstorming climax that will involve the obliteration of Britain’s seat of power.

Tonight, though, the revolution is stuttering, as Big Ben mocks the logistical urgency facing the crew of V for Vendetta. “Clang, clang, clang!” says first-time director James McTeigue later, simultaneously chuckling and grimacing at the clocktower’s gonging. “It was counting down the minutes for me! Such a short amount of time to get everything done . . . ”

This explosive set piece—for which the production was granted unique permission to shut down all of Whitehall, between Trafalgar and Parliament squares, for three nights—will symbolize fascist tyranny being vanquished. “It’s the most important thing in the story,” says producer Joel Silver (the Lethal Weapon and Matrix movies), who optioned the source material, an acclaimed graphic novel by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, when it was published back in 1990. But front-page news soon thrust V for Vendetta into an uncomfortable position the filmmakers say it doesn’t deserve. Five weeks after this scene was shot, the July 7 terrorist attacks in London shifted the focus to some undeniably eerie parallels in the movie’s plot, including a key sequence featuring a subway train crammed with explosives.
PREMIERE.COM EXTRA:
Click here to read a Q&A with V for Vendetta star Natalie Portman, director James McTiegue, producer Joel Silver and illustrator David Lloyd.

“There is the subject of terrorism in the movie, but it’s a different kind of terrorism,” says Silver. “This is a comic-book story, like Batman or Superman. I mean, War of the Worlds, those big tripods—they blew up everything! Yes, there was one shot in Spider-Man where they took out the Twin Towers [from a teaser trailer and poster], but, you know, that was just being human. This is not a story about what’s occurring now. It’s fictional.”

Long before concerns about current events arose, V for Vendetta was attracting an unusual amount of interest because of its screenwriters and second-unit directors, Matrix creators Andy and Larry Wachowski. Last night on the set, the famously private brothers (who are also producing) orchestrated the street action alongside McTeigue, who was their first AD on the Matrix films. Today, says Silver, “they weren’t on set every minute, but they were around.”

Hired by Silver before The Matrix’s 1999 release to write a Vendetta screenplay, the Wachowskis revived the project toward the end of shooting on Reloaded and Revolutions. Asked if they ever considered directing it themselves, Silver says, “It may have been a little close for them to The Matrix in some ways.” (McTeigue says the brothers did keep final cut, however: “I’m a first-time director. It’s not unusual.”)

The Wachowskis’ first script was very faithful to the graphic novel, says Lloyd; the rewrite infused the story with some distinctively Wachowskian action and fiddled with the novel’s structure, incendiary plot, and key characters—axing some and altering others, in particular Evey Hammond, who has changed from the malleable street waif of the original into a plucky TV station employee with a tragic past, whom V rescues from assault-minded members of the fascist government’s secret police and converts to his rebel cause. “She’s a stronger counterpart to him in the film,” says Natalie Portman, who, as Evey, has her head shaved onscreen in a pivotal torture sequence, a coiffure makeover that caused a global sensation at last year’s Cannes film festival. “You get to see her develop a political consciousness,” Portman adds, “which is amazing.” Filling out the cast are such stellar U.K. actors as Stephen Fry, Stephen Rea, Sinéad Cusack, and John Hurt, who plays the head of the totalitarian government (a neat inversion of his casting long ago as the beleaguered Winston Smith in 1984).

Vendetta started shooting in March 2005 in Berlin’s Babelsberg studios. One thing the Wachowskis kept intact was V himself, a kind of superhero (played by Hugo Weaving) with admittedly psychopathic tendencies, ferocious combat skills, and a Grand Guignol approach to blowing up London landmarks. “He’s a fascinating man,” muses Weaving (Agent Smith in the Matrix films). “He’s someone who’s been tortured and profoundly damaged by the state, this dark avenging angel who’s out to take revenge on the perpetrators of the torture. And the other side is this more heroic figure, who is attempting to get people to take responsibility for their lives rather than leave it up to the government.”

It’s precisely this blend of flamboyance and dementia that has given Vendetta its devoted following in the comic-book fraternity. Those fans can also be notoriously critical, however. Moore distanced himself from the movie early on (and his name is not in the movie’s credits), but Lloyd appeared at the Comic-Con convention in July in an apparent effort to forestall sniping. “They put their own stamp on it,” says Lloyd of the Wachowskis’ screenplay, “but it keeps the key scenes, it keeps the spirit, and it’s got integrity. A lot of people were concerned that it might be turned into a simple vengeance story of some crazed vigilante against bad guys. But it’s much deeper than that.”

A few weeks into shooting, the production encountered its first speed bump when the original V, James Purefoy (Vanity Fair), was replaced by Weaving. Switching your lead actor—even one who spends the entire film behind an immobile, leering Guy Fawkes mask (Fawkes was a coconspirator in a Catholic plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605; his failure is celebrated annually on November 5)—is no casual decision. “The mask was always going to be tough,” says McTeigue hesitantly. “James is a great actor, but . . . we had to make a change.”

Silver is a bit more blunt. “This is a voice-over gig,” he says. “I doubt if James Earl Jones ever came to the set of Star Wars. I see it in very similar fashion. They just weren’t happy with James’s reading of their lines. . . . They love Hugo and they really wanted him in the first place, so we made the decision. It was exclusively a voice thing.”

Weaving arrived in Berlin five days after McTeigue called (no, he didn’t show up growling, “Surrrrprised . . . to see me?”) and embraced “the absolute challenge of making the mask work,” he says. He was pleased when Purefoy sent him a letter giving his blessing. “He didn’t have to do that, and it was very sweet of him.”

Portman, who was surprised by the change—“It’s not like there was any weirdness on set,” she says—feels his spirit will live on in the film. (In fact, says McTeigue, some of Purefoy’s work ended up in the final cut.) But she calls Weaving “wonderful,” and the adjustment never dimmed her passion for the project’s thorny dilemmas: How far would you go for your beliefs, and does using violence to fight oppression make you a terrorist or a freedom fighter?

“The thing I like and the thing that’s scary is that I don’t have any set opinions about the issues in the film,” says the actress, who, as Evey, takes an active part in the decision to convert Parliament into a smoldering ruin. “I don’t think there’s a clear message. The whole point of the movie is to spark debate because it’s about issues that we’re dealing with as ordinary citizens. There are always injustices to fight about, and it’s definitely interesting to see what turns a person who’s passively living in a flawed society into someone who will try and change things.”

On this point, McTeigue is in complete agreement with his star. “[The film] raises issues that need to be raised in this climate,” he says, “and lets you make up your own mind about what side of the fence you fall on.” Still, whether Warner Bros. was spooked by 7/7 or, as the official line asserts, simply ran out of time to maneuver the film through its truncated schedule, the studio bumped V from the figuratively important release date of November 4 (the 5th was the 400th anniversary of the failed Fawkes attack) to March 17. The added stretch did come in handy, allowing for some additional days of shooting in September—not, insists McTeigue, to rethink or even douse provocative elements, but merely to “flesh out parts of Evey’s story. Based on those reshoots, I didn’t cut anything that [had already been] shot.”

What’s more, he adds, “London has a history of this stuff. If you take it back to Guy Fawkes or the IRA, I think it’s been in London’s consciousness for a long time, so [the recent attacks] didn’t really make me want to respond. It’s the world we live in now. V is an interesting film for difficult times.”