Matthew Vaughn has become very passionate about staying out of the studio system and raising his own budgets for movies. The very independent filmmaker recently sat down with Peter Aspden from Financial Times at a restaurant near his home in London. Here are some of the excerpts.
On his love affair with comic books:
“It is a tainted love. I loved them more as a kid than I do now. I always read them, and books too, with a mind to turning them into a film. It’s a shame. Every so often I read a book that I know somebody else has an option on, and I become a real reader again. What I love about comics is that the people who love them are true enthusiasts. They are absolutely genuine. A lot of people say they like things like art, and you ask them about it, and they know nothing. With comics, it is such a nerdy thing, that to say you like them means you really like them.”
Vaughn says he attended a comics convention, which he found
“fascinating but a little scary at the same time. It is weird to see a 45-year-old woman dressed as Wonder Woman, when she really shouldn’t be. But good luck to her.”
Vaughn touched base on the difficulties in getting
Kick-Ass made and some of the problems he sees with the Hollywood studio system.
“Originally my agent said it was a no-brainer – he would have the whole thing set up in three days and I could take my pick of the studios. The three days passed, I rang him, and he said, ‘Forget it, move on, no one is going to make this film.’”
“They didn’t like the character of Hit-Girl. They hated her. They wanted to turn it into a PG, but I was not going to do that.”
“Even with my film, the distributors wanted to cut the first 20-25 minutes because it was too slow. I like to start films at 30 miles an hour and then build to 180. In Hollywood they start at 180, and then run out of gas. I believe in making films for a mass audience, but the studios genuinely believe they are making films for total morons.”
“Hollywood is a dying industry. They could release rubbish films, and use DVD sales as their get-out-of-jail card. But that is collapsing now, and the quality is going to start going up. It is going to be like the 1970s again. Film will become a directors’ medium again.”
Vaughn recalls working in the studio system when he started to direct
X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) but walked out after 10 weeks on the project. (The film was finally completed by Brett Ratner.)
“I realised that I was a tiny cog in this huge machine, and I panicked. I felt there wasn’t a good enough reason for being away from my family.” Was that a traumatic time? “No, I knew I had made the right decision. In the short term my name was mud. They spun against me: I was a liability, I couldn’t cope with the pressure. But I was lucky enough to be in the position where I could just walk.”