Alan Moore interview. Part one of a long interview by Heidi MacDonald, again covering the V for Vendetta debacle but adding some additional depth. Part two. (via)
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In June 2000 I started blogging at peteashton.com and 10 years later in June 2010 I decided to stop. Blogging here, that is. I started a clean slate over on I Am Pete Ashton and maintain all manner of other web presences which are all listed here along with my contact details.
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Thanks for your eyeballs.
Pete Ashton
I went to the local cinema, paid my £6.60 and sat my arse down on a seat to watch ‘V for Vendetta’. My opinion… damn good film.
Yes I have read the comic/graphic novel. Yes, I like the comic/graphic novel. Yes, I like the film. I don’t think they have morphed ‘V’ from an anarchist into a liberal. He is still an anarchist through and through, and the script tips its hat to us anarchists in the audience. For example…
‘V’ – “A revolution without dancing is a revolution not worth having. ” This is clearly a reference to Emma Goldman’s famous “If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution!”.
Visually the film makers have clearly been influenced by recent events. The police ‘hook’ detainees, and Evey is seen in an orange prison suit. The nuclear war of the comic book is replaced with a biological weapon attack/virus.
I’m not sure why Alan Moore is so against the film. I am interested to read his views once he has actually seen the film.
I don’t think Moore really cares about the film as a film. He’s more upset about how he’s been treated by the publishers of V and the general process of adapting his works, essentially turning them into different beasts over which he has no control but which still play off the association with his name. and he’s a curmudgeonly old so and so.
Personally I haven’t decided if I’m going to see it in the cinema, mainly because there are a number of films I really want to see first. Will probably check it on DVD.
I’m not sure why such an obviously talented and intelligent writer expends so much energy on bemoaning the fate of his previous work. Live and learn :) I suspect it may all be a part of his creative process, that he needs to engage withn these feelings to keep his ‘muse’ to hand.
Or maybe he really is just being a grumpy old git :) LOL
PS – in my original post it should say ‘hood’ rather than ‘hook’.
You also have to remember Moore gets great pleasure from fucking with people’s ideas of the norm. Telling Hollywood types that, unlike most authors, he doesn’t want his works turned into movies and doesn’t want any of their money is akin to saying he wants to eat their children and shit in their pool.
He has a point – why should expensive film adaptations be the crowning glory of creative endeavour, especially when so many of them are shit?
Having seen the movie this week, I suspect that Moore’s opinion has been based on an earlier script with considerably less teeth than the final version, surprisingly, does seem to have. Not that it’s a perfect version, but it does retain a surprising amount of the thrust of the original comic. The most frustrating aspect is how the best bits of the film are the bits that cleave most faithfully to the book and yet, they still felt it necessary to shoehorn in the worst excesses of the Hollywood formula, tiny though they may be. To which my argument is, why bother putting it in at all? If, after 1 hour and fifty minutes, the audience hasn’t got the idea that this is not a love story or action-hero movie, then, frankly, even my incredibly cynical opinion of multiplex livestock has to be dropped another few notches. As it happens, a couple of people did walk out of the cinema about halfway through, but I think most people (including myself) were just shocked (and thrilled) at how many genuinely thought-provoking and subversive ideas and images had actually made it into the finished film. I understand Moore’s position. I agree entirely with his stance against DC from the point of view of rights over his own work and the unfortunate attitude of the behemoth of American Entertainment Culture. It’s by no means a perfect adaptation, but if it moves even a small percentage of moviegoers to pick up the original comic or think a bit more deeply about what’s going on in the world, then it’s done something worthwhile.