The Mad Man In The Mask

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The project they handed McTeigue was a tough one. Some of the challenges were cosmetic. For one thing, Evey would have to get her head shaved, on camera. But Portman was game. "The only scary thing was that it's the first time I've ever done anything on film where you don't have another chance," she says. "This was a one-time deal. There's a lot of pressure." For another, Portman's leading man would be spending the entire movie behind a mask and a big, black Herman's Hermits wig: you never once see his face. That was too much for James Purefoy, the first actor cast as V, who left the film four weeks into shooting. McTeigue managed to bring in Matrix veteran Hugo Weaving on short notice.

"I figured it's a very technical exercise--Does that work, does this work, does that work?" Weaving said last year on the set of V, tilting his head experimentally. "It's a beautiful mask, really exquisitely made. But making it live, that's the challenge. And I tend to bump into things a lot," he added. Even the kiss that V and Evey share in the movie presented highly technical smooching issues. "That was a giggle moment for me," Portman says. "They're like, Can you place your lips between his frozen lips?"

There were some noncosmetic challenges too--difficult, ideological challenges. V for Vendetta is a movie about a heroic terrorist. However unjust the regime he opposes--and we know it's unjust because it features a pedophile bishop, a jowl-shaking Big Brother figure, a spittle-spewing telepundit, concentration camps, institutionalized racism, religious intolerance and homophobia--V is a guy who goes around blowing up parts of London, and he likes his work. That was repugnant enough back when Moore wrote his comic book, two decades before Sept. 11. It's become even more so since last July, when terrorists actually did bomb three subway trains and a bus in London.

Everybody associated with the productions--Portman, McTeigue, Weaving, Silver--forcefully, insistently stresses that V is an ambiguous, ambivalent figure. They express their hope that the movie will spark debates about the definition of terrorism. Portman in particular does so: a recent Harvard grad still in the habit of philosophizing, she name-checks, among others, Gandhi, Elie Wiesel, Menachem Begin, George Washington and the Maccabees. Portman is also, lest we forget, Israeli-born. "In Israel you know tons of people who have been hurt by terrorist violence," she says, "and you know people who have committed violence. It's ever present in a way that you don't feel in the States."

She points out, quite correctly, that the question of what is and is not a legitimate use of violence has never been more vexed and that hyper-charged labels like "terrorist" aren't helping much to clarify matters. "I think the most important thing is that people will go home and fight about it," she says. "We all realize that at a certain point, violence might be the only means of effectively combatting injustice, but it's always going to be subjective--what injustice is great enough to provoke you to harm someone else?"