V for Vendetta

This week, join Chris and Lizzie as they learn how the two Midwestern mavens of the Matrix (facing diminishing box office returns), an unassuming Aussie assistant director, and mogul of mayhem Joel Silver spin Alan Moore’s decidedly English anarchist manifesto (starring a bomb-happy, building-blasting, Guy Fawkes fanatic) into a post-9/11 American studio spectacle. Plus, Natalie Portman's shaved head, practical dominoes, and James Purefoy's desperate desire for eyes. *CORRECTIONS: Natalie Portman was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, not Best Actress, for her role in "Closer". Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Winterbauer?

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• 0:31Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:15Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Hello and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a politically charged, perhaps risky one to make, I would assume, but I think a very good one. I am one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, as always, joined by Chris Winterbauer. Chris, how you doing? What do you got for us today?

• 2:24Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm doing fantastic. We are discussing a favorite of mine, actually, which is 2006's V for Vendetta, as Lizzie mentioned, a very politically charged film, although not charged enough in the eyes of some. And we will get to many of the interesting philosophical debates around the film and its intentions and the intentions of its creators and the original graphic novel behind it. But mostly, Lizzie, this film set the world on fire due to Natalie Portman's shaved head. I'm not sure if you remember that, but it was a-

• 2:57Lizzie Bassett?

  I do remember it.

• 2:58Chris Winterbauer?

  It was a very big deal.

• 2:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Gotta tell you, she looks great with a shaved head. I wish I looked like that with a shaved head. I would not have hair.

• 3:06Chris Winterbauer?

  She does. Still beautiful, even with the shaved head. And rocked it at Cannes back in 2005. So she was sporting it in public.

• 3:15Lizzie Bassett?

  I have one quick question before we start, which is, how old is she in this?

• 3:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Natalie Portman was born in 1981, so she would have been 24 or 25 when they were shooting V for Vendetta.

• 3:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 3:25Chris Winterbauer?

  So, Lizzie, had you seen V for Vendetta before? And what were your thoughts upon watching or rewatching it for the podcast?

• 3:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, I had seen it. I'm pretty sure I saw this in theaters when it came out, or if not, shortly thereafter via a rental. I remember thinking when it came out that I was like, that was fun, but that feels very overblown. I understand that they're trying to, you know, make a political message with this, but in all of my genius at however old I was, 16 years old, I was like, this feels like a bit much. However, upon rewatching it in 2025, I was like, oh, oh, no, it's all happened. It's all happening. It feels more of its moment now, I think, than it did when it came out in 2005. And I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed it both times. I think I enjoyed it more this time.

• 4:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I also saw this movie in theaters. I was and remain a huge Wachowski Sisters fan. The Matrix was, for so many millennial folks, defining. And I realized I was living in the Matrix this whole time, which I still, I stand by that movie. I think it's arguably the most influential film of the 90s. And we'll talk more about that.

• 4:36Lizzie Bassett?

  By the way, I will not derail us farther on this, but the irony of the fact that something that the Wachowski Sisters created spawned the Reddit threads of red pill, just

• 4:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 4:45Lizzie Bassett?

  My mind cannot wrap itself around that.

• 4:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, I'm sure like many people had been kind of let down by the Matrix sequels. I enjoyed Reloaded. Revolutions was a bit of a, a bit of a soupy mess by the end. And so I was really excited for V for Vendetta, even though the Wachowskis did not direct it, as we'll discuss. But I saw it in theaters and I really loved it, even though I didn't understand

• 5:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 5:07Chris Winterbauer?

  so much about it. In particular, the anti LGBTQ sentiments of the government that the Wachowskis were clearly exploring, and especially the Valerie sequence that comes midway through the movie. Lizzie, I'm sure you remember this. This is the sequence in which Natalie Portman's character, Evie, is reading the letter from what is revealed to be V's former cellmate, or one cell over, who was a lesbian actress. And she's telling her life story. And she has a very beautiful explanation of kind of the last inch of her own integrity, which no one can take from her. So it's a movie that I've rewatched over the years, and it's just grown and grown on me. I think it's a little flawed. I think it's a little campy at times.

• 5:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Totally.

• 5:48Chris Winterbauer?

  There are some structural issues, but I find it kind of equally thrilling and emotional and brainy at the same time. And I think that's a really potent combination. And I just, I still, I cried when I rewatched it. This, I just, I love so much about this movie. And I read the graphic novel that it's based on, and I now appreciate the criticism of the film more. And yet I still love the movie. And we'll get to all of the decisions that were made to change it. And Lizzie, you mentioned how prescient it is. Decisions that the Wachowskis made both made it more prescient, but also there are things from the graphic novel that were omitted that we'll get to that are also very prescient today.

• 6:23Lizzie Bassett?

  I have one bone to pick with this movie.

• 6:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Please.

• 6:26Lizzie Bassett?

  And I, I love her.

• 6:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Pick away.

• 6:27Lizzie Bassett?

  I think she's a great actress.

• 6:29Chris Winterbauer?

  I know what you're going for. I know what you're getting at, governor.

• 6:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, Natalie Portman's British accent is pretty rough in this. Which, you know what? By the time we were halfway through, I was like, nah, I don't care. But at the beginning, I was like, ooh. Oh.

• 6:44Chris Winterbauer?

  I think her performance is great. Even, even Chris, master of accents, as you guys know, struggles a little bit with it. It was, we'll just get it out of the way now.

• 6:54Lizzie Bassett?

  It's bad.

• 6:54Chris Winterbauer?

  It offended UK critics much more than American critics. It did end up on a number of lists of worst accents, you know, of the year, even though her performance was praised.

• 7:03Lizzie Bassett?

  I think that is fair criticism. It's rough.

• 7:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Are you like a crazy person?

• 7:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Everything sort of sounds like theirs. And it verged on like a Boston Mark Wahlberg accent at times.

• 7:17Chris Winterbauer?

  It was loose. I just, I blame it on George Lucas. She was coming off of Star Wars where she had been like pushed to no affect whatsoever. And so she was just exploring the expressiveness of the human voice in this film.

• 7:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course.

• 7:31Chris Winterbauer?

  All right. A brief disclaimer, Lizzie, I will be quoting author Alan Moore a number of times in this episode. If you guys are unfamiliar with Alan Moore, he is prone to, at times, flowery. You could call it hyperbolic, depending on your sensibilities. Offensive language at times may be reflective of a different era, at others indicative of his more anarchic sensibilities. I will not be centering his speech in any way.

• 7:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 7:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Just wanted to get that out of the way. All right. The details. V for Vendetta is a 2006 dystopian thriller directed by James McTeague. It is based on the graphic novel by an uncredited Alan Moore and the credited David Lloyd, adapted for the screen by the Wachowski sisters. It was produced by Joel Silver and Grant Hill. It stars Natalie Portman as Eevee Hammond, Stephen Ray as Chief Inspector Finch, Stephen Fry as Gordon Dietrich, John Hurt as Adam Sutler, and of course Hugo Weaving as the eponymous V. It was distributed by Warner Brothers and the IMDb logline reads,

• 8:38Chris Winterbauer?

  "In a future British dystopian society, a shadowy freedom fighter known only by the alias of V plots to overthrow the tyrannical government with the help of a young woman."

• 8:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, I have one other bone to pick with this that I forgot to mention.

• 8:53Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, we're just picking them bones, please.

• 8:56Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't love that there are romantic implications. And I don't know if that's in the graphic novel or not. That's the one thing in this movie that doesn't really work for me is when it's, you know, she's sort of like kissing him at the end. And it's like, it's crossed the boundary from sort of either companion, you know, teacher, student to something that's trying to be kind of like they're in love. And I just don't buy it. It doesn't work for me.

• 9:20Chris Winterbauer?

  So it's interesting you mention that because I definitely saw that as a complaint of fans of the graphic novel on some of the early message boards that I was looking at around the film. But then I read the graphic novel. And interestingly enough, Evie does kiss V kisses his mask.

• 9:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 9:37Chris Winterbauer?

  In the back half of the graphic novel. But to your point, I think in the graphic novel, it's played much more as a moment of gratitude following V freeing her mind.

• 9:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 9:48Chris Winterbauer?

  After her imprisonment. And there really isn't a romantic valence. And for me, I agree, one of the reasons it feels odd in the film is I always read V's character as gay. I don't know if that's right. I just, since in the film, it's minorities in the LGBTQ community that are being rounded up at Lark Hill, I just assume that because V is voiced by a white man, he must be a non hetero white man. Again, I may be way off base. And listeners, if you disagree with us, or if you have some insider information, please shoot us a note, [email protected]. All right. Sources for today's episode include, but are not limited to, Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore by Lance

• 10:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Parkin, interviews with Alan Moore, David Lloyd, Joel Silver, James McTeague, the Wachowski sisters, although those are really hard to come by, they're very private, coverage from the New York Times, Vulture, Various Trades, and more. And I'd like to give a special shout out to writer, academic, and critic Elizabeth Sandifer and her site, aruditorimpress.com. Her insights into Alan Moore, Beaver Vendetta, trans representation, and more were really illuminating and helpful as I was putting together this episode. So. The question remains, Lizzie, how did two Midwestern mavens of the Matrix facing diminishing box office returns, an unassuming Aussie assistant director, and, as we've mentioned,

• 11:10Chris Winterbauer?

  mogul of mayhem Joel Silver, spin Alan Moore's decidedly English anarchist manifesto, starring a bomb happy, building blasting Guy Fawkes fanatic into a post 9/11 American studio spectacle?

• 11:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 11:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Right?

• 11:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, and it is very British still, which I think also may have been why, watching it at 16, I was like, I don't know what that building is.

• 11:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, Alan Moore would say it's not British at all, but we'll get into his criticisms and what went wrong, much as we will learn along the way to getting this movie made. So, the story behind V's mask begins a few thousand miles away from Hollywood, Lizzie, in the United Kingdom, where a man named Dez Skin was struggling to achieve what nearly all our characters yearn for in this story: control. Dez, known as the British Stan Lee, had left Marvel Comics in 1981 to produce his own comics magazine Warrior. At this time, most, but not all, Marvel UK comics were just reprints of American material. And so Skin wanted to showcase British characters made by British creators. He wanted the creators to retain the rights to their work.

• 12:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Dez's desire to create something independent seems to have stemmed from a character that he was asked to make in 1979 for Marvel called Night Raven. Night Raven began as a violent, moody period piece. It was a descendant of the Shadow and the Spirit. These were 30s and 40s pulp magazine and comic heroes with alter egos that fought crime and beat the crap out of the bad guys and got knocked down a lot. And Night Raven was evocative of V in a couple of ways. Perhaps most obviously, he had an emblem on his chest that was a V encased in a circle. It was supposed to evoke the wings of a sparrow.

• 12:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm.

• 12:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, Stan Lee wasn't a fan, and he basically stripped everything that Dez Skin liked from this character and comic strip. He toned down the violence, he changed the art style. So Warrior Magazine is designed to fix these problems. Artists should not be forced to self censor and compromise. So Dez invites David Lloyd, who had been the original artist on Night Raven, to make a new Night Raven-type series for Warrior Magazine. Uncompromising, morally ambiguous, anarchic, and David Lloyd knows exactly who he needs to bring in to write this comic: Alan Moore. Now, Lizzie, I'm sure you know Alan Moore's name from one comic probably in particular he's most famous for? I don't.

• 13:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay, Watchmen. Okay, okay. Is the... Duh. He's widely known as the mind behind Watchmen, and I would argue a deconstruction of superhero tropes, generally speaking. Okay. As Parkin writes in his book, "Many of his early series imposed realism on hokey characters like Marvel Man, Swamp Thing, Batman and the Joker, reimagining their storybook worlds as unsentimental places of midlife crisis, economic reality, and brutal, often sexual violence." End quote. So Moore was always willing to color outside the lines when it came to comic books. He was born in November of 1953 into a working-class family. He's a voracious reader, first books, then comic strips. He lost interest in school.

• 14:26Chris Winterbauer?

  He basically thinks, "School is just trying to indoctrinate me with punctuality and obedience, and I am not interested in that." He made his own fanzine. He got expelled for dealing LSD. He called himself "the world's most inept LSD dealer," which makes sense, he got caught. He then drifted through low-wage jobs until sometime around 1978, when he decided he was gonna have a go at an artistic career. And so the next few years, he's writing, drawing, collecting unemployment, gets married, he has his first daughter Leah by this point, and he quickly realized he's a better writer than he is artist. And so he's gonna focus more on writing and partner with artists. So the comic community...

• 15:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Quickly realized that Moore was very, very talented and that he had a very different voice. So he started writing for Marvel UK and then 2000 AD, which was a British sci-fi weekly comic magazine. And he honed his storytelling through these four to five-page stories that he was being offered. But he really wanted a dedicated strip. He wanted something of his own, a longer-form story that he could tell. So V for Vendetta was not his first ongoing story, but it's arguably the story in which he began to reach the extraordinary highs, the potential that people saw in him. And so Lloyd brings Moore in, and Moore's intrigued by Lloyd's pitch. And there was even a character that he'd worked on back in the 70s that kind of fit the mold for this story called "The Doll." And I'll

• 15:49Chris Winterbauer?

  read the description here. "The Doll was, quote, 'a freakish terrorist in whiteface makeup who waged a war upon a totalitarian state sometime in the late 1980s. He had created it for a competition for DC Thompson, and, quote, 'DC Thompson decided a transsexual terrorist wasn't quite what they were looking for,' end quote." So Moore has a good sense of humor with most of these things, and he knows that he's playing outside the sandbox that most people will accept. So he also drew from a character called Five, trapped in an abandoned space opera project. And this idea was basically a mental patient of undefined but unusual abilities who had been kept in a particular room, Room Five.

• 16:32Chris Winterbauer?

  So you can start to see these characters coalescing into what V will be. He came up with the name Vendetta and wanted to set the strip in the 1930s, but David Lloyd said, "No, no, no, no, no. Pull it up to the 90s. We don't want to get boxed in. It's better to write into the future where we can make up the rules of our world." Smart. And we can avoid doing extensive research about the 1930s, which Right. Sounds like a slog. Lloyd pulled from a sample that he'd created, which featured an urban gorilla, G-U-E-R-I-L-L-A. Yeah, I figured that out. Well, it's comics. You never know.

• 17:05Lizzie Bassett?

  That's true.

• 17:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Fighting future fascists in the 1990s in a totalitarian state. And so Alan Moore loved this anti-fascist comic. It uses science fiction to talk about threats to the present. And this is all under Thatcher's very conservative British government.

• 17:20Lizzie Bassett?

  The Iron Lady, yes.

• 17:21Chris Winterbauer?

  So it was David Lloyd who came up with V's iconic mask. They were struggling to nail down the look of the character, and he pitched the Guy Fawkes mask as a joke.

• 17:29Lizzie Bassett?

  So was that a common mask prior to this?

• 17:33Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm so glad you asked. And if there are any friends across the pond listening, feel free to send us a note at [email protected] with any corrections here, but I think I understand this, generally speaking. So the gunpowder plot was an attempt by a group of Catholics to assassinate King James in the name of opposing religious oppression. So this was obviously post-Reformation. Protestantism is the name of the game in the United Kingdom, and Catholics are feeling like they are being put down. The plot fails, and a year later, on November 5, 1606, the state mandates a big celebration. Bonfires, church services to celebrate the survival of the king and the failure of the plot. And they burn effigies of Guy Fawkes. This then metastasizes over the years and morphs into a more secular celebration

• 18:18Chris Winterbauer?

  that by the 1980s is something not dissimilar, it seems like, from Halloween, right? Children get masks of Guy Fawkes. They're usually made out of paper. And he's become kind of a generic arch-villain bogeyman. I don't get the sense that there's a strong political valence associated with the mask at the time that Moore and Lloyd are using it for their graphic novel. Which is interesting, he'd kind of become a joke, even though Guy Fawkes was no joke. He was described by author Antonia Fraser as "a man of action, capable of intelligent argument as well as physical endurance, somewhat to the surprise of his enemies." Could be a really good description for V, I would say. Now Alan Moore thought this was a brilliant idea. It tied together the whole Britishness of the entire plot,

• 19:03Chris Winterbauer?

  because it was a very British symbol. Quick aside, Guy Fawkes was not the leader of the gunpowder plot, Lizzie. This was an attempt to assassinate King James by blowing up the House of Lords on November 5, 1605. But he was the one who was caught guarding 36 barrels of gunpowder red-handed. He was the only one caught red-handed. And so he became synonymous with the plot, hence his face.

• 19:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Got it. So the least talented guy in the plot is...

• 19:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Well...

• 19:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Sorry. That's terrible. Listen, Guy Fawkes, you did it. I'm just saying, if it's the one you caught, he's probably not the mastermind.

• 19:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay. But to be fair to Guy Fawkes, four of his co-conspirators were killed a few days after the plot was discovered in a shootout with the Sheriff of Worcester, and then eight were eventually hanged, drawn, and quartered in January of 1606. That included Fox. And there's one additional conspirator who I believe died of an illness in the intervening months, but between discovery and execution.

• 20:00Lizzie Bassett?

  The least talented terrorist, yes.

• 20:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Moore and Lloyd wanted a strip that was as morally ambiguous and complex as it was starkly illustrated. And the illustration style is really cool on this, Lizzie. It's evocative of something like Sin City that would come a lot later. All high contrast, black and white. The original had no color. And then the story is all shades of gray. Lizzie, in this morass of gray morality, Moore could play with a highly explosive political idea that he held close to his heart, and one that honestly, I didn't know a lot about as a political movement until I was researching this episode, which is anarchy, specifically anarchism. So I'm going to play you a clip of Moore speaking on BBC Four's Comics Britannia series on anarchism, the rejection of formal coercive authority, as it's described back in 2007.

• 20:49Speaker 02

  Anarchy is, and always has been, a romance. It is clearly the best way and the only morally sensible way to run the world. That everybody should be the master of their own destiny. Everybody should be their own leader. This is something that I still believe. I think that even a cursory look around the world at the moment, particularly at the moment, would reveal that it is about 0.00001%.

• 21:28Speaker 02

  Of the world's population that causes ninety nine point nine nine nine nine nine percent of the world's problems. And that tiny percentage, it's not the Jewish banking conspiracy. It's not the asylum seekers. It's not the secret homosexual conspiracy running Hollywood. It's not even the Scientologists. It is leaders.

• 21:52Chris Winterbauer?

  I really like Moore. He's very charismatic. He's very droll.

• 21:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Scientology is an interesting example in that setup, though, I would, I would argue, considering, you know, he says it's not even the Scientologists, it's the leaders. But within Scientology, I think you have a very particular example of what the problems of unregulated power can be.

• 22:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Sure. You raise an excellent point, which is anarchism seeks the abolishment of hierarchy and power structures, and specifically power hoarding. And that is very important to Moore, and I think important to the story, and I don't think is something that comes through in the film.

• 22:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm.

• 22:31Chris Winterbauer?

  And is a big point of contention. And we'll talk about, I think, what the Wachowskis were specifically trying to do and how it differs from Moore. So, interestingly, Lloyd, David Lloyd, the artist behind V for Vendetta, didn't believe that anarchism was possible. He feels, and has said, that there has never been an instance of human self-organizing in which people didn't turn to somebody else for instruction. So we always prop somebody up as a leader. So I believe that even though Moore holds it out as an ideal, Lloyd suggests we don't exist in natural cooperative, tribe-like states like that. We actually are our own worst enemies.

• 23:06Lizzie Bassett?

  I think that's true.

• 23:07Chris Winterbauer?

  In the terms of electing leadership. So, this tension between the two, I think, helped power the story and helped Moore challenge his own beliefs. As he later said, quote, "I didn't want to just come into this as a self-confessed anarchist and say, right, here's this anarchist, he is the good guy. Here's all these bad fascists, they're the bad guys. I mean, that's trivial and insulting to the reader. I wanted to present some of the fascists as being ordinary and in some instances even likable human beings," end quote. And so, I do- You want to say probably the biggest difference between the film and the graphic novel is the fact that the bad guys in the film are far more outlandishly portrayed. And I would argue kind of more one note Nazi-esque characters than in the graphic

• 23:52Chris Winterbauer?

  novel, which is a much more complicated assortment of folks, as he said, doing terrible things for at times understandable reasons.

• 24:06Chris Winterbauer?

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• 26:47Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm assuming, Lizzie, you've never read the comic. No, I have not. Or the graphic novel before. So let's briefly discuss some of the differences. Guys, if you want to read the graphic novel and avoid spoilers, scrub about a minute and a half, two minutes from now. But I think it's important to understand. So, comic is set in the late 1990s, film takes place in the 2020s. The precipitating events of the story are not a synthesized pandemic as they are in the film. It's nuclear annihilation and thus nuclear winter in the comics, in the graphic novel, I mean. Very much a Cold War feel. Okay. Norse Fire, the same political group in both, is clearly a white supremacist group, first and foremost, in the graphic novel. They rise from the vacuum of a gang-controlled

• 27:28Chris Winterbauer?

  society after the government has fallen. Homosexuals are mentioned as a targeted group, and you still have the Valerie sequence right in the middle. But Norse Fire's focus is just as much, if not more, on other racial groups. And so the purity propaganda is very much racial purity in the graphic novel. Okay. There are tons of subplots that get omitted from the film because it's a much more complicated story. Perhaps most important, Evie is 16 in the graphic novel. She is an orphan who is resorting to prostitution when we meet her at the beginning of the story. So Lizzie, when she's going to meet Gordon Dietrich in the beginning of the film on kind of a date, maybe a casting couch sort of situation, she assumes.

• 28:12Chris Winterbauer?

  In the comic graphic novel, she's actually going to solicit a man for basically offering her services in an attempt to survive. And she inadvertently propositions a fingerman in the alley. They're going to murder her and V saves her.

• 28:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Got it.

• 28:25Chris Winterbauer?

  So similar setup. She's much younger. She arcs from frightened child to V's ideological heir. She literally takes up his mask at the end and becomes the next V. Like you mentioned, it's a much more pseudo parent, child, teacher, mentor, mentee relationship than in the film.

• 28:42Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm getting Leon the Professional vibes more versus what they show in the movie.

• 28:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Or at least the American cut of Leon the Professional. I have not seen the French cut, but I've heard it's actually more erotic in that one, unfortunately. Okay, very important. The graphic novel features a mainframe computer called Fate, which the government uses to hoover up all of the information that they're collecting through its surveillance state. And it's even so powerful, it can predict short-term probabilistic events like rainfall and traffic and civil unrest. It's very evocative of artificial intelligence or a large learning model. And so even though it was eliminated from the feature, when you reread the graphic novel, it actually feels very prescient for today. Adam Susan, not Sutler, is the supreme leader who basically controls Fate, the computer.

• 29:30Chris Winterbauer?

  And he's basically in love with this computer. It's a very interesting relationship, anthropomorphized relationship. They composite a bunch of villains into one henchman, Creedy, you know, in the film. And then, again, perhaps most importantly, V does not seek to create something new or to revert power to the people. He literally seeks to destroy the existing hierarchy and institutions to reduce everything to rubble so that somebody can then make something new after he's deceased.

• 30:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 30:01Chris Winterbauer?

  So he sees his role as destroyer to make room for creator.

• 30:05Lizzie Bassett?

  I think that comes through a bit in the end of the movie, the very, very end.

• 30:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I do think the film, what they're saying is, I would argue, the film calls for liberal revolution, and liberal revolution is reclaiming power from the government. Anarchist revolution is destruction of the state so that people can rebuild a flat organization, you know, on top of it. All right. First chapter of V for Vendetta is published in March of 1982 in Warrior Magazine, and as early as 1984, Lloyd says that he and Moore were interested in potentially selling it as a movie or TV series, basically for money. Lloyd says they went as far as sending out proposals, but they never solicited any interest, probably because this was very explosive anarchist, anti-conservative material during Thatcher's, you know.

• 30:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Does not scream commercially profitable.

• 30:53Chris Winterbauer?

  It doesn't. It also, it looks very expensive. This is a vast world that they're exploring. So Moore says, for his part, that he was always dismissive of adaptations. He believes that he created it as a graphic novel, it should exist as a graphic novel. So V for Vendetta continues through February of 1985 as a serial, but Warrior Magazine collapsed and the story was left unfinished. The Valerie chapter was actually the second to last chapter to be published. So then, in the meantime, Moore has been working with DC on Swamp Thing and Superman. And in late 1986, we're going to meet one of our longtime friends of the pod. Moore and artist Dave Gibbons of Watchmen, Dave Gibbons Illustrated Watchmen, met with

• 31:33Chris Winterbauer?

  DC president Jeanette Kahn in London to discuss a potential Watchmen movie with an explosive American producer.

• 31:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Joel Silver.

• 31:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Joel Silver.

• 31:46Lizzie Bassett?

  We're gonna make it an action film.

• 31:49Chris Winterbauer?

  So, fresh off 48 Hours Commando and Weird Science, and about to go into Predator, Silver asked Moore to write a Watchmen script for 20th Century Fox under Lawrence Gordon's Largo Entertainment. But Moore passed. He just said, "I'm too busy." And he just clearly was not interested in movies. Silver was undeterred. He optioned Watchmen and the incomplete V for Vendetta.

• 32:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm.

• 32:15Chris Winterbauer?

  So even though, I mean, he's bombastic, he's excessive in his taste, both on-screen and off, Silver's always had a very keen eye for, I think, Smart Action Fair.

• 32:24Lizzie Bassett?

  He does.

• 32:25Chris Winterbauer?

  So he later said, "When I bought it, no one knew what they had. They didn't know what they had. V was then only available in England. It hadn't come to America yet. So we acquired them both. And over the years, I was not able to hold on to Watchmen, but I did hold on to V." And so basically, it sounds like what happened was Silver ended up going to Warner Brothers, the Largo deal under 20th Century Fox, I think, ended or fell apart. He fell off the legal chain of title with Watchmen, but he was able to bring V with him to Warner Brothers, probably because nobody else was as interested as he was. Watchmen was the obvious movie to adapt. I think V was the more difficult one.

• 32:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, and Watchmen was a much more independently successful graphic novel, right?

• 33:03Chris Winterbauer?

  It was. Yes. V was successful, but not nearly as successful as Watchmen. I should also mention that Time Warner is the parent company of both Warner Brothers and DC. So keep that in mind as we move forward. So V for Vendetta is unfinished, and in early 1988, DC and Moore come to an agreement. Basically, they'll pay for him to finish V for Vendetta, and then, when they stop publishing it, the rights will revert to him. So he will own it after they stop printing it, basically.

• 33:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Pretty good deal.

• 33:33Chris Winterbauer?

  So he and Lloyd complete the series, and the first color issues hit US shelves later that year. And it is worth mentioning, this is a moment when anti-homosexual discrimination was peaking in the United Kingdom. So this was largely as a result of the, or in response to, the AIDS crisis. And I do want to mention specifically Clause 28, or Section 28, which was passed in the spring of 1988, was an amendment that said, "A local authority shall not, A, intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with that intention, and B, promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship."

• 34:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 34:13Chris Winterbauer?

  And this actually, it's interesting, Moore had, in some senses, predicted the future with the Valerie sequence. I assumed the Valerie sequence was written after Clause 28. He had written it almost four years before. And so, again, more ahead of the times in a dark sense. So, they finished V for Vendetta in 89, and basically Moore's relationship with DC falls apart really quickly. And it seems like what it boils down to is, he realized that DC saying the rights would revert to him was bullshit. They would just print V for Vendetta and Watchmen in limited quantities forever, to make sure that he would never get the rights back to either of these properties.

• 34:54Chris Winterbauer?

  As he said, "You have managed to successfully swindle me, and so I will never work for you again." And he left DC. Wow. So meanwhile, Joel Silver commissioned a draft that was, according to David Lloyd, a disaster. Just how he likes them. I couldn't find this draft, but Lizzie, you mentioned how British it is. Well, it seems like Joel Silver agreed, and this is Moore's description of the draft. Quote, "They were going to change it to Paul Revere, and it wasn't going to happen in London, because that's just going to confuse Americans who can't remember that there's more than one country in the world." Sure can't. So perhaps it's going to be set in New York, and that political stuff about fascism, that doesn't really play, so we'll have an American that's taken over by the commies." Next up was Roadhouse Scribe, Hilary Henkin. She moved to the action, back to the United Kingdom,

• 35:39Chris Winterbauer?

  but it seems like she went a little over the top with some of the sci-fi, satirical stuff. It's unclear if it's like a dark comedy anymore. I wasn't able to find a copy of this version, but I found some summaries that seem reliable. So like, the Norse Fire Division headquarters, the ear, the nose, et cetera, right? Which are meant to denote, listening, watching, are literally shaped like their names. The ear looks like an ear, the nose looks like a nose. Good. The finger men are half goat, half human hybrids. What? Don't know why. Where'd they come from? Unclear. Evie is tortured by the government, so V does not torture her in this version. He's also revealed to be her father, which is like, a one-page, like, red herring they faint at in the graphic novel, but they just go for it here. Okay.

• 36:24Chris Winterbauer?

  They do age her up, and she's a TV employee, I believe, in this one, so that did survive. And V is more emotional and eccentric, which is also something that I think survives to the Wachowski sisters film. V is far more cold and ideologically driven in the graphic novel than in the final.

• 36:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Less driven by The Count of Monte Cristo?

• 36:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes. Yeah, he's, he's far more eccentric. I like it in the film.

• 36:48Lizzie Bassett?

  He has shades of gray gardens in, in the movie.

• 36:50Chris Winterbauer?

  I love it. Yeah, he's going crazy in the shadow gallery, as it's called. It was described as Les Misérables meets A Clockwork Orange in an LA Times article from 1993. And what's interesting is there is a spray painted image of the little girl from Les Misérables on one of the walls during a riot towards the end of the graphic novel. They say they're seeking a strong director, maybe Terry Gilliam, perhaps Paul Verhoeven. Again, Alan Moore hated it. Quote, "As I said at the time, if you wanted to do a film about goat policemen, then why the fuck didn't you just buy the option to Rupert Bear?" End quote.

• 37:24Chris Winterbauer?

  So good. So the project fails to find a director. It doesn't attract financing. Because little did Silver or Alan Moore know, the minds that would bring V for Vendetta to the screen were also working in the comics, Lizzie, just not at DC, but at Marvel. So like Alan Moore, in the early 90s, the Wachowski sisters were learning that everything came down to control. The Chicago-born sisters had dropped out of college in the late 1980s, started a construction and house painting business, and then decided to take a crack at screenwriting after reading Roger Corman's How I Made 100 Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime.

• 38:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Has there ever been someone on this podcast that didn't learn from Roger Corman?

• 38:05Chris Winterbauer?

  No, and it's the best. So they wrote comics for Marvel while working on their original scripts. Most importantly, for this moment, The Matrix, of course, and Assassins. Now, by, by 1994, they'd finished the scripts, landed an agent, signed a multi-script deal with Warner Brothers under the control of Lorenzo di Bonaventura at the time, and Joel Silver. Joel Silver was an early fan of the Wachowski's writing and The Matrix. From the outside, this looked like a fairy tale. From the inside, not so much. Assassins, which I'm sure you haven't seen. Sure haven't. Was their first film to make it to the screen. It's not very good. It actually, I think it's pretty fun.

• 38:48Chris Winterbauer?

  It stars Sylvester Stallone as the haunted number one assassin in the world, which is said multiple times. Like he, like there's a ranking and he is number one. All right, I'm warming up to it. Yeah, it's kind of John Wick before John Wick, but before they figured out how to make it good at all. Antonio Banderas is his biggest fan and number one rival. And Julianne Moore is Seattle-based computer hacker Elektra, and she's Sylvester's next target. I'm not nodding. And it's directed by Richard Donner. It's so out there. So basically, the finished movie doesn't really resemble the script that the Wachowskis had written. And they shared in a rare 1996 interview that they were deeply disappointed with this process. This is Lana.

• 39:32Chris Winterbauer?

  The film was not really based on the screenplay. The one thing that sort of bothered us is that people would blame us for the screenplay. And it's like Richard Donner is one of the few directors in Hollywood that can make whatever movie he wants exactly the way he wants it. No one will stop him, and that's essentially what happened. He brought in Brian Helgeland, who is maybe best known for LA Confidential. He hadn't written that at the time, but now. And they totally rewrote the script. We tried to take our names off of it, but the WGA doesn't let you, so our names are forever there. And I verified that, so they did try to separate themselves from the project. For good reason. It did not perform very well. It was panned by critics. Stallone got a razzie. And the Wachowskis learned a valuable lesson.

• 40:14Chris Winterbauer?

  If they wanted to tell stories their way, if they wanted control, they had to direct. So they obviously wanted to direct The Matrix, but Warner Brothers wasn't going to let that happen, not with the budget that the Wachowskis were demanding to make that film the right way. It was going to be a $70 million movie, and first time directors, it's a big ask. Now Warner Brothers, let's see, did not make any money off of Assassins. But executive producer Dino Delarente's did. He basically, I believe, optioned the script, flipped it to Warner Brothers for a bunch of money, pre-sold the foreign rights, and like walked away with millions before everybody else lost money on it. That man made so much money.

• 40:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. He's a mastermind of stinkers, too, of like making money off of stinkers. He is. Good for him. Oh, 100%. He had a soft spot for the Wachowskis, so they approached him about directing their next film. But they were nervous because the movie was about lesbians. And Dino De Laurentiis is an old school patriarch. As Lana said in 1996, "We were sort of beating around the bush trying to explain it. There's a woman, and then there's another woman." Dino stopped us and was like, in an Italian accent, "This the first woman? She is a lesbian?" And we were like, "Yeah." "This the second woman? She is a lesbian?" Um, yeah, she was. Then he claps his hands together and says, "Done, we have a deal."

• 41:38Lizzie Bassett?

  What?

• 41:39Chris Winterbauer?

  And thus, 1996's Bound was born, which, guys, if you have not seen, I cannot recommend it enough. You can absolutely see how the Wachowskis are establishing their visual style. It stars a fantastic Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly as two women who strike up a passionate love affair and plan on lifting $2 million in mob money off of Tilly's boyfriend, Joe Panteliano, Joey Pants, who just showed up in The Last of Us.

• 42:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Joey Pants, of course, also shows up in The Matrix as well.

• 42:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly, as Cypher.

• 42:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Also, shout out to Jennifer Tilly for being one of the best friend ofs ever on Beverly Hills Housewives.

• 42:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Absolutely.

• 42:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Make her a full cast member. Continue.

• 42:16Chris Winterbauer?

  It's really, it's a really, really tight-taut little erotic thriller of the 90s. It's, it's very underrated. So, sometime around this moment, the Wachowski sisters are under a writing contract for Warner Brothers. They're pushing to get a chance to direct The Matrix. Joel Silver hands them a graphic novel to take a crack at. V for Vendetta. So the Wachowskis give it a go. David Lloyd actually said of this version that it stuck very close to the source material. I did read some reviews that kind of panned it, but I haven't been able to get a copy of it. Bound comes out in late 1996. It's not a commercial hit, but it is a critical hit. And it proved that the Wachowskis could direct. And it really does. It's stylish, it's noir, it's sexy.

• 42:57Chris Winterbauer?

  So, six months later, and what they had to do in those six months is a story for The Matrix, they got The Matrix greenlit. V for Vendetta is pushed to the side. Of course, Lizzie, The Matrix is a culture-shifting smash.

• 43:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 43:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Warner Brothers and Silver Pictures quickly sign the Wachowskis to a much more lucrative long-term deal. And in 1999, the LA Times speculated that V for Vendetta could be their next film. But of course Warner Brothers said, absolutely not, we need to make Fifteen more Matrix films. As soon as possible and release them within six months of each other to capitalize on this money train before it leaves the station. So four years, two more films, over 300 shooting days, one short film anthology, one documentary, multiple comics, and a video game later. The Wachowskis were auteur millionaires and they were They need a nap. They were exhausted. So in 2003, they're in post-production on The Matrix Revolutions,

• 43:56Chris Winterbauer?

  and I want to make clear, they're exceedingly private people, and increasingly so across the production of The Matrix trilogy. According to some sources, they hadn't given an interview in four years. The official production notes on the original Matrix said that the two, quote, "have been working together for more than 30 years. Little else is known about them." End quote. And I think Warner Brothers liked that the mystery of the Wachowskis helped fuel the fandom for the films, right? The films are loaded with easter eggs and references to other films and martial arts and philosophy. It's very much a pastiche, and I think people liked observing and trying to figure out what's going on with those Wachowskis. They're so mysterious. Now, there'd been a lot of tabloid rumors at the time, a relationship with a

• 44:37Chris Winterbauer?

  dominatrix, a very real divorce. There was a very public battle with actor Marcus Chong. I'm not sure if you remember this, Lizzie, he plays Tank in the first film. Oh, I do vaguely remember this. He did not return for the second and third. So much had changed since the Wachowskis first took a pass at V for Vendetta, but its salience had not. In the light of post-9/11 policies like the Patriot Act and George Bush's invasion of Iraq eventually and Afghanistan, the extraordinary powers granted to the presidency by Congress, all of a sudden, this comic book felt like it was coming full circle. So they gave a copy of V to their Matrix trilogy first assistant director, James McTeague. They said, James, do you

• 45:19Chris Winterbauer?

  think this would make a good movie? And he said, I think it could. I really like James McTeague, and he's so unassuming and he's so talented. And they say, well, we've actually written the script. And he says, oh, sounds great. And I'm sure he's just assuming, well, I've got my next, you know, first day job. And they say, do you want to direct it? We'll produce it. Oh. Which I cannot describe the distance between assistant directors and directors professionally well enough. There is such a wall put up in our industry between the different roles that you can have on a film set. And so even though back in the studio days, there are a lot of directors that came up as assistant directors, Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa, Robert Aldrich, Guy Hamilton. In modern Hollywood, this is extremely rare. If you

• 46:02Chris Winterbauer?

  don't come in fully fledged as a director, as an auteur, it's really hard to get the opportunity to move into that role.

• 46:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Which is strange. It doesn't make any sense. Because you would think that you would want your director to have learned all of the onset skills they would be getting as a first AD, but no, it's like they want you to come in fresh with your own bad ideas.

• 46:22Chris Winterbauer?

  And it's not like it never happens, but all of the examples I could find were ADs of auteur directors who then had the power to say, now is your chance, not ADs selected by the studio.

• 46:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Well, it's nice that they chose to lift him up.

• 46:38Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't know. I've never met the Wachowski sisters. I don't know very much about them. Everything I've read suggests that the people, especially the crew that work with them, just really feel empowered and like they are true collaborators and it's a real family experience and they are brought from production to production.

• 46:57Lizzie Bassett?

  I was gonna say, they seem to have a lot of repeat collaborators, which that has to be a sign that they are good to work with.

• 47:04Chris Winterbauer?

  James McTeague being a prime example. V for Vendetta would be far from the last thing that they would make together. In flexible roles, it's really interesting. They have a lot of quotes about how they feel that the role of the director is one of the most fluid roles on set because anybody could make a decision that could be the right decision from the top. You know, there's something anarchic about the way that they like to make movies too, I think. By this point, James McTeague, Australian born, had been ADing major Hollywood productions for a decade. He is very experienced. He had not only done the Matrix trilogy, he had managed to fit in one film out of another trilogy, Star Wars: Episode II, Attack of the Longest Star Wars Movie You're Ever Gonna Watch Clones.

• 47:48Chris Winterbauer?

  I actually quite enjoy that one. He was directing commercials at the time. He was looking for an entryway into feature films. As I mentioned, it's unlikely that a studio is going to see him that way. But the Wachowskis could. They could see what he could be and they had the power to make it happen. So they go to Warner Brothers and Joel Silver, and I'm guessing they probably said, look, we're exhausted. We don't have it in us to direct a movie right now, but we will produce, we will handle storyboarding, and we will write V for Vendetta, and we want James to direct it. And by this point, he'd worked with Silver and Warner Brothers on multiple films. So this is probably a very established relationship. Now, The Matrix and its sequels had printed money. To diminishing returns, Revolutions did not do nearly as well

• 48:33Chris Winterbauer?

  as the first two, but they'd made well over a billion dollars. This was still a movie about a masked vigilante who blows up buildings.

• 48:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 48:41Chris Winterbauer?

  And we are less than two years removed from 9/11. And at roughly this exact moment, the United States was invading Iraq.

• 48:50Lizzie Bassett?

  And if 9/11 can kill Glitter.

• 48:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. If it can take down a remarkable film like Glitter. So Warner Brothers, to their credit, agrees to make the film. I think that's pretty bold for a studio at this time.

• 49:08Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree. That is a surprising choice to make.

• 49:12Chris Winterbauer?

  It's easy to put down studios as risk averse and regurgitative. That's not a word, but always regurgitating material. We're watching the studio right now, but I think this was a bold green light.

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• 50:07Chris Winterbauer?

  The Wachowskis are handling the rewrite with McTeague's input, and they wanted to give it a little bit more American flavor, even though they want to keep it in the UK. As McTeague later said, quote, "We decided to do a rewrite because the original script," meaning the Wachowskis' first pass from the 90s, "was very unwieldy and slavish to the graphic novel. The graphic novel itself is quite long and complex, with lots of A, B, C, D, E, and F plots." Very true. "So we tried to harness that into a coherent film." So it seems like, based on interviews with McTeague, he gave input on the rewrite, and then the Wachowskis went, and they rewrote the script. Now, they've spoken very little about the movie and the scripting process, but we can infer some big changes. So it's updated for a post-9/11 Bush-era audience. The studio was very clear.

• 50:52Chris Winterbauer?

  This is not meant to be reflective of any particular administration. That being said, there are sequences that evoke Bush-era words. For example, during the Valerie sequence, "I remember how the meaning of words began to change, how unfamiliar words like collateral and rendition became frightening." Lizzie, I'm not sure if you remember, but rendition was a big word at the time. It referred to the CIA's transfer of foreign nationals suspected of involvement in terrorism to detention and interrogation in countries where federal and international legal safeguards do not apply. It's very much what's happening at the beginning of Zero Dark Thirty, for example. It's moving to torture zones, where you can do things without oversight from international guidelines.

• 51:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Guantanamo Bay.

• 51:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Actually, no. I assumed that Guantanamo Bay would count in this definition. However, because the prisoners being flown to Gitmo were in direct American custody, were off in public, and it didn't involve a third state, they were not considered instances of rendition. And to be clear, this is actually a program that started under President Clinton, but was obviously expanded under President Bush as we moved into the War on Terror years. "We moved from nuclear winter to the Norsefire engineering, then curing, quote, 'a bioweapon outbreak to seize power.' This is obviously evocative or prescient of the pandemic that we'll eventually face." The pandemic was, of course, not a bioweapon, and then cure and cover-up, but a pandemic nonetheless.

• 52:16Chris Winterbauer?

  The bigotry of the Norse fire focused more on anti LGBTQ discrimination than the racially driven white supremacy of the graphic novel. And again, I just want to highlight, this is right at the moment when George Bush, and I do think he kind of got backed into a corner by his more conservative party members, started making statements about marriage being strictly between a man and a woman. Quote, July 30th, 2003, George Bush, I believe in the sanctity of marriage. I believe a marriage is between a man and a woman, and I think we ought to codify that one way or the other. He then went on to say, and Jesus, did he stick his foot in his mouth on this one, I am mindful that we're all sinners, and I caution those who may try to take the speck out of the neighbor's eye when they got a log in their own.

• 52:57Lizzie Bassett?

  What?

• 52:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Of course, it makes him sound like he's just saying gay people are sinners, and therefore we shouldn't persecute them. I understand what he was trying to say. He just totally, completely botched it.

• 53:07Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm not understanding the, the log to the fleck situation, but that's-

• 53:10Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a commonly used Christian phrase. It's from the book of Matthew. Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? It's basically meant to call out the hypocrisy and self-righteousness of calling out the flaws in other people when you've not attended to your own.

• 53:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Got it.

• 53:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Then, of course, they tried to strengthen DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act, which again, was a act passed under President Clinton, which defined marriage in every federal law and program as only a legal union between one man and one woman, which cut legally married gay couples off from more than 1,000 federal benefits and protections. And so, again, very, very evocative of clause 28 from 1988, nearly 20 years prior in the United Kingdom. So obviously, Evie Hammond remains aged up. She's a TV producer. Their relationship is shifted a little bit to maybe pseudo romantic, and Natalie Portman explained it, I think, best. She says, the relationship between V and Evie has a complication. Actually, she references The Professional.

• 54:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm.

• 54:12Chris Winterbauer?

  She says complication, like the relationship in that film. She's speaking of The Professional. There's moments when it's father daughter. There's moments when it's like lovers. It has moments when it's mentor student, and many times, those all all at once. Adam Sutler, he is not Hitlerian at all in the graphic novel. He is a man behind a computer. Very much in the movie is. John Hurt doing his best great dictator impression.

• 54:36Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, even down to the color schemes of what he's wearing and everything. Yes, and Norse Fire does have that kind of Naziesque style in the graphic novel, but it is heightened to such a degree in the film. And I think this intentional, you know, in one interview Lana specifically references the way art and film was subsumed by the Nazi regime. Yeah. In pre-World War II for propaganda purposes. And then a really big change, Stephen Fry's Gordon Dietrich was not a closeted gay man in the graphic novel. Oh, okay. I really like that change. I think that's a really, really wonderful sequence when she shows up at his house. I also just always loved Stephen Fry. He's great. And it is when they do give a nod toward the racism of Norse Fire, when he references owning the Quran and how that could result in his execution.

• 55:21Chris Winterbauer?

  It seems like the lodestar they had, and Lana said this in a later interview, how many perspectives do you take into account when you're deciding what is right for your society? And I think obviously she's suggesting that many minorities were being cut out at this point in time, and so she wanted to give voice to them. Yes. All right, casting. So it seems like Natalie Portman was basically the frontrunner from the beginning on this. It makes sense. James McTeague had worked with her on Star Wars Episode Two, but there were two other women he considered. Neither of them are British. Scarlett Johansson. Okay. Who had just achieved acclaim for Lost in Translation, fantastic actress, and Bryce Dallas Howard,

• 56:03Chris Winterbauer?

  who had just done The Village. She receives a lot of praise for The Village, Lizzie, and I think she's very good in that film. I don't think she would have been exactly the right fit. All great actresses. But it was an actress that I mentioned McTeague had just worked with who had bagged the role. Natalie Portman was announced as Evie in January of 2005. She was a month out from being nominated for Best Actress for her role in Closer. So I think they were thinking she is a critical darling who has just starred in the biggest movie of 1999 and one of the biggest movies of 2002.

• 56:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Of those three, she is by far the biggest name.

• 56:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, by a mile.

• 56:41Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, obviously, I think Scarlett Johansson is now, but that's a much more recent development than people may remember.

• 56:48Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't think it's even close. Portman had been famous for 10 years because of the professional.

• 56:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Exactly.

• 56:52Chris Winterbauer?

  So they were trying to figure out how to bring V to life, and there were a number of options. They could go to the Darth Vader route, you know, one actor on set, use stunt performers, another actor lending his voice. But McTeague and the Wachowskis seemed to prefer one performer for all of it. So they actually did screen tests with actors in masks to see who could give life to the mask while giving the vocal performance that they wanted. And it was English actor James Purefoy.

• 57:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 57:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Who won the role as V.

• 57:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Interesting. He's in.

• 57:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Rome is.

• 57:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Rome and Vanity Fair, yeah, with Reese Witherspoon.

• 57:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep, and A Knight's Tale, Sharp Sword with Sean Bean, Mansfield Park.

• 57:33Lizzie Bassett?

  He's good.

• 57:33Chris Winterbauer?

  He's a very talented actor. He's great as Mark Antony in HBO's Rome.

• 57:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, he was wonderful.

• 57:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Which came out right around this, and he, I think, has a very good voice. He's got the right physicality. The Wachowskis and McTeague established he would never show his face.

• 57:48Lizzie Bassett?

  It's a very handsome face.

• 57:50Chris Winterbauer?

  As McTeague later said, quote, "You don't have any facial tics with the mask, so you kind of have to move the mask and bring the words with it." Which is true, you have to be way more expressive with your head than you normally do.

• 58:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 58:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Purefoy seemed both excited and exasperated by the mask. I was unable to find the exact date of this quote, but the source that I found did say that it was given during production. "It's a great acting challenge. Wearing that thing, meaning the mask, takes a lot of tics. Spider-Man's mask comes off. Batman's mask comes off. Even the Elephant Man had eyes. That's all I ask for, just an eye. Every night I'm in that mask for another three hours when I go home. I have mirrors all over my apartment and I live in it until I go to bed. So my neighbors obviously think I'm mad." He's a big elephant in that eye. That eye. I think he's struggling with the mask.

• 58:45Chris Winterbauer?

  So despite being a first time director, I think McTeague's experience as an AD, the backing of Warner Brothers and the association of the Wachowskis basically gave him pick of the litter with casting. So Stephen Ray as Finch, that was McTeague's first choice. Stephen Fry as Dietrich, that was McTeague's first choice. And in a fun reversal, John Hurt joined to play Adam Settler. And Lizzie, I'm not sure if you remember this, Hurt played Winston Smith, who was kind of the disaffected records clerk who begins a rebellion against the Big Brother regime in 1984. That's right. So he plays the opposite role in this film. And I think he has a lot of fun with it. He's so good. I love John Hurt. And then, Lizzie, shit hits the fan. For the first of four times in major ways.

• 59:27Chris Winterbauer?

  On March 4th, 2005, a press conference was held to announce the production. They're going into production within, I believe, two weeks of this press conference. And Joel Silver, for no reason, states that Moore, Alan Moore, the creator, was, quote, "very excited about what Lana had to say, and Lana sent the script, so we hope to see him sometime before we're in the UK." Uh oh. I don't think you do hope to see him. Yeah, Lizzie, because unfortunately, this was news to Alan Moore. At the time of the press conference, Alan Moore was back at DC. He'd ended up working for a company called Windstorm Studios that was bought by DC, and he ended up sticking around out of loyalty to his colleagues, even though he hated DC.

• 1:00:06Chris Winterbauer?

  And the truth is, Moore just didn't care about adaptations of his comics. And the ones that had been made had just increasingly fucked things up. So 2001, Lizzie, are you familiar with From Hell? Yeah. Johnny Depp? Oh, yeah. Jack the Ripper? That's based on an Alan Moore graphic novel. Okay. Which I think it was fine. It doesn't seem to have bothered Moore. Moore did not want his name on it. It was fine. I had it on DVD. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Again, it doesn't seem like there was a lot of controversy. Moore just didn't want to be involved. Yeah. 2003's adaptation of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen begs the question, "Just how bad could a comic book movie be? Oh, god, is this it? Oh, god, it's so bad." I really liked that movie. It's very fun. It's not great.

• 1:00:50Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 1:00:51Chris Winterbauer?

  It was not even very faithful to the graphic novel. And so that was not Moore's problem with it. The problem was his name kind of got dragged through the mud because since the movie was such a loose adaptation, a screenwriter and producer Larry Cohen and Martin Poll sued 20th Century Fox claiming that Fox had plagiarized a spec script of theirs from the 90s and then slapped the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen title on it to do it as a smokescreen. They went further. They claimed that Alan Moore had been hired to create the comic as a cover story for the subsequent plagiarism. Basically, they said Alan Moore created the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Alan Moore, established genius of comics, working in the UK,

• 1:01:35Chris Winterbauer?

  ripped off our crappy spec script from 1993 to make his comic. And he had to go in and he was deposed for 10 hours to defend his position. He found the entire thing insulting, a waste of time. And I'll read you his quote. Disclaimer, some flowery language. "If I had raped and murdered a school bus full of retarded children after selling them heroin, I doubt that I would have been cross-examined for 10 hours." End quote.

• 1:02:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow. Alan.

• 1:02:06Chris Winterbauer?

  He was not happy.

• 1:02:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Coming in hot.

• 1:02:11Chris Winterbauer?

  His biggest problem, because this was settled out of court, it looked like an admission of guilt. And so he was not able to prove that he had not plagiarized anybody by virtue of association.

• 1:02:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:02:22Chris Winterbauer?

  All Alan Moore cares about is his integrity. That Valerie sequence, that last inch, your integrity that they cannot take away, that is all, you cannot buy that off of Alan Moore. He does not care about your money. He does not care about your prestige. All he cares about is that integrity. It is so obvious. So he implements a policy. Any work that he controls, it's not going to be adapted. Any work that he doesn't control, he doesn't want to credit on. Any money they try to pay him from adaptations, he sends it back and they can pay it out to the other artists that have worked on the projects. He does not want a dime.

• 1:02:56Lizzie Bassett?

  And he had lost control of V for Vendetta many years prior, right?

• 1:02:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 1:03:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 1:03:00Chris Winterbauer?

  As long as DC continued to print V for Vendetta, they controlled it. So Joel Silver, to be fair, hadn't lied entirely. One of the Wachowskis, I believe Lana, it may have been Lily, called Moore and Moore politely told her he wasn't interested. He didn't want to talk about the film. He wasn't interested in the film. That was the end of it. Then Karen Berger of DC tried to send him an $8,000 option check for the film rights. And he said, I don't care about this. This was, I think, to re-up the, you know, film rights going into production. And he just said, remake it to David Lloyd. I don't want any of the money. So when Joel Silver said Moore was excited about the project, Moore was furious because he had literally said, I don't want anything to do with this. I don't want your money.

• 1:03:46Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm not involved, period. So it made him look duplicitous, in his opinion.

• 1:03:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:03:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, the reason, according to Silver, that he thought Moore was excited? Because of the lunch that he'd had with Moore back in 1986.

• 1:04:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Joel Silver says, quote, "I had a nice little lunch with them. And Alan was odd, but he was enthusiastic and encouraging us to do this. I had foolishly thought that he would continue feeling that way today, 20 years later."

• 1:04:12Lizzie Bassett?

  It's been two decades. Maybe check with him. I don't know.

• 1:04:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Who knows if this is really true or just Silver trying to-

• 1:04:20Lizzie Bassett?

  That's so funny.

• 1:04:21Chris Winterbauer?

  -backtrack. It's very funny. According to Silver, Silver claims he called Moore to apologize and that Moore basically hung up on him. Moore then told Warner Brothers that he wanted Silver to publicly retract his statement. And he told DC that he would sever ties with them again unless the apology was made on a platform as big as the press conference where Silver had made his remarks. So Warner Brothers and DC said, fine. And they published a retraction on the DC website, which Moore viewed as way too small. And he, again, cut ties with DC, following through on his threat. He also then launches on a small, but not insignificant,

• 1:05:03Chris Winterbauer?

  defamation tour of how Warner Brothers is going to ruin V for Vendetta, just as they are launching into the production.

• 1:05:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:05:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Production for V for Vendetta began in March of 2005, and most of it took place not in the United Kingdom, but in Germany. So they started their shoot at Babelsberg Film Studio in Germany, just outside of Berlin in Potsdam. Now, Babelsberg is the oldest large-scale film studio in the world. People have been making films there since 1912. Production designer Owen Patterson built 89 sets here in Babelsberg, like the interior of the Jordan Television Tower, Victoria Station, the various sections of the Underground. And then, on historic Stage 2, and this is where Fritz Lang shot one of the most timeless films of all time, Metropolis, in 1927, they built V's shadow gallery,

• 1:05:57Chris Winterbauer?

  where he lives with all of the blacklisted art and music and books that Evie gets to experience when she joins him down there. They would obviously also shoot some exteriors in Germany, and eventually they would move back to London to film the big set pieces that take place outside of Parliament, for example. But long before they get back to London, they have their next crisis. Roughly three weeks into production, James Pugh Foy drops out of the project. No reasons were initially given. James McTeague has said in the intervening years that it came down to the mask and Pugh Foy not being comfortable with it. Sounds like it. Pugh Foy said it wasn't the mask, and that it was just, quote, "creative differences." Unclear what those are. The mask. Yeah, exactly. It was the mask. It wasn't the mask, but it was the mask.

• 1:06:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Losing an actor during production, as you know, Lizzie, can doom a film completely. But McTeague and the Wachowskis had two key advantages. First, V wasn't really the lead anymore. No. Because Evie was. And you don't know who the fuck he is. You can put anybody in that thing. Because of his mask, they didn't have to reshoot Pugh Foy's footage. And in fact, a lot of the scenes in the film have stunt performers behind the mask, for example. So by May of 2005, Rite of reported that it would be The Matrix veteran Hugo Weaving. Love them. Who would replace Pugh Foy. McTeague's countryman, he actually has UK citizenship through his parents, rose to international recognition with I'm sure you've seen this movie, Lizzie. It's fantastic.

• 1:07:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

• 1:07:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Adventure road trip comedy, two Sidney drag performers, Hugo Weaving and Guy Pearce, accept a gig in a remote desert resort and they recruit their older trans friend Bernadette, Terrence Stamp, to join them. They buy a battered bus, Priscilla, and they set off across the outback. It was mostly very praised for a positive portrayal of the LGBTQ community with some noted criticisms, specifically having cis men play drag performers and a trans woman.

• 1:07:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:07:51Chris Winterbauer?

  It was Weaving's magnificently menacing performance as Agent Smith, Mr. Anderson, in 1999's The Matrix, and his stoic turn as Lord Elrond in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings, that solidified him as one of the more versatile character actors working worldwide. Now, McTeague called Weaving to pitch him the part, and Weaving had two advantages. One, he had done voiceover, specifically 1995's Babe. Not sure if you remember.

• 1:08:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Who is he in Babe? Is he a dog? Is he a sheep?

• 1:08:20Chris Winterbauer?

  He is Rex, one of the Border Collies in Babe. Now, Lizzie, he also had done a very specific type of acting back in theater school called neutral mask work. Did you ever do neutral mask work?

• 1:08:35Lizzie Bassett?

  We sure did do a little bit of this. I believe it's where, as the name suggests, you wear a very neutral mask on your face and you are required to then sort of use the rest of your body as expression.

• 1:08:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, you have to lose the self through the face and figure out a different way to exist. Pioneered in the 50s and 60s, I think it was part of the clowning movement as well. So, Weaving has six days to get to set and he has four days to prep. So, within 10 days of his call with James McTeague, he is in costume in front of the camera with Natalie Portman, Evie coming out of the torture

• 1:09:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:09:12Chris Winterbauer?

  and realizing that V was the one behind it.

• 1:09:15Lizzie Bassett?

  How much footage did they get with James Purefoy?

• 1:09:18Chris Winterbauer?

  It doesn't seem like that much.

• 1:09:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 1:09:19Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't know that, but the way McTeague describes it is that there was a lot of coverage of Evie that was shot, for example. There was a lot of coverage of, you know, other characters and-

• 1:09:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, if it wasn't working, they may have been avoiding him too.

• 1:09:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, exactly. So- They shoot the scene as basically strangers. And I think it works.

• 1:09:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:09:38Chris Winterbauer?

  And I think that because of the second hand that Weaving, McTeague, and the Wachowski sisters had, they'd worked together for the better part of a decade at this point. They were probably able to make up for any lost time very quickly.

• 1:09:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, Lizzie, this was all overshadowed by something far more shocking taking place on set. Natalie Portman was going to actually shave her head. This was, I forgot how much people freaked out about this.

• 1:10:05Lizzie Bassett?

  This was big news, Chris.

• 1:10:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Such big news. So.

• 1:10:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Also, I gotta tell you, I have must thank Nicole Kidman for my newly found wig spotting abilities, because I immediately could tell that they had gone back and reshot certain things. Because you can see the wig. It's pretty good, but you can tell when it's not her hair.

• 1:10:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Right, the alley sequence at the beginning.

• 1:10:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:26Chris Winterbauer?

  So I believe that's because they shaved her head by the end of May 2005, because she showed up to Cannes to promote Attack of the Clones with a buzz cut. And that's when everything went viral, you know, at that moment. And so if, for example, Purefoy had already shot the alley scene, and they wanted to reshoot part of it with Weaving, they would need to reshoot her with a wig. They shot the scene of her getting her head shaved, which is also a big moment in the graphic novel. In one take with five cameras, that is not an actor, that is Portman's hairdresser, who is shaving her head in the scene.

• 1:10:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Nice.

• 1:10:59Chris Winterbauer?

  And this is very sweet. Several crew members volunteered to have their head shaved before the real take, so they could light block and rehearse ahead of time.

• 1:11:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:11:07Chris Winterbauer?

  They had one shot at it, and that's the one shot that you see in the film. And it wasn't the only moment that they had one shot at capturing. The dominos, which are also a big part of the graphic novel.

• 1:11:19Lizzie Bassett?

  I wondered about that. I was like, my, this, this man has a lot of time on his hands.

• 1:11:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, he does. They were made by somebody else with a lot of time on their hands, Robin Veyers. He is a Dutch professional domino builder. His production company spent 200 hours of building time placing 22,000 dominos in position. They closed the set as if they were doing a love scene because an earlier disturbance had toppled the dominos during setup. Oh, God. They got everything into position when an assistant hairstylist dropped her comb while touching up V's wig at the head of the chain and narrowly missed the first piece domino. They then rolled cameras and everything fell into place perfectly. And I believe that's the take that you see in the film. It's really cool.

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• 1:13:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, in June of 2005, one major sequence remained to be shot, and that was the film's climax, in which Eevee carries out V's plot, blows up Parliament, and the common folk march on their government. As Jeff Boucher put it in the LA Times, "That brought the cast and crew to the very heart of the British government between Trafalgar Square and Big Ben, the first week of June with tanks and an ominous brigade of commandos armed to the teeth." And this was actually the first time that the British government allowed a film crew into this historic site, this close to Parliament, to film.

• 1:13:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I guess that was really surprising, that it looked like they really were on location for that.

• 1:13:53Chris Winterbauer?

  They were on location.

• 1:13:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:13:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Again, during the peak of the War on Terror.

• 1:13:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Blowing up Parliament with people marching on the government. It required nine months of negotiations with 14 government departments and agencies. As James McTeague later explained, "They shut down all of Whitehall to Trafalgar Square. Roughly 500 people in masks descended for the shot." So that's 500 extras in full Guy Fawkes gear, "as government snipers monitored from nearby rooftops." Which all inspired a particularly funny conspiracy theory, that it was Tony Blair's son, 22-year-old Ewan Blair, who was responsible for getting the filmmakers' access. So basically, Stephen Fry had given a quote, where he asked an A.D. how they got permission to film in this location. And the A.D. pointed at Ewan Blair, who was working as a runner on the movie,

• 1:14:43Chris Winterbauer?

  and Fry said, "Oh, that's how we got permission. Daddy, daddy, can you please let them have permission to film?" This was obviously a joke, but it was quickly spreading as if it was serious, and that Ewan Blair's nepotistic connections had been what allowed them to film there. And then Tony Blair drew real heat for allowing a film that seemingly championed terrorism to shoot its climax at such an important national site.

• 1:15:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Even the New York Times wrote, at roughly this moment, "As persuasively as the filmmakers argue that their movie means to raise provocative questions rather than to lay down moral judgments, it is hard not to be unnerved at the mental image of one of the West's proudest democratic symbols splintering into millions and millions of tiny particles." And this does play into a bit of a meta-narrative, which is the Wachowskis and McTeague did want to illustrate the fact that they felt that the news media was complicit in helping the government sell its story of why they were invading Afghanistan and Iraq, for example. So, production wrapped less than one month later and real tragedy struck.

• 1:15:46Chris Winterbauer?

  On July 7th, 2005, Islamic extremists Haseeb Hussain, Mohammed Siddiq Khan, Jermaine Lindsay, and Shazad Tanwir detonated four bombs in the heart of London. Three on trains in the underground and one on a double-decker bus. Fifty-two people were killed, over 700 were injured. And a day later, police shot and killed an innocent Brazilian man, John Charles de Menezes, when he was misidentified as one of the failed suicide bombers. This is obviously a terrible terrorist attack that occurred less than a month after filming the terrorist attack for the film in almost the same location where that had been shot.

• 1:16:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:16:28Chris Winterbauer?

  On August 18th, 2005, Warner Brothers announced that the film would be pushed from November 5th to March 2006. They claimed that the delay was, quote, "strictly to accommodate the FX-heavy film's post-production schedule."

• 1:16:42Lizzie Bassett?

  No, there's no way.

• 1:16:43Chris Winterbauer?

  No. And if you look at the original release date alone, the 5th of November, this was a big move by Warner Brothers, and I'm sure one that they didn't take lightly.

• 1:16:52Lizzie Bassett?

  But the, I mean, the right move, for sure.

• 1:16:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. And there are some interesting quotes. Joel Silver was reaching out to reporters. There was a big effort to try to clarify the intent of the film at this moment, but not give it away.

• 1:17:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Maybe that's sort of what I remembered from seeing this was that, first of all, being still so close to 9/11 and then also being close to the terrorist attacks in London as well, like it was genuinely, you know, I think, I don't know if this is the case. I think maybe for younger people who were not as sort of conscious as we were when all this was happening, it might unfortunately feel, you know, potentially a bit more rote today, and it didn't then. It felt very scary. So seeing this kind of building blow up, seeing like the sort of imagery that you see in this movie, I remember feeling a little icky about it. I don't now, you know, kind of like knowing what's behind it and seeing it through fresh eyes.

• 1:17:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, for me, the distance between the United Kingdom and the United States, and then also the distance candidly between the East Coast and the West Coast, were enough that it didn't bother me at the time of the release, but I can completely understand why it may have bothered a lot of people at the time of the release. Press around the film was not great at this point in time. The LA Times even speculated that, "It's not unreasonable to wonder if this capes-on-cobblestones movie will end up in the same commercial litter box as the studio's Catwoman, a universally ridiculed masked mishap."

• 1:18:18Lizzie Bassett?

  God, how many litter box jokes were made about Catwoman? All of them.

• 1:18:22Chris Winterbauer?

  So, every single one. Now, James McTeague, I believe, did want the extra time in post. It seems like he's made it clear in interviews that they were blowing past deadlines to try to finish the movie on time, which makes sense. They wrapped filming in June. There's a lot of special effects to get through.

• 1:18:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that's very fast.

• 1:18:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. Now, all of V's dialogue was recaptured in the ADR booth. That's automated dialogue replacement. That means you re-record your dialogue in post-production, so nothing that you hear from him is what was captured on set.

• 1:18:51Lizzie Bassett?

  And just to be clear, you would have to do that with an actor wearing a mask for the entire time? Like regardless of-

• 1:18:56Chris Winterbauer?

  They did mic them.

• 1:18:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I'm sure you mic them, but you would still, I would imagine, almost certainly have to do all of it.

• 1:19:02Chris Winterbauer?

  That was intentional from the beginning. They mic'd the interior of the mask. It just sounded very muffled, and so he honed in the performance in post. It is a magnificent vocal performance, in my opinion.

• 1:19:12Lizzie Bassett?

  He's great.

• 1:19:13Chris Winterbauer?

  There was an early fan, David Lloyd. The artist behind V was shown the film on November 5th, its original release date. And according to McTeague, the lights came up, and there was this voice from out of the darkness, which was David. And he said, "That's a fantastic representation of the work we did." Lloyd has said in interviews that he thinks the film and the filmmakers did a fine job, but he does note the graphic novel is superior, and I don't necessarily disagree. Now, Lizzie, James McTeague has asserted that the studio only had one major note during post, and it was to remove one section of the film. If you had to guess, which section would that be?

• 1:19:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Gotta be the Valerie section.

• 1:19:49Chris Winterbauer?

  That's exactly right. It is the Valerie sequence of the film. If you guys are unfamiliar, it is a sequence in which the story of a gay woman, an actress who was imprisoned and eventually murdered by the government, is told to Evie Hammond's character as she is imprisoned.

• 1:20:07Lizzie Bassett?

  I want to be clear. I say gotta be the Valerie sequence for two reasons. One is that I can see why, you know, that was a cultural live wire at that time. And I'm sure that the money people wanted that removed for that reason. The second reason is one of the only things in the movie that is somewhat self-contained, that you would potentially be able to lift out without disturbing any other parts of it. Of course, if you were to lift it out, you would also sort of remove the beating heart of the movie itself, but I totally see-

• 1:20:38Chris Winterbauer?

  From a plot mechanic-

• 1:20:39Lizzie Bassett?

  From a plot mechanic, you could remove it, yes.

• 1:20:42Chris Winterbauer?

  To your point, Lizzie, it feels like in 2005, that would have been when Warner Brothers is seeing this rough cut, the Wachowskis and McTeague were effectively able to sneak a queer short film into the middle of an action blockbuster.

• 1:20:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, and it's great. It's like, it's one of the best parts of the movie.

• 1:20:59Chris Winterbauer?

  I think it is probably the best overall part of the movie. I personally love Vs. getting shot 100 times and then killing everybody with knives and saying, "Behind the mask is more than a man. There's an idea, and ideas are bulletproof. It's amazing." And it also makes me cry, but the Valerie sequence is, like you said, it is the heart of the movie. It's where you get at its true thesis.

• 1:21:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:21:19Chris Winterbauer?

  So, the filmmakers, McTeague and Wachowski, said, "No, we're not cutting it." Again, to the studio's credit, McTeague says Warner Brothers backed off. It doesn't seem like it was a big fight. They had the note, they said no, and they moved on. Now, one crisis was averted, but the studio needed to keep the buzz alive. Lizzie, they needed the nerds.

• 1:21:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Austin's Butt Numathon was a 24-hour movie marathon run in every December from 1999 through 2016 at the Alamo Drafthouse by Harry Knowles, founder of Ain't It Cool News, who we spoke about briefly in our coverage of Lord of the Rings. The BNAT Butt Numathon was a way for studios to get advanced hype on internet message boards with the kind of cool gatekeepers of nerd-dom without having to put the movie in front of critics. So, they basically went in and they said, "You guys can watch this. There can be no leaks, and we want you to post about it afterwards." It's kind of the equivalent of like bringing in a bunch of TikTokers now, you know, and showing them the movie. So- Ain't It Cool News was also a bit of a friend to Warner Brothers. They had provided positive coverage of Lord of the Rings and The Matrix.

• 1:22:24Chris Winterbauer?

  And my guess is that the studio feels, even if the response is poor, they could claim that it's a test and that they're implementing fan feedback. Right. So it could be kind of a win-win. V for Vendetta screened at the Butt Nuthon on December 11th, 2005. It was dedicated to the recently deceased Adrian Biddle, the legendary cinematographer who had lensed the film. He, of course, had shot Aliens, The Princess Bride, Willow, Judge Dredd, Event Horizon, The Mummy, The World Is Not Enough, Thelma and Louise, and so many, so many more. He had passed away a few days prior, and so unfortunately, he did not live to see the film's release. I hope he would have been proud because the nerds were in love.

• 1:23:06Chris Winterbauer?

  The V monologue, the Valerie sequence, the explosive finale, the internet was a buzz, and Vendetta was a glow with the approval of the Illuminertie, as I call them. Sorry, not sorry. But the buzz was to be short-lived. In January of 2006, Rolling Stone published an article titled, and I'm going to use this name because I think it's important to the story, but this is not her name, "The Mystery of Larry Wachowski." Written by Peter Wilkinson, the article portrays Lana, the filmmaker, as a recluse who leads a double life in the Los Angeles BDSM clubs. It asserts that at these clubs Lana allegedly met and fell in love with Karen Winslow,

• 1:23:48Chris Winterbauer?

  who at the time was working as a professional dominatrix under the name Elsa Strix. The article did not feature any direct quotes from Lana. It instead relied on court filings from her divorce, gossip following her feminine appearance alongside Karen Winslow at Cannes in 2003, and specifically the testimony of Buck Angel, who is a trans adult actor, and crucially Karen Winslow's ex.

• 1:24:12Chris Winterbauer?

  So basically, according to the article, Lana and Karen fell in love. What was once a professional relationship became personal. They struck up an affair. Each of them left their respective partners. Buck Angel felt betrayed and gave a lot of quotes to a lot of different places. Buck Angel asserted that Lana was beginning hormone therapy and thus forcibly outed her publicly as a trans woman years before she would come out on her own as a trans woman. So.

• 1:24:44Lizzie Bassett?

  I would hope that Rolling Stone would not do this today. But just a reminder to listeners that in, what is this, 2004, 2005?

• 1:24:54Chris Winterbauer?

  2000, this is January of 2006.

• 1:24:56Lizzie Bassett?

  January 2006. I mean, this is, this is prime tabloid fodder at that point, which is awful. I can't imagine having something that personal. Have someone else speak that for you.

• 1:25:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Speculation was rampant, you know, online, offline.

• 1:25:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I remember this.

• 1:25:14Chris Winterbauer?

  In the trades. Weirdly, the story was given some additional oxygen because there was a Senate committee hearing happening on January 19th. So I believe the same week that the story was released called Decency in Broadcasting, Cable and Other Media. I don't want to get into too much detail, but basically the founder of the Parents Television Council and the then Chair of the National Association of Broadcasters were focused on trying to revive the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act. And there was a lot of hand wringing over things that were seen as not family friendly and that were perverse coming out of Hollywood. And it was described as the Hollywood problem. And a lot of, there were a number of stories that ran pairing the Lana Wachowski explosive

• 1:25:55Chris Winterbauer?

  revelations with the perverse Hollywood problem, which even if not explicit implies as if there is something wrong. You know what I mean? Or perverse with Lana and that in some way ties to what these senators.

• 1:26:09Lizzie Bassett?

  From what I remember, it was explicit. Like, I don't think that people were.

• 1:26:13Chris Winterbauer?

  It may have been. I just was unable to find an example that did explicitly. So I just want to be careful with.

• 1:26:18Lizzie Bassett?

  I was a, I am ashamed to. To admit, I was a regular reader of Perez Hilton and less hateful, I think, than Perez Hilton was delisted. And I do remember there being, I'm pretty sure, quite a bit of coverage of this on there. And I think it was coupled, you know, coupled with sort of this, what was considered at the time salacious news was also the fact that it involved a BDSM professional. I think that also ended up making this even more sort of like, you know, hand wringing.

• 1:26:50Chris Winterbauer?

  And it was presented as the answer to a question that had lingered since Keanu Reeves, since Neo met Trinity, inside of what looked like a BDSM club in the beginning of The Matrix, right? There had been this question, and what's interesting is, you know, the Wachowskis have long toyed with the idea of identity. They've long been interested in queer stories from bound forward, but they explicitly do not give interviews telling the audience what to think about their movies. And so I really think Rolling Stone published this and people glommed onto it as if,

• 1:27:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:21Chris Winterbauer?

  here it is. This is why everything about The Wachowskis is the way it is. And that's why it was considered a scoop. So obviously, this hurt Lana far more than it did the film. I cannot imagine what it must have been like. She was robbed of the chance to come out on her own terms. She wouldn't do so until 2012, roughly six years after this. V for Vendetta opened wide on March 17th, 2006, mere days after Alan Moore again was quoted in The New York Times stating, I've read the screenplay, it's rubbish. So not great hype, but critics generally disagreed with Moore. The press reports from a Berlin Film Festival premiere in February had been mixed to positive.

• 1:28:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Roger Ebert gave it four out of five stars. Variety didn't love it. The New York Times didn't love it. But generally speaking, American critics were pretty warm to the movie and Natalie Portman's accent. And European and British critics were a little harsher on the film, broadly speaking.

• 1:28:21Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, come on, guys, the accent.

• 1:28:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Americans are like, she sounds just like them. Conservative feathers were ruffled somewhat, and I will say so was the anarchist community. There were a couple of protests that were staged by, I would argue, true anarchists, political anarchists, feeling that the message of anarchy had been entirely stripped from the movie. And I do think that's true. I think he is trying to cause chaos to incite a liberal revolution, not an anarchist revolution, as we've discussed. Now, audiences were more receptive to V's message, Lizzie. It opened number one at the box office. It grossed $135 million in its theatrical run against a $54 million budget. Okay. So broke even, maybe broke even, close to broke even. It was far below the Matrix

• 1:29:08Chris Winterbauer?

  trilogy. And I do think it was kind of the second lily pad in a trend that began with Matrix revolutions toward eventually financially unsuccessful films like Speed Racer and then Jupiter Ascending for the Wachowski sisters. But it was extremely successful on DVD. I believe it made well over $60 million on DVD in short order. So I do think this movie made money. Yeah. Natalie Portman, during one press conference, expressed hope that Alan Moore would watch the film one day. To my knowledge, he has not, and he has said that he never will. Now, you mentioned this, Lizzie. One aspect of V in particular lives on the Guy Fawkes mask. The mask first became synonymous with Anonymous, the hacktivist group that in

• 1:29:50Chris Winterbauer?

  2008 took on the Church of Scientology. And I forgot about this. The church had basically pressured YouTube into pulling a video of Tom Cruise discussing Scientology practices, and I believe indoctrination, from YouTube. It was meant to be an internal video and somebody accidentally uploaded it to YouTube. Yeah, accidentally on purpose. Yeah. And so Anonymous was saying, hey, no, no, no, that's ours now. You can't take that down. That's public. And then, of course, the mask was adopted during a lot of the Occupy movements, Occupy Wall Street, even the Arab Spring. And of course, as Alan Moore and others have pointed out, the irony is every mask bought is a dime or a dollar in Warner Brothers' coffers at the end of the day, and is ultimately more capitalist than it is anarchist.

• 1:30:32Chris Winterbauer?

  James McTeague went on to make a number of other films and projects with the Wachowskis, including Ninja Assassin and Sense Eight and more. And the Wachowskis have continued to explore identity in increasingly interesting ways with Cloud Atlas and whatnot. But for me, V for Vendetta remains my second or third favorite film for them. And even though its politics are more simplistic by a mile than what Alan Moore offered in his graphic novel, I think they're a great introduction into the idea of how we, at times willingly, will give up our civil liberties for the idea of control. And for that, I will always love this film and the fact that it brings a little bit

• 1:31:16Chris Winterbauer?

  of brain to a normally just brawny genre.

• 1:31:20Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree, and I also think it does a great job of showing how easily manipulated we are as a people when we are scared. And don't they say in the movie, people should not be afraid of their government, the government should be afraid of its people?

• 1:31:36Chris Winterbauer?

  That is arguably the most famous line from the film.

• 1:31:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, you know, I think, I won't wax too political here, but I think that what we have seen as fallout, particularly from the pandemic, we have seen an awful lot of sort of predators come out of the woodwork. And I think that's pretty much exactly what you see happen in V for Vendetta, is you look at, you know, a population that's very afraid and that sort of opens the door for people to step up and say, I will fix it. I'm your savior. And I guess, I think the movie left me with a feeling of just always be very careful of someone who, you know, offers to fix everything for you or offers to explain everything for you because nobody knows everything.

• 1:32:22Chris Winterbauer?

  And that's ultimately Moore's, and I believe, an anarchist criticism of the film is, the opposite of fascism is not liberalism. Fascism and liberalism are siblings where they exist on a continuum. And the risk of liberalism is that when you are afraid, fascism is what you tip toward because there is an existing hierarchy to exploit.

• 1:32:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:32:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Anarchism says, without any hierarchy, I believe there's a line from the book, yeah, here it is. "Anarchy wears two faces, both creator and destroyer. Thus destroyers topple empires, make a canvas of clean rubble where creators can build another world. Rubble, once achieved, makes further ruins means irrelevant." So, Lizzie, thank you for going down the rabbit hole on V for Vendetta with me, a movie just, I really, I really love. And I would like to ask you, what went right?

• 1:33:19Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, I have to give it to old Hugo.

• 1:33:22Chris Winterbauer?

  He's so good.

• 1:33:22Lizzie Bassett?

  So good. I just, you know, I think it's, it's particularly difficult to give an engaging performance when you are not able to use your face in any way. It's also particularly difficult to give an engaging performance almost exclusively through ADR. And he does it and does it beautifully. He's a wonderful actor. He's a wonderful voice actor and he's someone who, you know, throughout his career has had no problem figuratively and literally disappearing into roles. And I just don't think that this would really work without somebody as strong as he is being the one behind the mask.

• 1:33:59Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. I'm going to give mine to the Wachowskis, the Wachowski sisters, who, I think it's easy. I think there are some people who seem to forget the impact they've had on film and

• 1:34:12Lizzie Bassett?

  It's enormous.

• 1:34:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Prefer. Yeah, they prefer to reference maybe a couple of later flops than they do the more seminal influential works that they've made. Again, I would argue The Matrix is the most influential film of the 90s. I think at worst, it's top four, Jurassic Park, Toy Story, Titanic, The Matrix. I'd spent a long time trying to make up that list and those were the four I could really think of.

• 1:34:34Lizzie Bassett?

  I might swap Fight Club in for one of those, but sure.

• 1:34:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, I shouldn't have said I spent so long making that list because, uh, yeah, you're right. I probably should have included Fight Club. But first rule of Fight Club, you don't talk about Fight Club.

• 1:34:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, sorry.

• 1:34:45Chris Winterbauer?

  I think the Wachowskis are fantastic masters of pastiche. And I say that as a positive thing. And I think what I like most about them is that they are fascinated by the idea and the limitations of identity. And we are so, as a society, focused on identity right now, I think, across all spectrums. And I love that the Wachowskis are interested in the fluidity of identity. And I think Alan Morris too, in the graphic novel. And so I will give it to the Wachowskis. I hope we see more from them. I'm not sure if they have any more collaborations planned. Obviously Lana made Matrix Resurrections by herself, but I've always enjoyed their films and the questions that they ask. And if you will allow me, Liz.

• 1:35:28Chris Winterbauer?

  I would like to end with an Alan Moore quote. This is from, I really do recommend, if you guys haven't read V for Vendetta, please do read it. This is from the introduction to the graphic novel, which he wrote in 1988. So obviously at the release of the second half. My youngest daughter is seven and the tabloid press are circulating the idea of concentration camps for persons with AIDS. The new riot police wear black visors, as do their horses, and their vans have rotating video cameras mounted on top. The government has expressed a desire to eradicate homosexuality, even as an abstract concept, and one can only speculate as to which minority will be the next legislated

• 1:36:13Chris Winterbauer?

  against. I'm thinking of taking my family and getting out of this country soon, sometime over the next couple of years. It's cold and it's mean spirited and I don't like it here anymore. Good night, England. Good night, Home Service and V for Victory. Hello, the voice of fate and V for Vendetta. And that concludes our coverage of V for Vendetta.

• 1:36:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Great job, Chris. I'm glad you had me re-watch this one.

• 1:36:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. All right, guys. If you enjoy this podcast and you would like to help us spread the word, the word of what went wrong, there are four easy ways to do it. Feel free to leave us a rating and review on whatever pod catcher that you use, Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, something independent. You can also follow us on any of those platforms. You can share our podcast with a friend, a family member, a stranger. You could capture somebody, torture them in your home, indoctrinate them to your beliefs, shave their head.

• 1:37:10Lizzie Bassett?

  We do not recommend that.

• 1:37:12Chris Winterbauer?

  We do not endorse any of those things. Or you can subscribe to our Patreon. You can head to www.patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast. You can join for free. We publish free musings, articles, additional information, corrections. We also, for a dollar, offer you the opportunity to vote on films that we cover in the future. We have a very fun pirates poll for you guys right now. For $5, you can get an ad-free RSS feed, and for $50, you can get a shout out just like one of these. Voila! Voices of valor, veracity and visionary vim let us venture if only vocally to venerate a very vital vanguard. Cameron Smith, Ben Schindelman, Scary Carey, you are the very vindication of this venture.

• 1:37:55Chris Winterbauer?

  The Provost Family, Zach Everton, Galen, David Friskalanti, vocal virtuosos, all of you vibrating with vivacity. Adam Moffat, Film It Yourself, Chris Zaka, Kate Elrington. Your value is vast, your vow inviolable. MXodia, Seegrace B, Jen Mostrow Moreno, Christopher Elner, you are varnished with verve. Blaze Ambrose, Jerome Wilkinson, Rural Juror Lance Stater. Nate the Knife, Lena, Ramon Villanueva Jr., Half Grey Hound. Ventsurism, valorous and velocitus in wit. Eleanor, Brittany Morris, Darren and Dale Conkling. Richard Sanchez, Jake Killen, Andrew McFagelbagel. You are vividly thoughtful, viscerally kind vaults of virtue.

• 1:38:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Matthew Jacobson, Grace Potter, Ellen Singleton, JJ Rapido. You are vibrato strong, vehemently voil and verve incarnate. Jewishri Samant, Scott Gerwin, Sadie, just Sadie, virtue distilled. Brian Donahue, Adrian Pangkorea, Chris Liel, Kathleen Olson. Brooke, Leah Bowman, Steve Winterbauer, Don Scheible, vaulted in grace, you are veritable legends, vital conduits and vow-worthy companions. George Kay, Rosemary Southward, Tom Kristin, Jason Frankel. Virtually unstoppable valence, rich and visibly brilliant. Suzanne Johnson. Sohman Chinani, Michael McGrath, Lon Relod and Lydia House. Your venerated minds, vast imaginations make you vanquishers of mediocrity and viscounts of value.

• 1:39:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Each of you, though your voices remain invisible, now varnish this venture with vastness and verity. You are not volume, you are voltage. A vital vein, neither vague nor vestigial. You are the voices behind the verse, the viscera behind this vessel. Our victories are yours, our vow is weakly.

• 1:39:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Thank you, V, for that inspiring shout out. Lizzie, what do we have for the people next week?

• 1:39:51Lizzie Bassett?

  That would be Doctor Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Loves a Bomb. I'm very excited.

• 1:39:59Chris Winterbauer?

  And a really great film to follow up V for Venn.

• 1:40:01Lizzie Bassett?

  It is. It's so good.

• 1:40:03Chris Winterbauer?

  If Alan Moore is concerned about the malice of a controlling few, boy, does Doctor Strangelove explore their ineptitude in the most fun ways.

• 1:40:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, it really does.

• 1:40:15Chris Winterbauer?

  I cannot wait.

• 1:40:16Lizzie Bassett?

  We'll see you next week.

• 1:40:17Chris Winterbauer?

  See you, guys.

• 1:40:22Speaker 05

  Go to patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast to support What Went Wrong and check out our website at whatwentwrongpod.com. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom podcast, presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman. Research for this episode provided by Jesse Winterbauer, with additional editing from Karen Krupsov.