FAQ

To show the parallels between V and Gordon - possibly to create a 'red herring', but also to show that V's ideas go beyond himself - Gordon also has a hidden room/lair with banned items that he has saved from the censors. Some of the items he has display elements of his personality that he has to keep hidden from the government i.e. the images of gay men, but also objects that show how diametrically opposed he is to the regime i.e. his appreciation of art and culture in a world where this is discouraged - As Gordon states when Evey asks if he is a Muslim/religious, he states he finds "the images beautiful {and the} poetry moving". It is also a subtle hint that, as a banned book, Islam is a persecuted religion in 'Norsefire Britain' - yet another example of their authoritarianism.

V for Vendetta is a film adaptation of the comic book series of the same name by British writer Alan Moore and British comic artist David Lloyd. The first portion originally appeared as a strip in the British magazine, Warrior in the early 1980s and was later completed as its own limited series later in the decade in the United States and published by DC Comics and is current kept in print as a single bound volume under DC's Vertigo Comics imprint. It was adapted for the movie by screenwriting siblings Lana Wachowski (formerly Larry) and Lilly Wachowski. The screenplay was subsequently novelized by Stephen Moore (no relation to Alan Moore) and released as a mass-market paperback.

Alan Moore had always disdained the idea of his work being adapted for film, and he furthermore suffered a bad legal experience prior to V for Vendetta when his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was adapted. After that experience, he vowed to remove himself completely from any film adaptations of his work, including financially and in credits, to ensure that he would never have to endure that kind of legal trouble again. Moore also specifically didn't like this particular film because he felt that its message was different to the novel. Its release angered him to the point that he actually left his publisher, DC Comics, since they are owned by Warner Bros, the film's production and distribution company.

Guy Fawkes was one of the English Roman Catholics (led by Robert Catesby) who tried to blow up Parliament (with King James I and the Protestant aristocracy in it) on the 5th of November in 1605. This is known as the Gunpowder Plot. V is loosely based on Guy Fawkes, and his plot to destroy the parliament building is similar. However, the movie's depiction of Guy Fawkes is not historically accurate, due to a few minor details. For example, the beginning of the film shows Fawkes being hanged until dead, but Fawkes actually leapt from the gallows and broke his neck in order to avoid being hanged, and then drawn and quartered by his executioners; which combined with him being caught in the act is likely what contributed to his celebrity, whereas his notoriety stems from his failure and eventual revealing of information about his confederates.

V wears a Guy Fawkes mask and used his story as a role model in his quest to end the Norsefire rule. This was because V felt Guy Fawkes was right in trying to bring down what he felt was an oppressive government during his day. Similar masks were/are traditionally used for Fawkes effigies on Bonfire Night in the United Kingdom when the effigies are burned. The burning, and accompanying use of fireworks, is the traditional centre-piece of the festivities. Fawkes is the victim in this ritual; it is daring, and initially puzzling, for someone to take the mask on himself, as if saying "here is the one you have killed" and "here I am to be killed." V also briefly explains the significance of the mask when he says: "This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished."

They are Creedy's special police force, essentially the equivalent of Nazi Germany's Gestapo. They do the black-bagging and interrogations, as well as having the authority to make on-the-spot judgements for offenders, without due process of law. Finch is the leader of the Nose, which is essentially the regular police force-they sniff out criminals. Sutler might be considered the Brain. The Fingers do the dirty work. The Eyes and Ears are visual and auditory surveillance (led by Heyer and Etheridge respectively). The Mouth is the news outlets, the propaganda machine (led by Dascomb). Together they make up the Head and the five senses, though only the term "Fingermen" survived the novel's translation to film, with the Nose, Mouth, etc left unmentioned by those names.

In the film, breaking curfew is a crime for which Fingermen (the secret police) get judicial discretion on dealing with suspects (in effect, acting as judge and jury, meting out punishment themselves). The men Evey runs into in the film were planning to use this discretion to rape her with a legal seal of approval. Part of their mentality is that of seeing curfew policies as existing to protect against such things, and they will go out of their way to ensure that such things occur when curfew is broken (which the media outlets can then spin with expressions like "See what happens when you break curfew?"). In the graphic novel, the charge is prostitution and the Fingermen clearly state they are going to rape and kill Evey.

The Old Bailey is the Central Criminal Crown Court in Central London, and yes, it is actually known today as "The Old Bailey", although, officially, "The Old Bailey" is the name of the road on which the Court is located.

It is Latin for, "By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe." Although V attributes the phrase to Faust both in the graphic novel and the movie, it doesn't occur either in Christopher Marlowe's Faustus or Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust but in fact was a motto of the 20th century occultist Aleister Crowley, who likely had as much of a fascination with Johann Georg Faust as Marlowe and Goethe yet isn't known for explicitly writing about Faust in correlation with the motto. It could be speculated that V was in possession of an unpublished and furthermore esoteric work of art of some kind that linked these, but for Evey's sake, V's attribution was dubious, since she being an ordinary civilian would have no awareness of the hypothetical artifact.

This is explained in an expanded voiceover of Delia Surridge's (the coroner that V killed) journal, which exists in the original script but was cut much shorter for the final product. While at Larkhill, V was allowed to tend the garden there, for which he had access to chemical supplies, grease solvents, ammonia, and fertilizer. He used those to produce napalm and mustard gas.

There are two theories. (1) The doctor is talking metaphorically, i.e. she couldn't see his eyes because of the fire but knew he was looking at her. Throughout the movie, V can be seen reading books, watching movies, and visually noticing people. (2) Yes, he is blind. You can clearly see his face around his eyes is caved in and completely black on the close up, with no flames distorting your view, and it can be assumed that his enhanced kinesthesia is the way he views the world now, with no need for visual perception. This would, of course, necessitate an expanded definition of the the meaning of the term 'kinesthesia." In the comic book, however, it mentions (in the Doctor's Diary), that he has eyes, and is not blind: "He looked at me today as if I were some sort of insect. He looked at me as if he felt sorry for me." This is the part where the Doctor is beginning to go into more detail about him. Also, when V explodes the facility, the Doctor again mentions him looking at her, and it describes the gaze, so you would assume he has eyes, and is not blind.

This is explained in an expanded voiceover of the coroner's diary that exists in the original script but was cut shorter for the final product. In it, she explains that V was allowed to tend the garden at Larkhill, where he "grows roses. Beautiful roses." Therefore, she knew it was V when she saw the rose Finch handed to her. The scarlet carsons were grown by the lesbian lover of Valerie, the actress in The Salt Flats, who wrote the autobiography on toilet paper that she passed to V during their incarceration. That autobiography inspired V to live without fear, and he used those flowers as a signature for the killings he committed as retribution for Larkhill. The flowers in the movie are Scarlet Carsons, but the graphic novel claims them to be Violet Carsons, another connection to the letter "V". Violet Carson [1898-1983] was a British actress most famous for playing the role of Ena Sharples in the soap opera "Coronation Street". There really is a Violet Carson rose, created in 1963/'64 and named after the actress.

No digital effects were involved. The dominoes are corporeal props, and the effect is largely physically unmanipulated. Weijers Domino Productions proposed and designed the pattern including the falling sequences as well as the coloring effects. It took 4 professional domino assemblers 200 hours to set up 22,000 tiles. Each tile is 1⅞″ tall by ⅞″ wide and ¼″ thick (4.8 cm × 2.2 cm × 0.6 cm). According to Cinefex #106, the domino scene involved only minor finessing, such as slightly extending the photography in the top shot (leaving the dominoes themselves untouched), and a simple splitscreen effect in the final shot, when the dominoes come to rest in perfect symmetry with one domino still standing.

The man visible in the mirror is Inspector Finch.

It's the finale of the 1812 Overture by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. It is a programmatic piece celebrating the victory of Russia over Napoleon, and the big theme is the old Russian anthem: "God Save the Czar".

"Yakety Sax" by Boots Randolph. Also regularly used in the old British comedy series The Benny Hill Show (1969).

There are several songs that play during the end credits. In order, they are (1) "Street Fighting Man" by The Rolling Stones, (2) "BKAB" by Ethan Stoller (with excerpts from Malcolm X and Gloria Steinem), and (3) "Out of Sight" by Spiritualized. The remainder is original score from the film composed by Dario Marianelli. The song most folks seem to be interested in is "BKAB" by Ethan Stoller. For more information, please see his Q&A.

Specifically, it is a bit of both the 7th and 8th tracks from the sound track. It starts with a section of "Valerie" and then blends the tail end of "Evey Reborn". This is a rare soundtrack as it actually contains the theatrical score. For example, there is a Rolling Stones tune from the movie that is not included on the soundtrack CD.

John Hurt plays both doubles. However, it is unknown who in the movie world plays the doubles. Likely just skittles actors that work on Gordon's show, with some quasi-futuristic makeup to make them look and sound exactly like Sutler.

No. Director James McTeigue, in the book "V for Vendetta: From Script to Film", indicates that John Hurt's prior performance as the protagonist of Nineteen Eighty-Four played into the deliberately ironic casting of him as a Big Brother-type figure in this film.

Edmond Dantès is mentioned near the end of the movie in the exchange, "Who was he [V]?' 'He was Edmond Dantès, he is you, he is me...." He is the main character in The Count of Monte Cristo—V's favourite movie. The film was based on the book of the same name by Alexandre Dumas, and tells the story of a man who was wrongfully imprisoned, eventually escapes, assumes a new identity, and begins to exact vengeance upon those responsible for his incarceration. Read Count of Monte Cristo online here.

No, V states within a minute of meeting Evey that he is a man (twice, in fact). The doctor's diary also refers to V as the man in room 5 (V).

Yes, Valerie Taylor (1913-1997) was an American author of books published in the lesbian pulp fiction genre, as well as poetry and novels after the "golden age" of lesbian pulp fiction.

This depends entirely on your point of view. To the government in the movie and under current legal definitions in the US and UK, he is a terrorist. To the people of London in the film, to Evey and Finch by the end of the film, he was a freedom fighter. It's possible that he was both; for instance, the Sons of Liberty in the American Revolution were a terrorist group fighting for American freedom. However, Alan Moore, who wrote the graphic novel, would disagree with both of these. One of Alan Moore's problems with the film was that it painted "V" as a freedom fighter when he is in fact an anarchist. Anarchy is far more important to V's character than terrorism or freedom, but it is hardly even addressed in the film. There is of course still V's symbol, an upside down anarchy stamp with the horizontal line of the "A" missing.

2027 and 2028. About 1:30 into the film, the news anchor mentions the St. Mary's terrorist attacks "14 years ago." In the following scene, the detectives discuss two covert intelligence agents who suspiciously died "the day after" those attacks, and the computer screen reads their deceased dates as 06.05.14 (May 6th, 2014). So the film ostensibly is set from November 5th, 2027 to November 5th, 2028.

Influenced by, certainly, as Alan Moore quite clearly states in the Afterword to the comic book. However, just because a work is similar in subject does not mean it is plagiarized or a "rip-off". Nineteen Eighty-Four was itself largely influenced by Yevgeni Zamyatin's We and, to a lesser extent, Jack London's The Iron Heel, and all dystopian novels ultimately stem from such classics as Thomas More's Utopia and Plato's Republic, which depict "ideal" societies that many people today would find oppressive. Nineteen Eighty-Four was also largely influenced by world events occurring at the time it was written (1948), and this is clearly true for V as well. Fundamentally the stories are actually quite dissimilar, as V for Vendetta tells the tale of a revolution planned, announced, anticipated and then carried out. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, there is no revolution. The rulers are never threatened and the status quo remains constant. There is a brief moment of recognition that a revolution would be beneficial for the masses, but before that thought is given a chance to grow it is swiftly snuffed out by a brutal and torturous form of systematic mind reconditioning.

Not a direct attack, no. Art, as a medium, is often too subtle for such methods. It tends to run to the sort of scathing sarcasm and derision that undermines its target rather than attempting to assault them directly. On the other hand, the fact that we have asked the question demonstrates not only that the designed purpose of the film and its story is to enlighten the viewer while exposing cheap political demagoguery and social elitism for what they truly are, but that it succeeded in achieving that goal as well by actually stimulating the thinking processes which is ultimately the true goal of all art.

The original comic book was written by a Briton named Alan Moore and illustrated mostly by David Lloyd, starting in 1982 and published through 1988. It was aimed directly at Margaret Thatcher and Fascism. Alan Moore took umbrage with the film adaptation, making comments to the effect that the filmmakers did not have the courage to make an out-and-out attack on Bush, so they decided to adapt the story he'd written for their own purposes. In one scene, a protestor is carrying a sign which appears to have the word "BUSH" written on it. Plus, to account for the Doc Frankenstein comic series the Wachowskis created, they seem very liberal (i.e. socially democratic by European parlance), so the question isn't that far-fetched. Nevertheless, it does bear remembering that the script for this film was in development as far back as the mid-nineties, well before Bush took office.

The visual imagery of the Norsefire party, with its red and black flags that used an old, largely outmoded religious symbol as it chief device and the scenes of Sutler campaigning with fervent shouting and gesticulating seem clearly designed to evoke recollections of the Nazi regime rather than any modern political situation. The slight alteration of the Leader's name from the novel (originally Adam Susan rather than Sutler) also seems to be a deliberate attempt to reference Adolf Hitler. The party's practice of marginalizing and shipping ethnic and social minorities to detention camps is also a clear reference to the Third Reich, rather than modern America. Of course, certain details from modern times were included to make the story more identifiable to a modern audience, such as Prothero's similarity to various media pundits with staunch conservative viewpoints (or extreme derision toward the details of social "justice" ideology), as well as the brief reference to an avian flu outbreak and the general notion that the media exists to distract and worry the public rather than inform them of the facts. The Nazi references in this movie were far more obvious and deliberate than any disparagement of George W. Bush.

This dish goes by various names, but the one used in the movie is called "Egg in a Basket," or, as Gordon calls it "Eggy in a Basket" (Alan Moore especially disliked this detail, finding it unauthentic). Butter both sides of a piece of thick bread. Cut a hole in the middle, using a cookie cutter or glass. Drop a small bit of butter into a skillet or frying pan on low heat. Place the bread into the pan. Give it a few moments, and put 1 egg into the middle of the hole. When the egg begins to set, flip the whole thing over. Keep flipping until the egg is done the way you want. Keep the heat on low and don't get impatient; you'll have ashes on charcoal if you put the heat up too high. If you make more than one, put more butter in the pan each time. As a slight variation, you can put a slice of your favorite cheese and/or a deli thin slice of ham about a minute before it's done cooking. Do not flip once you've put the cheese on. This is also known as One Eyed Toast or an Egg in a Frame (in the southern parts of America). A similar dish using Italian bread and peppers is made in Éclair de lune (1987). The source of the aforementioned recipe is here.

No, V is not related to Gordon nor do they ever meet in the film. The similarities are there to illustrate that the two men are similar in their respective situations: V was sent away to a detention camp, Gordon would likely be similarly sent away if his identity as a gay man (a sadomasochistic gay man) were publicly known. Both are forced to hide their "true faces" in order to survive. It's also likely that, in the earlier scenes of this nature, that Gordon is being set up as a red herring for a possible secret identity for V, though the film points out rather quickly that this is indeed not the case. Additionally, V is unusually tall and thin; Gordon could not possibly fit into that costume, and, having seen the DVD image, he must know it himself, and know that Evey can see this as well.

The similarities drawn between various people in this film—which have led to multiple questions along the vein of "Is this person also that person?"—are intentionally designed to demonstrate that everyone is human. Everyone is "the same" in that they are deserving of freedom, justice, and the chance to live. This would be meant to stand against the Norsefire government's message of minorities, sexual "deviants" and others being a threat due to their perceived differences from the majority group. In the book, V is referred to as an idea/concept, and this could be applied to other characters in the book; no matter how "normal" you try to make people, their individualism will always show through. Gordon had a secret room and was homosexual, the man in charge of "The Head" was in love with the computer that fed him information, and it is implied (towards the end) that he masturbates over it, which could also be deemed non-"normal" behaviour.

They are homoerotic pictures of muscle-men in intimate moments. At a glance, it would appear that they are photos in the style of Robert Mapplethorpe's work.

[‡] The two-barred cross appearing on the red-and-black Norsefire flags, as well as nested between wings at the base of the "Strength through unity, unity through faith" posters similar to the Cross of Lorraine. Carried by the Knights Templar and still used in modern Freemasonry, the cross also was associated with Joan of Arc, and denotes the rank of Cardinal in the Catholic Church. This may be a subtle reference to the infamous "blood flag" of Nazi Germany, which had a similar color scheme and also used a cross variant, the fylfot, as its chief device, now known almost exclusively as the swastika. The cross could also be seen as a St George's Cross (representing England) and a Nordic cross (representing the "Aryan" race) placed together. In the graphic novel, the posters (which originally read "Strength through purity, purity through faith") used the traditional Christian cross. This change may have been an attempt to avoid offense. Some viewers have suggested that the Norsefire symbol signifies how the party has double-crossed the people.

The scrap of paper was the one she grabbed before going out the night V found her. It had Gordon's address (and a time to meet him) on it. For some reason, she still had it the next day when V took over the TV station. She wanted to escape V's lair and she felt she would be safe at Gordon's. She told V all the background stuff to help convince him to take her "out" with him so she'd have a chance to escape.

During Finch's "everything is connected" speech, we see various shots of events past and those yet to come, including Gordon throwing a lighted match into a waste basket and burning something. What you're seeing in that moment is Gordon burning the censor-approved script that he told Evey he'd "thrown out" when he wrote "a new one," i.e. the show lampooning Sutler, which got Gordon arrested. If you look closely, the paper in the basket is stamped with the word "Approved."

"Balls!" It's British slang, the equivalent of "bullshit" (or "horseshit"), similarly implying "I don't believe this; it's lies!" or "you're talking rubbish." Can also be used as an exclamation like "Damn!" If you are "talking bollocks", then you are being accused of lying or speaking nonsense/absurdity. It literally is a slang term for testicles. It is very much more commonplace in the south of England, where it is used a great deal. "The dog's bollocks", on the other hand, means "excellent", the total opposite of every other context that bollocks is used in, and may be a crude equivalent of "the bee's knees".

When Prothero is on the phone complaining about the DoP, he says "In the morning, the Paddy will be gone." The term "paddy" is a derogatory term to describe an Irish person. It comes from the common Irish name of Patrick and is often used as nickname.