‘V for Vendetta’ Director James McTeigue Reflects on the Movie’s Cultural Legacy 20 Years Later

“V for Vendetta” was released 20 years ago this month, not that you would know it.

The film, written and produced by the Wachowskis and directed by frequent collaborator James McTeigue, was based on the comic book series by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. It imagined an ultra-conservative future Britain, inspired at the time by Margaret Thatcher, and an enigmatic figure named V (played in the film by Hugo Weaving), who wages war against the powers that be. (Natalie Portman starred as a woman he rescues and radicalizes.)

As the years between the release of “V for Vendetta” have worn on, our world has started to eerily resemble the version of society depicted in the movie – state-run media companies controlling the political narrative, a surveillance state where free-thought is discouraged or criminalized, the implementation of violent thugs to quell unrest. These are all parts of “V for Vendetta” and, now, our daily lives.

At the time of the film’s production, the Wachowskis were exhausted.

They had made “The Matrix” in 1999, quickly becoming the hottest filmmaking team in Hollywood, and followed it up with two sequels, shot concurrently and both released in 2003. It’s hard to remember now, but the sequels were part of a massive, transmedia campaign that also included a video game (with 30 minutes of cut scenes directed by the duo) and a series of animated shorts, compiled as its own feature, all overseen by the Wachowskis.

The Wachowskis had a three-film writing deal with Warner Bros., the studio behind “The Matrix,” which also included an adaptation of DC Comics character Plastic Man and “Carnivore,” a horror thriller. They offered to produce “V for Vendetta” and help McTeigue “shepherd through the studio,” according to McTeigue.

McTeigue remembered that the Wachowskis gave him the collected comic book for his birthday. “They said, ‘Hey, we wrote an adaptation, do you think maybe we can all make this into a great film?’” McTeigue said. The attempt, with the script, “was to keep the authenticity and the essence of it,” while attempting to modernize its politics and point-of-view and getting rid of extraneous subplots and character arcs.

“We honed it to be more cinematic,” McTeigue said.

McTeigue said that they even had a conversation with Moore, a notoriously cantankerous sort who has spoken openly about his dislike of the adaptations of his work and refuses to sell the rights to his more recent material. “He didn’t want to have anything to do with it, but that’s okay. He was so gruff and dismissive of us,” said McTeigue. “He didn’t offer any words of encouragement. He was just like, ‘I have no control over this. I don’t trust you guys to do anything good with it but I can’t stop you.’ I think that, if I was to paraphrase the whole conversation, it was something like that.”

Looking back on “V for Vendetta,” it’s shocking that a major studio got behind it so provocatively, but McTeigue said there was never any nervousness from Warner Bros. He said that they were just happy to get behind whatever the Wachowskis wanted to do next.

“And I think Joel Silver, the producer, did a good job of moving it through the studio. But surprisingly, the politics never came up. You wouldn’t get that now. And so that was really refreshing, actually, and the script, much to their credit, was a great script,” McTeigue explained. “I think you picked it up, and you read it, and you went, ‘Okay, this is political, but it’s political in a way that is going to be like a great film.’ And I don’t think people stood in the way of that. Now, you might get to write the movie, make the movie, but then they might sting you on the release.”

McTeigue was surrounded by an ace team on “V for Vendetta,” including stunt men David Leitch and Chad Stahelski, who years later would redefine the action genre with their directorial debut “John Wick.” “Chad is the guy on fire when V blows up the camp. Dave’s the guy flicking the dominoes, Dave’s the guy throwing knives. I had a lot of people around me, lifting me up,” McTeigue said.

Not that the production was free of drama – like when McTeigue was forced to fire the lead actor, James Purefoy, six weeks into production. “At that point, I worked on 20 movies and never had to sack the lead actor and here I was,” McTeigue said.

The issue, McTeigue said, was that it “wasn’t a right fit for him underneath the mask.” “I think if you’re going to be behind a mask, you really have to embrace it. And he was struggling with that. He’s a good actor but I was taking away his visage,” McTeigue said. “And Hugo came in and went, ‘Yeah, I’m down for it. I want to be behind a mask.’ He came in and embraced it. That changed things up.”

While McTeigue said he was dealing with “challenges on that film,” he had already worked as an assistant director on all three “Matrix” films, the “Star Wars” prequels and “Moulin Rouge,” among many others. That experience helped him make the decision to fire Purefoy and navigate the rest of the challenges on a movie as daunting as “V for Vendetta.”

“One of the things too you learn as an assistant director is you just have an innate feeling of what’s going on behind you, if there’s a problem or something that is not going right,” he said. “I took that into the film too. I could tell when something behind me wasn’t coming together.”

In the years since “V for Vendetta,” the movie and its iconography (particularly the Guy Fawkes mask worn by the title character), has been embraced in all sorts of political uprisings and protests – it’s been seen during the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, Arab Spring and protests against the Church of Scientology. It’s also been adopted by the disruptive hacker group Anonymous.

“Not to give you like a hoary old, hackneyed cliché but once you push the boat out into the water of the world, you don’t have control over how people use it. Sometimes people get it and sometimes people don’t and I don’t think I can really say one is right and one is wrong. They’re co-opting it for what they think is right,” he added. “But what I do love is that it’s out there. What I do love is that, for the most part, people culturally understand what it’s used for and why it lives on. I like that idea.”

“V for Vendetta” is so loaded with powerful imagery and ideas that can be transplanted to various time periods, like how the team took Thatcher-era unease and made it palpable for the 2000s Bush administration, that it’s a little surprising it hasn’t been revisited, in the same way Moore’s “Watchmen” was adapted for HBO. Not that McTeigue was all that surprised.

“I’m not surprised that it hasn’t been remade because, to tell you the truth, I tried to give it this timeless quality, which would not make sense to do a remake of it really. I know they’re trying to make a series of it, but I think that’s meant to be like a more literal adaptation of the graphic novel,” McTeigue said. “Unless you had like a new take on it, and like a new angle on it, like in the way that Christopher Nolan had like a new take on ‘The Dark Knight,’ then what’s the point? Yeah. But if you were trying to do something with [Portman’s character] Evie, what’s Evie doing 20 years later? That’s interesting. I think that in the way that ‘One Battle After Another’ took the Weather Underground story and updated that for this time, that you don’t really know what setting, I thought that was kind of interesting.”

“V for Vendetta” is available on 4K UHD from Warner Bros.

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