NEW YORK — Hollywood press junkets don't come much stranger.
The star and makers of the eagerly anticipated V for Vendetta are ensconced in a honeycomb of hotel suites high above Central Park. They're engaged in a concerted campaign to say only the most neutral and innocuous things about the film.
But when you're promoting an incendiary political movie, there isn't any need to throw fuel on the fire. You just try to control the blaze.
Based on a cultishly popular graphic novel, V for Vendetta, which opens Friday, is about a bomb-planting, masked vigilante fighting a totalitarian regime in a futuristic England.
Yet the parallels to the Bush administration seem inescapable. The movie is about a government that wiretaps its own citizens, that twists the meaning of words in Orwellian fashion, that accuses its enemies of "godlessness" while menacing them with truncheons, that uses its all-news channel to whip the populace into line by keeping them in a state of near panic.
On this frigid day, the makers of V for Vendetta have assembled to insist that the film is anything but a timely indictment.
"The graphic novel was written in the '80s and the first draft of the film script in the mid-'90s," says Natalie Portman, who plays the budding revolutionary Evey.
Portman sits, curled up in a chair, tightly hugging herself. Her hair, which was shaved off for the film, is styled into a riot of short spikes. In profile, her delicate, angular features suggest Nefertiti.
"Yes, it seems relevant now," the 24-year-old actress says. "But people are also finding echoes of World War II and Stalinist Russia. The beauty of setting it in an imaginary world is that it has this timeless quality."
The director, James McTeigue, an Aussie who lives in New York, contends that the themes of V for Vendetta are universal.
"I wouldn't say it's particularly about America," he says. "I'd say it's about society. It could as easily be about Blair's U.K., or where I come from, John Howard's Australia.
"It's always dangerous to be different. At times, it can get you persecuted. In different societies, there is always some sort of fear-based politics. I think the film respects the right of the individual to stand up to these things."
V for Vendetta marks the directorial debut for McTeigue, the longtime first assistant director for the Wachowski brothers, those mysterious auteurs of the Matrix trilogy who wrote and produced V, as well as serving as second-unit directors.
