V for Vendetta is hitting cinemas. Is this the most serious ‘action’ movie ever made. John Mosby met with two the movie’s stars, Hugo Weaving and Stephen Fry, to talk comics, chaos, characters, and what they thought of the material.
Hugo, you replaced James Purefoy after filming began. When did you come onboard?
Hugo Weaving: I think they’d done about four weeks of shooting, it was quite late and normally you wouldn’t be able to replace an actor without reshooting everything. We did quite a lot of reshooting, but we didn’t reshoot every scene so there’s still a bit of James in there.
V for Vendetta is considered to be one of the best comics ever produced, but it hasn’t really been known outside the genre. What was your first contact with the material?
HW: The only thing I knew about the book was that cover. I’d seen the cover and heard about it, but I’d never read it. When James McTiegue asked how quickly I could get to Berlin, I said maybe in a couple of days. I had a script sent to me and had to start work within a couple of days. So all my time was with the script, which is how it should be anyway. The book is different material and you, as an actor, have to work from the script anyway. So I never read it during shooting. I dipped into it and read bits of it if there was a scene that wasn’t working or I didn’t understand where I was coming from. It was useful, but I treated it as a completely separate entity.
Stephen Fry: I have to confess that the graphic novel is not a genre I was particularly familiar with. I knew it existed and that people of immense intelligence and discrimination were very fond of them, but I myself had not got into them. People like Paul Gambacinni and Jonathan Ross are fanatical about them and they are both intelligent people, so I read the script and then met with director James McTiegue who gave me a copy of the graphic novel and I just thought it was superb. There’s so much in it, more than an ordinary novel. I’ve always loved… there used to be a whole genre of films in the early ‘70s, like Logan’s Run, Zardoz, Soylent Green and The Omega Man… I think ’dystopian’ is the smart word for them and it went out of fashion and I’m sure there’s sociological and cultural reasons as to why, in the 1980s and 1990s, people were not interested in that kind of film so much. They’re remaking Soylent Green, Logan’s Run? There you are you see! Suddenly the culture’s back.
Arnold Schwarzenegger was attached to I am Legend for a while…
SF: No. Seriously? Oh…well there you are. Bless him. He can’t be The Omega Man and the Governor of California can he? Well, who’s to say?
HW: At first, I couldn’t bring myself to use the term ‘graphic novel’. I thought ‘What does that really mean? It’s a comic!’ But I actually think there is a difference between them. I think graphic novels tend to embody the more serious ideas. I think that’s fair enough. But comic-wise, my favorite was Tintin. I can still reread Tintin today. I never liked superheroes, I wasn’t big on them. They’re too perfect, I don’t like that.
SF: I would borrow other people’s Beano’s and Dandy’s (that was the one with Desperate Dan and Korky the Cat… Lord Snooty was The Beano). There were other ones with names like Victor, with war stories, and I liked the Eagle, before it merged with Look & Learn in a rather odd way, though Look & Learn had the Trigan Empire and the sort.
Hugo, the character is always behind a mask - not the easiest thing to do. Was it something you wore all the time in rehearsals to get the feeling right or just for the actual footage?
HW: I generally rehearsed with the mask off initially, then I’d put it on and we’d keep on rehearsing. Because it just did something different. It was also for her sake too. She didn’t ask me to, but I didn’t want to not have a mask for her. But she shouldn’t see his face. She does have to connect with that mask and what he’s saying, so it didn’t seem right to work with it off. Well when I was working with Natalie I was generally looking at her breasts… because the mask was set in a particular way so that I didn’t have exact eye contact. When I first read the script I thought it was an extremely audacious idea…it’s all well and good to have a masked man in a graphic novel because the characters speak, you read the bubble and then you go on to the next thing. But in a film, where you have a full face mask and talk and move, that’s a completely different thing. But I thought there were many exciting ideas within the script as well and that‘s why I wanted to do it. Trying to find out how do you actually make that work. Obviously James (Purefoy) had had a lot of difficulty with just that and had become obsessed and very worried about the whole thing. So I think, really, I learned a lot from his problems and I also had no real time to think about it. Possibly he had a LOT of time, so I had to just jump in and use my instincts. I was a waterfall behind that mask. I had a wig on and this incredibly thick woollen outfit with no heat escaping. I tend to get very hot anyway and under lights I was boiling.
SF: It’s an extraordinary achievement. It’s very difficult and can easily be overdone, so easy to want to do too much. The very telling movement of the head to one side which we’ve all kind of seen with Jason or the Hallowe’een movies when the villain in the mask leans his head to one side and you know ‘I’m sizing you up before I knife you…’ kind of thing they do in those kind of movies. I thought he used his body well. I thought the voice reminded me a bit of Rowan Atkinson’s. There’s a scene in Blackadder II where Rowan puts a bag over his head (all to do with Mr Ploppy and an execution) and it reminded me because you didn’t see the face but heard the voice.
V’s voice is all important for the character to work, isn’t it?
HW: My voice is a weird mixture of Australian sounds and some English sounds. All these characters (in the film) are English so I had to get rid of my Australian-ness. V is a very theatrical character - when he first meets Evey he was a humble vaudevillian veteran. So I thought of him as an actor, that was his profession before he was thrown in the clink. He obviously loves Shakespeare because he quotes it ad nauseum. I thought he was of a particular…I just think there’s a charm and theatrical-ness about him and I felt that needed to be expressed in the voice. Because there are so many words it needed to have a certain vocal energy and sense of humor. I tried to find all that within a voice, without thinking about it as just a sound. I try not to think about exteriors too much. I tried to think about what was going on inside and hopefully the exterior world will be created. You have to work it all out, especially when you are thrown in at the last minute. I had to make some very graphic decisions. There were probably things that I decided on without thinking about it… probably the first thing I thought of (laughs).
Were you at all apprehensive about the strong political content of this story?
SF: I think like all great revenge stories - and Alan Moore is quite brilliant in his reference to the whole history of what used to be known as the Revengers’ Tragedies - the Jacobean form, the Shakespearian form (Hamlet, of course, is the prime example of a revenge tragedy) in the hands of any proper writer you’ll nearly always find that the one who gets his revenge at the very beginning or later on in the story, somehow loses his soul. That no matter how justified his cause, the action of devoting yourself to revenge expunges your humanity and you nearly always have to die. Those who take revenge ultimately destroy themselves along with whoever they revenge themselves against. V does that, of course. But he’s kind of aware of that. V was killed a long time ago. It’s like the Edmund Dante / Count of Monte Cristo. Somehow it couldn’t really be done any other way. You couldn’t have him as a hero, pulling off his mask and walking off happily into the sunset with Natalie/Evey. It wouldn’t be right, somehow. In order to do the terrible things he does - and no matter how appalling John Hurt’s government is - the things he does are too awful and he is ultimately a terrorist. Thank goodness he doesn’t do all that invasive business of checking buildings are empty first because he’s so good he wouldn’t want to kill anybody innocently… actually he is deluded and crazed to some extent, so it’s right that he dies. He’s the spirit of vengeance. Maybe it IS something to do with the times in which we’re living. Maybe we are more threatened, more paranoid, more concerned by our governments… all that is true. But it’s a perfect story for today.
HW: On the contrary, that was what I was really excited about. As film-makers, actors and writers you have a desire to respond to the world in which you live and express your views about that. We ought to do that in society. There are times within certain countries of the world where you feel less and less able to express your opinions because you are afraid to express them. That’s really what the film is about.
If V for Vendetta is a story about oppression and anarchy, is it as relevant today as it was when it was written?
HW: It’s a really fascinating mixture of serious political ideas which are referencing many, many things we are going through at the moment in the world - they reverberate all the way back to 1605 and before and beyond and back to 1984, back to Thatcherite Britain. It certainly speaks volumes about contemporary United States foreign policy.
SF: We’re not afraid to say things about our government. Whatever we think of the war we have to admit I can say whatever the hell I like about Tony Blair, but could not say what the hell I like about Abu Hanza without thinking ’Careful, Stephen….’ People do forget what terrorism means, it means death and terror. There was a writer in The Sun who rather brilliantly commented on the whole Danish cartoon situation, where everyone was talking po-faced about faith and annoying people…he said ’Why is no-one talking about FEAR?’. Someone said ‘Quite right and I admire the British press for not reproducing the cartoons…’ It had nothing to do with that, it was because they were scared shitless. There are two words that are becoming extremely annoying. One is ‘respect’ and the other is ‘offence’. Taking offence is nothing more than a whine, a moan. ‘Oh, I’m offended!’ Oh, really…well there you are. I’ve got an itch, what else do you want to share? Have I hit you? Have I killed your children? No. I offended you and I meant to. I’m allowed to. There’s no law against it. People offend me…well, so what?
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John Mosby After coming runner-up in the Jackanory Writing Competition, John Mosby eventually became a freelance entertainment journalist and has spent the last fifteen years or more discovering his and others’ delusions of adequacy. He’s written three books including two official tie-ins: X-Men: The Essential Guide and The Making of Barb Wire and has eMCeed conventions in Los Angeles and Sydney. In March 2006, will help host a major Highlander event at the Royal Armouries in Leeds (www.highlanderworldwide.com). He edits Impact magazine - available in most Borders, W H Smith, Barnes & Noble etc. and Verbatim (e-mail him at a.j.mosby@btinternet.com for ordering details)