“We were pro­ject­ing for­ward” – James McTeigue on V for Vendet­ta at 15

Released 15 years ago, James McTeigue’s V for Vendet­ta plunged audi­ences into a dystopi­an vision of a bleak near future. With a viral pan­dem­ic sweep­ing the nation, a fas­cist gov­ern­ment bru­tal­ly keep­ing soci­ety in tow and civ­il unrest lurk­ing around every cor­ner, it relied on a masked vig­i­lante known only as V (Hugo Weav­ing) and his young appren­tice Evey (Natal­ie Port­man) to defeat the régime’s High Chan­cel­lor Sut­ler (John Hurt), reclaim order and rein­state free­dom through chaos and anarchy.

Based on the 1982 graph­ic nov­el by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, V for Vendet­ta is a cau­tion­ary tale inspired by trou­bling real-world issues – and as we creep clos­er to the time in which the sto­ry is set, it feels eeri­ly prophet­ic. ​“If we had put some of the things that have hap­pened in the 15 years since the film came out into our script now, no one would’ve believed it,” says McTeigue, speak­ing in ear­ly 2021. ​“Of course there wouldn’t be a virus that crip­ples the world, of course there wouldn’t be a psy­chopath in the White House who encour­ages his fol­low­ers to start a raid on the Capi­tol Build­ing and of course Boris John­son could not pos­si­bly be the Prime Min­is­ter. Some of the top­ics we were try­ing to dis­cuss have either come true or gone much fur­ther than we ever thought they would go.”

Sad­ly, the themes of the film are all-too per­ti­nent to events of recent weeks. ​“We were pro­ject­ing for­ward,” McTeigue adds. ​“Just as Alan Moore and David Lloyd wrote their orig­i­nal graph­ic nov­el as a response to Thatch­erism, we were tak­ing on the Bush régime and try­ing to make a com­ment on that. What we were real­ly doing with the film was say­ing that a lot of pol­i­tics is cycli­cal; you always go through times where you have tin-pot dic­ta­tors for total­i­tar­i­an or reac­tionary gov­ern­ments. We were hold­ing a mag­ni­fy­ing glass to that.”

McTeigue’s polit­i­cal streak can be traced back to his child­hood in Syd­ney, where he first became exposed to under­ground cul­ture. ​“A large part of my grow­ing up was buy­ing the NME or Melody Mak­er and they steered you in the direc­tion of counter-cul­ture,” says the now 53-year-old film­mak­er. How­ev­er, it wasn’t until he was much old­er that the chance to adapt an anti-estab­lish­ment clas­sic became a real­i­ty. ​“We were get­ting towards the end of the sec­ond and third Matrix films that I’d worked on as first assis­tant direc­tor, and Lana and Lil­ly Wachows­ki start­ed talk­ing about doing some­thing togeth­er again, with me direct­ing. They had a three-film writ­ing deal at Warn­er Broth­ers and one of the scripts they had a shot at was V For Vendet­ta. I don’t think Warn­ers knew what it was, to tell you the truth. I think they thought if we made any film at that point, it’d make money.”

With the project green-lit and the Wachowskis on scriptwrit­ing and pro­duc­ing duties, McTeigue began devel­op­ing his debut fea­ture. ​“We decid­ed to do a rewrite because the orig­i­nal script was very unwieldy and slav­ish to the graph­ic nov­el,” he recalls. ​“The graph­ic nov­el itself is quite long and com­plex, with lots of A, B, C, D, E and F plots, so we tried to har­ness that into a coher­ent film.” It was a tricky process that was aid­ed by a lack of stu­dio notes: ​“They let us do what­ev­er we want­ed. I had no edi­to­r­i­al input from the stu­dio at all. In fact, I went to a meet­ing where they asked me about one par­tic­u­lar plot in the movie – the Valerie plot. I said I wasn’t going to change it and they just said, ​‘Oh, okay’. That hasn’t been my expe­ri­ence since, I have to say.”

When it came to cast­ing, McTeigue want­ed a lead­ing man who could pull off wear­ing V’s grin­ning yet inan­i­mate mask and still pack an emo­tion­al punch. How­ev­er, after ini­tial­ly cast­ing James Pure­foy as the Guy Fawkes-inspired anti-hero, the direc­tor was forced into a shuf­fle. ​“What hap­pened with James is unfor­tu­nate because he’s gone on to do many var­ied roles,” McTeigue explains, ​“but the thing he didn’t realise at the time was his main instru­ment – his face – was being tak­en away. We came to this mutu­al con­clu­sion that it wasn’t real­ly work­ing. I rang up Hugo Weav­ing, who I’d worked with on The Matrix and said, ​‘What do you think?’ He was like, ​‘Part of my act­ing train­ing was mask work, so I’m look­ing for­ward to doing the mask.’”

It was a last-minute gam­ble that paid off. ​“I remem­ber the very first thing Hugo did was the scene where Evey has been in prison for a long time and receives a let­ter from Valerie. She comes out and V is wait­ing for her and she realis­es he is the per­son that’s impris­oned her. It’s a big emo­tion­al scene. On his very first take, I just thought, ​‘Oh my god, he’s saved me. This is going to be amaz­ing’. And he was. We couldn’t real­ly mic the mask prop­er­ly so we had to loop a lot of Hugo’s dia­logue lat­er and he gave a com­plete oth­er per­for­mance all over again. He loved it.

Port­man also brought her A‑game, as McTeigue attests. ​“I always thought Natal­ie would be great, but I test­ed a cou­ple of oth­er actors for it; one was Scar­lett Johans­son and anoth­er was Bryce Dal­las Howard. Natal­ie came in and owned it. She intrin­si­cal­ly under­stood what the char­ac­ter was and always had ques­tions about Evey. She knew the graph­ic nov­el inside out and brought this pres­ence that’s undeniable.”

Despite hav­ing two strong leads at his dis­pos­al, mak­ing the jump from first AD to direc­tor was no small feat. ​“Fool­ish­ly and naive­ly I thought it was just the nat­ur­al pro­gres­sion because I’d worked on some big com­plex movies, but it’s a whole oth­er expe­ri­ence,” McTeigue admits. ​“I real­ly loved the mate­r­i­al and cre­ative­ly it was every­thing I was inter­est­ed in, but I got to the end of the first week and I was like, ​‘Whoa.’ It felt like I’d been hit by a truck. It was a com­plex movie.”

To help cre­ate his stark vision of the future, McTeigue enlist­ed the help of cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Adri­an Bid­dle, whose work on clas­sics like Alien, Aliens and Wil­low came in very handy. ​“He was from the Rid­ley Scott school of DP-ing,” says McTeigue. ​“I had a very def­i­nite sense of what I want­ed aes­thet­i­cal­ly. You just told Adri­an what you want­ed and he’d exe­cute it.”

Released in 2006, V for Vendet­ta was an instant hit with audi­ences and crit­ics. Over time, how­ev­er, the film has come to sym­bol­ise some­thing more than just a cult movie. With polit­i­cal activist groups like Anony­mous adopt­ing V’s chill­ing mask, life has start­ed imi­tat­ing art. ​“Its lega­cy has come to mean some­thing dif­fer­ent now,” McTeigue reflects. ​“I’m glad there’s a lot of peo­ple who under­stood the mes­sage of the movie in the way that it had its part in Arab Spring, Occu­py Wall Street of the Hong Kong protests. The notion that ​‘I are we’ is strong – and we can’t con­trol everything.”

He con­tin­ues, ​“It gets mis­ap­pro­pri­at­ed, too. I saw a bunch of the V masks around the stu­pid­i­ty that hap­pened at the Capi­tol Build­ing in Wash­ing­ton DC, but once you put a piece of art out into the world, it’s no longer yours. You can’t con­trol whether it’s cham­pi­oned by the left, right or mid­dle. Peo­ple find mean­ing in the way they want to. V is one of those films and I’m hap­py for that.”