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All should be able to agree, however, that V for Vendetta — with its disturbing echoes of attacks that struck America (9/11/01), Spain (3/11/04), and Britain (7/7/05) — is more volatile and disturbing than any run-of-the-mill comic-book movie.
Words like prescient and timely regularly pop up in discussions about V for Vendetta. And yet, as Silver notes, ''it was sitting there for a long time.''
Flush with cash from the back-to-back blockbusters Lethal Weapon and Die Hard, the producer optioned the rights to V for Vendetta in 1989. Years later, around the time he joined forces with Larry and Andy Wachowski on the 1995 Stallone-Banderas shoot-'em-up Assassins, the brothers, comic-book devotees to the core, penned a screenplay adaptation. But the project gathered dust as the group turned its attention — and rebellious spirit — to the Matrix trilogy.
Then, says James McTeigue, the brothers' longtime first assistant director and friend, ''toward the end of the third film, Revolutions, we started talking about it.'' The Wachowskis thus reloaded V for Vendettain 2003 and tapped McTeigue — a genial 41-year-old Aussie who directed Matrix-themed Heineken and Samsung spots — to helm. He makes his feature debut here. At first, he says, ''it was a very literal adaptation of the graphic novel.'' So over the next year they bounced around ideas and hammered out a draft that contemporized the two-decade-old story — hence, those ultra-current references to subjects like bird flu and ''rendition'' — and got a green light from Warner Bros. in February 2005.
To minimize costs, the producers shot the bulk of the movie in Germany, where they were afforded tax breaks and favorable cofinancing opportunities. (The final price tag: a reasonable $50 million.) And so it was that this story of dictatorial rule played out last spring near Berlin, former home to the Nazi and Communist regimes, in the same Babelsberg Studios soundstage where Fritz Lang shot his dystopian fable Metropolis some 80 years before.
That's where EW first visited the production early last April. At the time, filming was a month along and Portman — whose audition had gotten her hired over peers like Scarlett Johansson and Bryce Dallas Howard — was delivering her dialogue in the Queen's English opposite James Purefoy (HBO's Rome), who had been cast as V. The set was quiet and subdued that gray day, and though he looked completely zonked, Purefoy gamely agreed to sit down for an interview. ''It's hard,'' he said, struggling to summon a smile. ''Acting in a mask is hard. You know, I spent 20 years learning what my face does and now I've had that taken away from me.'' He went on to talk about feeling ''very isolated'' behind the mask: ''Nobody has any idea what you're thinking or feeling.''
As it turned out, the actor's difficulties persisted. A month later, Warner Bros. (a division of EW parent Time Warner) announced that Purefoy had left the film and that Hugo Weaving was taking over the part. ''I was sitting around at home [in Australia],'' Weaving says, ''and James McTeigue rang and said, 'Are you interested in coming to Berlin? How quickly can you get here?''' Today, Silver dismisses the change as ''a nonstory.'' But the replacement of the lead actor in a high-profile Hollywood movie is hardly routine. ''With no disrespect to James [Purefoy], what really happened was we had offered the movie to Hugo first and Hugo was unavailable,'' says Warner Bros. production president Jeff Robinov, referring to Weaving's plans to shoot Eucalyptus opposite Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman. But when that film fell through days before its start Down Under, and it then became clear to everyone back in Germany that Purefoy wasn't working out, they made the switch. (Purefoy's publicist said the actor was unavailable for a follow-up comment.)
