V for Vendetta co-creator David Lloyd

No. They did offer me a chance of being a V in the crowd, but it’s not my scene. I think they just thought it would be fun for me to do that, but I don’t know. I heard that Stan Lee appears in every movie of his.

No, absolutely not. I’ve always been a liberal and I’ve always had strong socialist leanings. I understand why people do vote on the conservative side of the ticket because people have a tendency to go for strong governments when really, from an idealistic point of view, it’s a bad thing. People accept a government that will be strong if they think it’s looking after them. They will accept all kinds of judgments.

Sometimes they do it slowly and sometimes they do it fast. You look at Hitler’s Germany. Let’s face it. Most of the German people would not have willingly supported that.

That’s exactly true. That seduces the population. You get in there and you say, “We’re only going to send these people away.” It’s the whole thing of, first they came for them and then they came for me. As I said, Hitler’s Germany is a classic example of people needing somebody strong. They were coming out of a terrible hyperinflation and poverty and unemployment and depression and this guy offered them a way out. Most of the German people weren’t members of the Nazi Party. But they supported them.

Yeah, exactly. It led them down the wrong road. That’s happened throughout history. It’s happened in the past and it’s going to happen in the future. V is like a mythical situation. It’s an allegory for what could happen. V has philosophies within it that actually warn against things like that happening.

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.

You get to stay in some really nice hotels. Also the people involved in the film were very nice. Of course it’s kind of a completely different world and a rarified atmosphere to me. I just sit at the drawing board most of the time. I am used to talking to people. I love going to conventions, getting feedback and talking to people. Some artists don’t. Some artists sit at their drawing board because their personality actually dictates that.. Although it’s strange to be in this world, I’m really happy to be here.

Yeah. At the end of the day, we’re all makers. I didn’t know how much I might think I might have in common with people like [director] James [McTeigue] then when I was invited to the preview in November, I met a lot of the cast, a lot of the crew, the sound director and some of the lighting guys. It’s really interesting that we all have a lot in common. We’re all craftsmen of one kind or another.

I knew that they were fans when they did the first screenplay. I’m kind of sad that they were so successful with the Matrix. I figured if they hadn’t been, they might have actually ended up doing the movie. But this version is great.

Thank you. It’s a very interesting story but I’m afraid people missed it when it came out.

It’s about escapism and what leads people to escapism and why we need to escape and what it is that makes us want to escape. We wrapped it in this story about one person who is a mystery. When we first see this person, we don’t know who he is or where he’s come from and then we go on this journey with him. He’s got to find something to look for to justify his own existence. The story that wrapped around these other stories was a tribute to the pop magazines of the ‘40s and ‘50s. They were one of the key escapist entertainments of that period. We did four issues and each one carried the character through this kind of surreal world of fantasy pop fiction.

Around '98, I wanted something to do that had the flavor of Lovecraft so I approached Dark Horse with a vague suggestion of it. Dave Land had an adaptable concept which was of a similar nature revolving around the idea of a Gatekeeper, a doorway into some other place or universe. The company then decided it was a good idea to develop the idea as some kind of intertwined set of stories.

In the middle of all this, I had suggested enlisting Jamie, who I knew well, to help with the story. Jamie brought one of his pet ideas along to the mix, the notion of a future prison system where inmates were stored and stacked for convenience sake like so many used cars, drugged and comatose to reduce management problems. As time progressed in the script and visualization process, the idea changed shape and took on different flavors.

Our society's need for escapism has always interested me. We spend more time developing means of escaping our troubles than we do solving the troubles we're trying to escape from. I'm interested in how artists and writers do this, using art as therapy. Escaping into the worlds we create. We're all victims and few of us are truly free. How we live in a world where we're all linked to each other through dependence on governing bodies like utility companies, phone companies, social security numbers, interests me. We all have a love/hate relationship with it. We can't do without the big machine around us but we wish we could. We want to be comfortably looked after but we want to be free to make our own choices. We have a desperate need for someone to tell us where to go and what to do in the big frightening world and often we end up being led to Hell like fools.

Kickback is a police thriller which I wrote. I’m very proud of it. I did it in two parts for France because when I wrote it, there wasn’t the audience demand for crime stuff that there is now. There was just Sin City and publishers weren’t interested in crime stuff and this was before 100 Bullets. It came out in France last year. It’s about a corrupt policeman in a corrupt police force who changes his ways. I’m interested in why people compromise when they shouldn’t. It comes back to what V’s about in a sense. We’ve all got ideals, but given the right circumstances, we’ll forget about them and put them behind us. I’m very interested in why people do that.

Yeah, I like doing them. As long as the audience is out there for them, I’m happy to do them. But I like telling stories about anything. The thing is you don’t always get the opportunity to do what you really want to do. I must say it’s difficult to get your own projects underway. I’m lucky. I’m quite popular in this business and people know me. Most of the time there’s somebody that wants me to do something. In a sense, you have to hope that the phone won’t ring so that you’ve got time to do something of your own because otherwise you’ll never be able to develop your own project. It’s been a long time since I wrote the first draft of Kickback to when I actually got it sold because I just never had the time to sell it.

Oh yeah. There’s a guy in England who has one. I think I’ve seen one somewhere else too. Somebody showed me one that they had made. They are pretty interesting. I think they’ll be more now. I’d be interested to see exactly how it pans out when the movie opens because there are a lot of critics and people who aren’t sure about the film. They’ve underestimated the effect the atmosphere of the film is going to have and the bizarre nature of it. It’s not like a regular adventure story.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck