Matthew Vaughn Compares X-Men: First Class to Twilight & James Bond Films!

"The best way of describing it is X-Men meets Bond, with a little bit of Thirteen Days thrown in for good measure. It’s set in the ’60s, and I basically molded a young Magneto on a young Sean Connery. He’s the ultimate spy — imagine Bond, but with superpowers."

"You’re seeing Xavier become a professor. For me, Magneto is the good guy in the film, but he’s a sort of a good bad guy. He literally kicks off the movie, and Xavier goes along on the ride trying to figure out what the hell is going on, and trying to persuade Erik that you don’t have to kill everyone."

"n the beginning of the film, no one knows that mutants exist, and all the mutants don’t know that each other exist. They’re all in hiding. Kevin Bacon plays a very megalomaniac mutant [Sebastian Shaw] who decides that he can take over the world and that mutants are the future. Erik and Charles then meet each other and hook up with the CIA to try and prevent World War III. You find out everything about what went on between Erik and Charles."

"They’re not flashbacks — we start there. It starts in 1942, and then works its way up to 1962."

"Yeah, but I could tell those fans that they’re wrong. One thing about the X-Men world is that, if you know your X-Men universe, every writer reinvented the storyline. I did my research, and none of the histories of the characters make any sense. Each writer just totally changed the history to make their plot work. So I can quite safely say that X-Men has a history of reinventing its history for the sake of the plot."

"Not really. There are a lot of nods to the X-Men world and the X-Men movies, but it’s definitely its own beast."

"That’s true. It was as simple as that. In retrospect, I probably would have had more time then than I do now, which is highly ironic. But I also have more experience now than I did then. And I had no idea how big-budget filmmaking worked, so I was just applying small-budget independent-style logic to the wrong equation. And when I saw the film, I realized that Fox would have given me all the tools I needed. I was just stupid enough not to take them. But we both decided to cross the bridge together again. I definitely had burned a bridge. But they asked, so we met and we both kissed and made up and went off to make the film."

"Professor X is a very hard character to cast. Out of all the characters, he’s the dullest if you really think about it. He’ll be in a wheelchair eventually, and he’s sort of a sanctimonious preacher half of the time. Patrick Stewart brought so much to that role, and I needed to get an actor who could do the same — who could give him a fourth dimension that’d make him sparkle. James was literally at the top of the list, and he said yes, so I got my first actor very quickly. Magneto was a juicier role. I’ve been watching Fassbender for a long time, and I knew the guy was going to pop as a movie star. He read it and knocked it out of the park, and the rest of the cast just fell in around them. What makes me laugh is, by this time next year, half of my cast is going to be extremely popular and famous. Jennifer Lawrence [i.e. Raven Darkholme/Mystique] is going to pop. Nicholas Hoult [i.e. Hank McCoy/Beast] definitely is. People are going to find Kevin Bacon a revelation, and January Jones [i.e. Emma Frost] has got huge star potential."

"It’s got a lot of teenage angst. The Twilight girls will like it."