V For Vendetta opens this weekend and it looks awesome. Alan Moore, however, isn’t too keen on it, or really any of the other shitty adaptations of his work, which doesn’t come as shock. In fact, there seems to be very few people Alan Moore isn’t pissed at these days. Guess that’s to be expected if you’re a reclusive pioneer in your field.
From The New York Times
In Mr. Moore’s account of his career, the villains are clearly defined: they are the mainstream comics industry — particularly DC Comics, the American publisher of “Watchmen” and “V for Vendetta” — which he believes has hijacked the properties he created, and the American film business, which has distorted his writing beyond recognition. To him, the movie adaptation of “V for Vendetta,” which opens on Friday, is not the biggest platform yet for his ideas: it is further proof that Hollywood should be avoided at all costs. “I’ve read the screenplay,” Mr. Moore said. “It’s rubbish.”
“I explained to [Larry Wachowski] that I’d had some bad experiences in Hollywood,” Mr. Moore said. “I didn’t want any input in it, didn’t want to see it and didn’t want to meet him to have coffee and talk about ideas for the film.”
But at a press conference on March 4, 2005, to announce the start of production on the “V for Vendetta” film, the producer Joel Silver said Mr. Moore was “very excited about what Larry had to say and Larry sent the script, so we hope to see him sometime before we’re in the U.K.” This, Mr. Moore said, “was a flat lie.”
“Given that I’d already published statements saying I wasn’t interested in the film, it actually made me look duplicitous,” he said.
Through his editors at DC Comics (like Warner Brothers, a subsidiary of Time Warner), Mr. Moore insisted that the studio publicly retract Mr. Silver’s remarks. When no retraction was made, Mr. Moore once again quit his association with DC (and Wildstorm along with it), and demanded that his name be removed from the “V for Vendetta” film, as well as from any of his work that DC might reprint in the future.
The producers of “V for Vendetta” reluctantly agreed to strip Mr. Moore’s name from the film’s credits, a move that saddened Mr. Lloyd, who still endorses the film. “Alan and I were like Laurel and Hardy when we worked on that,” Mr. Lloyd said. “We clicked. I felt bad about not seeing a credit for that team preserved, but there you go.”
David Lloyd, V for Vendetta’s co-creator and artist likes the movie adaptation. He talks more over at Suicide Girls.com about what the experience has been like seeing his work on the big screen. Here’s a spoiler: he’s bit more into it than Moore.
DRE: I know you and Alan Moore haven’t spoken in a long time. When I spoke to him he said to me “If it’s worth reacting to, it’s worth overreacting to.” I realized that informs nearly everything he does. V is certainly a reaction, not only is it an allegory but it’s not 1984. The government doesn’t win. V blows up everything. Were you full of piss and vinegar when you started this book?
Lloyd: When we started the book there was the Margaret Thatcher regime in Britain at that time. She’d only just been in power for a couple of years and she was getting her stride. Then as things progressed, we saw that she was quite ruthless. From a political point of view, we were interested in saying those things that we said in V, but we weren’t actually politically active. Alan was always interested in politics in a major way. He actually believes that anarchy is a politically viable system, but I don’t. I was always interested in putting forward the ideas that represented my viewpoint. I feel the same about anything I’m doing. I’m in a privileged position as an artist because if I’ve got something to say, I can say it. But you don’t want to preach. That’s terrible. But if you have a point of view and you’re an artist or a writer, it’s kind of crazy to not take advantage of that, especially if you can do something that’s entertaining as well. I’ve done a number of things like that over the years.
On a slightly related note, check out Rolling Stone’s The Mystery of Larry Wachowski for a little insight into some reported changes going on amongst the dynamic Wachowski duo. Let’s just say a quote like: “My greatest accomplishment in some ways,” she once said, “[was] putting 333 needles into a single penis,” from a dominatrix Larry’s been close with may explain why the last two Matrix movies suck so much. With that kind of pain who could think about much of anything.
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