Why V For Vendetta Only Feels More Timely 2 Decades Later

Across the entire history of the comic book industry, there are precious few writers who have had as outsized and significant an impact on the medium as Alan Moore. The herald of the British Invasion of the comics industry in the ‘80s, Moore had a storied career in British anthology magazines long before he would give DC Comics some of their most acclaimed stories. His work on Green Lantern introduced Mogo the Living Planet and the prophecy of the Blackest Night, he gave The Joker his most famous backstory in Batman: The Killing Joke, he gave the world John Constantine in his lauded Saga of the Swamp Thing, and he redefined the comic book industry entirely with the endlessly celebrated Watchmen.

Despite his hostile feelings towards an exploitative mainstream comic book industry, Moore’s work has been adapted (frequently, to his frustration) many times with varying degrees of success, from the animated series Justice League (its version of his iconic Superman storyline For The Man Who Has Everything is one of the only times he’s given an adaptation his stamp of approval) to Zack Snyder’s big-budget 2009 interpretation of Watchmen. But one of the most celebrated and culturally resonant is undoubtedly James McTeigue’s 2005 cult-classic V for Vendetta, an adaptation of Moore’s British miniseries of the same name about an anarchist vigilante waging war against a fascist dictatorship in an alt-history version of the U.K. in the 1990s. McTeigue’s film is celebrating its 20th anniversary with a re-release this year, and the timing couldn’t be more perfect considering just how eerily prescient Moore’s original novel and the film are to our current political moment (along with the irony that it will be screening on Guy Fawkes Day).

“Authoritarian governments always do the same thing,” McTeigue tells Inverse over Zoom. “There’s always disputes about executive authority and immigration enforcement and universities and federal funding and going after minorities; it’s always the same playbook.”

While McTeigue’s film feels more like a critique of the post-9/11 American government rather than the book’s Thatcher-era London, its reflection on the importance of fighting back against the rising tide of fascism is more important now than ever. Two decades after its release, James McTeigue talked to Inverse about his relationship with the material, the political context that inspired his take, and why now more than ever he believes in the optimism of its ending.

How did you discover V for Vendetta?

I knew of V for Vendetta, but I didn't read it in the ‘80s. I read it much later as a graphic novel probably in the ‘90s sometime, I would imagine. And I feel like it went out of my thinking until the Wachowskis asked me about it at one point and said, "Hey, have you ever read this? We had a three-film writing deal with Warner Brothers. What do you think about directing this movie?" And I'm like, "Oh my God. Yeah, of course, of course."

I'd made my intention known when we were making the Matrix movies that I was sick of being an assistant director. So then that perfect storm happened.

Was there a certain level of intimidation that came with approaching a novel as beloved as V for Vendetta? And were Alan Moore's feelings about adaptations of his work part of that resistance?

I think Alan felt he'd been disserviced by adaptations that had come before V: League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and From Hell. I think that it doesn't matter what we would've done with the film, he would've disliked it. He's got his own complex ideology around that.

But, was I concerned with that? No, I feel like I was concerned with making a great movie from great material. And Alan Moore and David Lloyd really had a way of blending politics and religion and social sciences and psychology in a graphic novel with an anti-hero. And so I was just concerned about trying to get to the essence of what made all that great.

Obviously the London of the graphic novel is very much a reaction to the Thatcherite policies of the country at the time, yet the movie feels very rooted in the political culture of 2005. What was your approach to modernizing this specific dystopia?

Well, the great thing about London is it's always changing and there's always going to be buildings from the 1500s or the 1600s jammed against modern buildings. So there's always going to be cobblestone streets against asphalt streets. And the great thing for me is anything that's abstracted into the near future means no one can say, "Well, that is not going to look like that." And I’d lived in London, so growing up on a lot of cultural things that came from London, whether it was TV or film or the actors that were in those movies, gave me a good understanding of what I wanted to do with the aesthetic of the movie.

And of course I looked to the graphic novel, but I wasn't enslaved by it either. I knew that the political environment that I made the movie in, which is a post-9/11 Bush-era kind of thing, was not dissimilar to the Thatcherite era that Alan Moore and David Lloyd had done, because we go through these political cycles all the time. There's always disputes about executive authority and immigration enforcements and universities and federal funding and going after minorities; it's always the same playbook.

Can you talk a little bit about the feelings and the process behind engaging with some of those optics and ideas so directly after 9/11?

I came at it from the point of view (which I think is the same way that the creators of the graphic novel came at it) that if you know there's something wrong with the system that you are in, and if you have a voice and you're in a democracy, you're entitled to say, "Hey, I'm putting up my hand here and I'm not making a morality judgment, but I'm showing you what is going on. What is the morality of terrorism in a post-9/11 world?" It’s a valid thing to have a discussion about, it doesn't happen in a vacuum, it's a causality. I think that's the thing, and you can just look down through history and go, "OK, X happened because of Y."

And I think V, he has questionable morality. OK, so something happened to him in a political environment that completely changed the person that he was, but does that make it OK for him to try and change the system and murder all the people who made the system? And the studio and the producers, Joel Silver and the Wachowskis, didn't flinch about it. They're like, "We know it's political. It's based on something that is political and you guys can keep going ahead." No one ever told me to put the brakes on that movie, which was pretty great.

So much of the movie is framed around Evey’s ideological journey, her realizing it’s not enough to just keep her head down and realizing she has power as a citizen. Have you seen that in the political uprisings since the movie came out?

Yeah, I mean Evey goes from someone who's frightened and disengaged to becoming personally liberated, right? I mean, that's a very reductive part of her journey, but that's what she becomes. She has this humanistic and political awakening along the way.

Do I think that's happening now? I think we're at the start of that happening now. I mean, I think there's always an end game for authoritarian figures. If you just look down through history, there's an end game to Hitler, there's an end game to Mussolini, there's an end game to Thatcher. The list is endless, and it's why the French Revolution happened. At some point, you have enough of the oppressors, you have enough of people telling you that everything's OK when it's plainly not OK.

The movie ends with the hope of collective unity, the idea that we can throw off our shackles, so to speak. How do you feel about that ending all these years later? Do you still feel that same sort of optimism about our chances?

Yeah, I do, because I know the political cycle and the civil cycle are always the same. I wish we didn’t have to have them, but we always have these cycles where you feel like the hand of the government pushing on your head and this drift to the far right and quasi-authoritarian and things. But I also know all those characters and some of the ones we've been talking about, they have their time.

It's hard to live through, when they're flooding the zone every day and you're just going, "Oh my God, I want to do this and that. Is it ever going to be any better?" But it will be. It'll be better. And even in the version of V, where you had the Voice of London, and you had the Fingermen, and you had Creedy, and you had all the branches of government that he was controlling, his time was finite.

V for Vendetta will return to theaters on November 1 and November 5.