Promoting the DVD release of Matthew Vaughn's
Kick-Ass, Tarquin Pack speaks with
Movie Web on Vaughn & FOX's mutant flick
X-Men: First Class, which hes serving as the producer. Pack not only debunks the Aaron Johnson casting rumor, but compares the tone of the previous "X-Men" trilogy, and speaks on the rewrites due to Christopher Nolan's
Inception.
There was a rumor that Aaron Johnson was portraying Cyclops. Is that happening at all? Are there any other cast members you can tell us about?
"Nothing you don't know about, yeah. Don't believe everything you read in the papers about Aaron, unfortunately. Aaron's kind of busy, yeah.
Can you talk a bit about the tone of the film? Will this be similar to the first three films or will you be going in a different direction, tonally?
"I think the first two (X-Men and X2: X-Men United) are the closest to the sort of movie we want to make. This isn't going to be a Kick-Ass version of X-Men. It is what it is and I think Matthew will bring a freshness to it. He has a way of authoring movies, like you see in Layer Cake, Stardust and Kick-Ass, that nuanced outlook will be in X-Men because that's just the way he is as a director. That's just the way he works. I think all of the movies
he's done, where you expect him to turn right, he turns left. That's why Fox asked him to do an X-Men movie and, even though it's a big, franchise American movie, and you might think he'll be turning right like everyone else would, we'll still be turning left"
There was a story that came out a few days ago where Matthew said he had seen Inception and had to cut a few pages out of the script. Can you elaborate on those revisions at all?
"I can't go into great detail, but let's just say that an idea we thought we had that was brilliant and original... damn that Christopher Nolan (Laughs). In the end, there were cuts. You always want everything to be in your film, but they were kind of irritating changes to make, because it was a really cool idea, but I think there's a possibility that there's a version of it that we might be able to use as well. In the end, it wasn't that we had to remove all this stuff in the film that didn't make sense, it was more that it was a really cool device that we thought we were going to be using."
Filming is expected to begin soon for
First Class. And starring James McAvoy (Xavier), Michael Fassbender (Magneto), Alice Eve (Emma Frost), Nicholas Hoult (Beast),Caleb Landry Jones (Banshee), Lucas Till (Havok), and Kevin Bacon, and Edi Gathegi (Darwin), the mutant-flick hits theater June 3, next year.