How did the process of bringing V for Vendetta from book to screen begin?

Silver: We acquired the material in the late '80s. I thought it would be a fun movie that people would enjoy seeing, although it was a different political time then. The Wachowski brothers wrote the first script in the mid-nineties and when we made The Matrix there was a lot of interest in what other ideas they had. So we pulled this thing out and looked at it again. They said why don't we rewrite it and let James direct it? James had worked with us on all The Matrix films and had done a lot of promotional advertising work for The Matrix films. So the Wachowskis went back in 2004 and rewrote it, cleaned it up a bit and here we are today.

Could you give an insight into the London you created and how you went about creating it bearing in mind the unprecedented permission that you had to get for filming in London ?

McTeigue: I always wanted the look of the film to feel like London is now and maybe how it felt like twenty-five years ago. If you project into the future, some things will change but London is always a constant. Fashion affects it, industry affects it but I wanted there to be touch-stone moments that you recognise as London.

If you could project 25 years in advance of where we are now, how likely is this to be the face of England ?

Fry: If only it would be that stylish! I think my view is that whenever you project into the future you're never likely to be right in the details, it's all in the style of it. Orwell's 1984 was not physically accurate in many ways and we don't know what will happen in twenty years time but it's certainly possible that the liberty of the individual will be compromised, if not by the state then by the billions of bits of data about us floating around. Things will be up in the air in a way we can't imagine but can probably guess at.

Did the London bombings have any effect on the cutting room floor? 

McTeigue: We'd actually finished shooting the film by then. You have to go with the material you have so it didn't affect the film on the cutting room floor at all.

Is there any truth to the rumours at the time that the release date was pushed back for reasons of sensitivity to the London bombings?

Silver: We had intended to release the movie on November 5 th because we thought that would be a wonderful marketing idea. But the picture finished shooting in September of that year and the idea of getting it done by November was impossible. Not only that, Guy Fawkes Night is a one territory holiday � albeit a very important territory � so rather than kill ourselves trying to get the movie done when the date wouldn't have meant as much around the world, we just decided to pick the date when The Matrix opened around most of the world. That made more sense to us. We just couldn't get the movie done. In the end it worked out because the world-scene has gone to a place where the movie is even more relevant now than it was several months ago.

Natalie, how liberating was it for you having to cut your hair in the film?

Portman: Obviously for my character it's a very traumatic experience because it's a violence committed upon her. For me, I got to choose to do it so it didn't feel like a violence being committed against me and it was actually kind of wonderful to throw vanity away for a little bit. As a woman you're always expected to be primping and preening yourself so it was a nice opportunity to not think about that stuff for a while.

How was it engaging with Hugo through the mask?

Portman: Working with the mask is kind of amazing because as an actor opposite a mask you're always wondering what's going on behind it. Are they laughing behind it, are they smiling behind it, are they crying are they angry? You're so engaged with the other person's emotions that you almost become that other person and there's this incredible engagement with the character. Hugo's performance was so vocally and physically specific that it was a great help. It's not like working with blue screen where you have to imagine the performance opposite you. He was giving a full bodied performance.

John, having been a victim of Big Brother twenty years ago, did you enjoy playing Big Brother in this film?

Hurt: Well, it's something that hadn't occurred to me until it was brought up. The glory of being an actor is that one is not Winston Smith and one is not, thank God, the self-made Chancellor of a fascist England . The glory of it is being able to play both sides of the coin. I have to say I had a lot of fun doing it, I enjoyed it a lot.

Do you think a film like this could have been made in America ? Would a major landmark being blown up by the hero be tolerated in any other part of the world? 

Silver: Well, in Independence Day aliens blew up the White House.

But not by a home-made terrorist. 

Silver: We followed a graphic novel that was created in the '80s. Then it was a discussion of Thatcher's England but we translated the graphic novel to the movie and we tried to stay as close to it as we could. That story took place in England and though we filmed a lot of the movie in Berlin, we were here for two weeks. We shot a lot of the outdoor scenes here. England is where the story took place and we tried to make the movie replicate the novel as much as we could. 

How surprising was the level of political content in the script when you got it? Does that make it a hot potato when it's released in America ?

Hurt: One might have questioned, and indeed one did, how on Earth are they going to be able to put this out? But the fact is it's been made into physical existence so we have it now and it is being put out and handled pretty well, it seems to me.

Rea: Obviously you're surprised to get a script that's intelligent and well-realised and is actually an intervention into something that we're living through. For an actor that's a dream. When James showed me the script I couldn't believe my luck.

Portman: When I received the script I was shocked that a big Hollywood action movie could have substance. It's something that's provocative and will make people feel very strong things whatever those various reactions will be. I thought this is crazy, I want to do this! This is exactly the kind of entertainment that I'm interested in making.

Fry: I was actually going to ask Joel for my own purposes this question. I think Die Hard 2 is one of the most perfectly constructed thrillers ever made. No one could pretend it's deeply serious but I wondered if you feel a difference. Is this just another action movie or is there a particular pride you have in making films like The Matrix and V for Vendetta which actually cause more discussion?

Silver: I've made a lot of stupid action films in my life but I like stupid action films, I'm proud of them. But we found in The Matrix that people were willing to accept something more. It was a smarter film. V for Vendetta makes you think about what's going on and there's a lot of dialogue in it, more than I'm used to, but I do blow up a lot of buildings it's just maybe people will talk about it some more. I think it's something we should be doing. It's a responsibility of a film-maker to do something fresh and unique and original and I think this movie is that.

James McTeigue: The script came into being because what Alan Moore and David Lloyd [creators of the graphic novel] did is still quite prescient. The discussions of what happens in the film are so in the vernacular of everyday life, it's in the news media everyday. At some point that bleeds into cinema and the arts. The film was just trying to address what was out there at the moment.

What debates do you hope this movie will create? 

Rea: I'd like to think that a lot of people in government will see it and have a little thought about what extreme government can do to citizens and what position citizens can find themselves forced to be in. There is a wonderful debate in the film about the nature of terrorism and the kind of person you become when you start responding to tyrannical government. It's the kind of debate that people from where I come from [ Ireland ] have been having and from where Natalie comes from as well [ Israel ].

Fry: In the '70s there was a wonderful strand of films that they used to call 'dystopic' films like Zardoz, Soylent Green, The Omega Man and Logan's Run, which Joel's developing at the moment. I guess it happened then because there was a big issue about the relationship between the individual and the state. In the '80s that was less interesting to people but now suddenly it's something that everyone's talking about again. It's rather wonderful to be in a film which is a fantastic 'pop-corn' movie, but which also has people coming out of screenings really talking about things. Not in a pompous way but genuinely talking about the way their country's going. Not only here but in the States where the Patriot Act has gone through. The film doesn't directly address those issues, of course, but it raises the question. That's one of the best things that films can do and if it can do it in a format that's wholly entertaining then so much the better.