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MillimeterFade to Black: James McTeigue, Director
Mar 1, 2006 8:00 AM, By Michael Goldman
As his film V for Vendetta opened to strong box-office sales in March, James McTeigue seemed remarkably unflustered about the success of his feature directorial debut. A well-known veteran assistant director, McTeigue says he was used to large projects from his AD days on three Matrix films and one Star Wars project, among others. That same experience helped him “know all the best people to surround myself with,” and he admits he benefited from the wise counsel of the film’s writers and co-producers, Andy and Larry Wachowski—old hands at big-budget directing and his former bosses on the Matrix series.
But McTeigue insists he was determined to take the film’s portrait of an Orwellian, futuristic Great Britain and the one man who rebels against that future in his own direction when he took on the job.
“I wanted to go for a style that was my own,” he says. “I was not interested in doing something that has come before me, or something else I’ve already worked on. The Wachowski brothers wrote and produced the film, gave me the opportunity to direct it, and they definitely had their own vision, but they were also great as partners. I was allowed to take or leave their suggestions, and in the end, they wanted the film to be my vision. That was real nice.
“But, at the same time, books you have read over the years seep into you through osmosis, and sometimes, some of that comes out consciously, and sometimes, sub-consciously on a project like this. There were all those similarly themed things that came before, like 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451, and I guess some of those bits come out and some don’t. And, obviously, some bits that came from the graphic novel [upon which the film is based] are in there. But I also had my own, definite ideas about what the film should look like, and that was based on all sorts of different things. The Sensation [art exhibit] from a few years ago [in London], Francis Bacon, the cinematography of Gordon Willis, those ‘70s movies like Three Days of the Condor, Winter Kills, The Parallax View, All the President’s Men—all of these things seeped out of me and into the discussions I had with our cinematographer [Adrian Biddle], our production designer [Owen Paterson], and others.”
McTeigue reports his project management skills developed as an AD played to his advantage on the project, but his former career might have helped him most when it came to offering direction to actors the caliber of Natalie Portman and Hugo Weaving.
“A big part of filmmaking is trust, and accepting this is a collaborative effort,” he says. “So you surround yourself with people who give you a comfort level, and then, once you have done that, you get a chance to become a lot more creative, because you are able to trust that those people will do their jobs, that the equipment will arrive, that insurance will be taken care of, all those things. And I was also very confident working with actors. I’ve been around actors my whole life. The leap to [directing actors] was not as big as you might think, because, as a first AD, I had worked steadily with prominent actors.”
McTeigue’s Matrix and Star Wars experiences also gave him a frame of reference for crafting the film’s 450 visual effects shots in collaboration with artists at London’s Framestore CFC. But unlike those effects extravaganzas, McTeigue resisted making V for Vendetta a digital feast.
“[Many digital shots were] straight-out color correction and wire removals and things. I was interested in digital effects only in terms of weaving them into the narrative and making them seamless, so that your eye will not be expressly drawn away from the story. We tried to make effects part of the narrative, and our visual effects supervisor [Dan Glass] and I agreed that primarily using miniatures and augmenting them with digital touches was the way to go.”
