Alan Moore gives a rare interview to MTV.com about V for Vendetta and his frustration with all movie adaptations.

In all the months we’ve been debating this movie, here and over on the Libertas boards, people are always firing back that the movie can’t be a parable or metaphor for the War on Terror because the original book wasn’t… as though it’s not a movie with a modern screenwriter adapting it to fit. Well, here the guy who wrote the original finally speaks out about people who think a book and a movie are the exact same thing.

The whole thing is worth reading, but here are some excerpts.

Those words, “fascism” and “anarchy,” occur nowhere in the film. It’s been turned into a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country. In my original story there had been a limited nuclear war, which had isolated Britain, caused a lot of chaos and a collapse of government, and a fascist totalitarian dictatorship had sprung up. Now, in the film, you’ve got a sinister group of right-wing figures — not fascists, but you know that they’re bad guys — and what they have done is manufactured a bio-terror weapon in secret, so that they can fake a massive terrorist incident to get everybody on their side, so that they can pursue their right-wing agenda. It’s a thwarted and frustrated and perhaps largely impotent American liberal fantasy of someone with American liberal values [standing up] against a state run by neo-conservatives — which is not what “V for Vendetta” was about. It was about fascism, it was about anarchy, it was about [England]. The intent of the film is nothing like the intent of the book as I wrote it. And if the Wachowski brothers had felt moved to protest the way things were going in America, then wouldn’t it have been more direct to do what I’d done and set a risky political narrative sometime in the near future that was obviously talking about the things going on today?

…Presumably it’s not illegal — not yet anyway — to express dissenting opinions in the land of free? So perhaps it would have been better for everybody if the Wachowski brothers had done something set in America…

Tip of the hat to Chilean Knight on Dixonverse for the link.