Director James McTeigue and Natalie Portman on the set of V for Vendetta

A few weeks into shooting, the production encountered its first speed bump when the original V, James Purefoy (Vanity Fair), was replaced by Weaving. Switching your lead actor—even one who spends the entire film behind an immobile, leering Guy Fawkes mask (Fawkes was a coconspirator in a Catholic plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605; his failure is celebrated annually on November 5)—is no casual decision. “The mask was always going to be tough,” says McTeigue hesitantly. “James is a great actor, but . . . we had to make a change.”

Silver is a bit more blunt. “This is a voice-over gig,” he says. “I doubt if James Earl Jones ever came to the set of Star Wars. I see it in very similar fashion. They just weren’t happy with James’s reading of their lines. . . . They love Hugo and they really wanted him in the first place, so we made the decision. It was exclusively a voice thing.”

Weaving arrived in Berlin five days after McTeigue called (no, he didn’t show up growling, “Surrrrprised . . . to see me?”) and embraced “the absolute challenge of making the mask work,” he says. He was pleased when Purefoy sent him a letter giving his blessing. “He didn’t have to do that, and it was very sweet of him.”

Portman, who was surprised by the change—“It’s not like there was any weirdness on set,” she says—feels his spirit will live on in the film. (In fact, says McTeigue, some of Purefoy’s work ended up in the final cut.) But she calls Weaving “wonderful,” and the adjustment never dimmed her passion for the project’s thorny dilemmas: How far would you go for your beliefs, and does using violence to fight oppression make you a terrorist or a freedom fighter?

“The thing I like and the thing that’s scary is that I don’t have any set opinions about the issues in the film,” says the actress, who, as Evey, takes an active part in the decision to convert Parliament into a smoldering ruin. “I don’t think there’s a clear message. The whole point of the movie is to spark debate because it’s about issues that we’re dealing with as ordinary citizens. There are always injustices to fight about, and it’s definitely interesting to see what turns a person who’s passively living in a flawed society into someone who will try and change things.”

On this point, McTeigue is in complete agreement with his star. “[The film] raises issues that need to be raised in this climate,” he says, “and lets you make up your own mind about what side of the fence you fall on.” Still, whether Warner Bros. was spooked by 7/7 or, as the official line asserts, simply ran out of time to maneuver the film through its truncated schedule, the studio bumped V from the figuratively important release date of November 4 (the 5th was the 400th anniversary of the failed Fawkes attack) to March 17. The added stretch did come in handy, allowing for some additional days of shooting in September—not, insists McTeigue, to rethink or even douse provocative elements, but merely to “flesh out parts of Evey’s story. Based on those reshoots, I didn’t cut anything that [had already been] shot.”

What’s more, he adds, “London has a history of this stuff. If you take it back to Guy Fawkes or the IRA, I think it’s been in London’s consciousness for a long time, so [the recent attacks] didn’t really make me want to respond. It’s the world we live in now. V is an interesting film for difficult times.”