Matthew Vaughn Interviewed

http://www.comicscontinuum.com/stories/1105/29/matthewvaughn.htm

HeyUGuys interviews Matthew Vaughn

Q: Is the film about super powered individuals facing off against one another, or about political and social ideas. It’s clearly both, but which first and foremost?

Matthew Vaughn: No idea. It is what it is. I should be able to answer that, but the making of it was such a crazy experience, we were just trying to get it done, and get it finished on time. It’s the first time I’ve made a movie with no time to think. You ask me a question like that normally, I’ll be able to tell you,’ when I set out to make this film I had the following ideas’, but every day we were just making it up; so I think it’s a mixture of both.

I think primarily it’s about the relationship between Magneto and X, but set in a backdrop of political espionage and the Cold War. I always wanted to do a Cold War movie, I’m desperate to do a Bond film, always have been. I got my cake and eat it, managed to do an X-Men movie, and a sort of a Bond thing, and a Frankenheimer political thriller at the same time.

Q: You brought in Jane Goldman to write part of it with you, but there were other writers,…

MV: Not really.

Q: So it was you and Goldman who wrote it then?

MV: WGA don’t think that, but they’re fuckwits. Jane and I wrote the screenplay, threw everything out and started again. Sheldon Turner managed to get a ‘Story By’ credit, he wrote the Magneto script that none of us have ever read. I didn’t even know that. I was like, ‘who the fuck is this guy?’. Hollywood’s got its own way of dealing with things.

Q: How much input did Singer have? It feels to me that it’s got the undercurrent of humour that you and Goldman have brought to Stardust and to Kick-Ass, but it feels much more of an ensemble piece than you’ve done before, and that’s where Singer’s experience is.

MV: You say that, but Stardust had a shitload of characters, so did Kick-Ass, so did Layer Cake, in a weird way. And Snatch and Lock Stock. I’m actually more terrified of doing a movie with one lead character, because the good thing of having lots of characters is if one’s getting boring I can just say, ‘let’s cut to that plot line’. It’s hard to make sure they come across as three-dimensional characters, but at the same time I think it’s more interesting – it’s easier to con an audience that lots of interesting things are happening if I can switch the channel, let’s say, whenever I need to.

The influence of Bryan, Bryan came up with I think, I don’t even know who came up with the original idea, I think it was Bryan’s idea. Once I started, I think we made the film in ten months. We’ve had nine weeks post. I only saw the film for the first time five days ago; I hadn’t even ever seen it working on all these different sections. I got given two weeks for the director’s cut. When I say it was madness, there were times when I thought we wouldn’t get the film finished, and if it is finished, God knows what it’s going to be like to watch. I was taken out of my comfort zone on this film. I come from low budget film making, which is very much about prepping, making sure every dollar goes on screen. Here I hardly got any time to prep, and five DPs on this film, four different ADs. Every day I didn’t know who my crew were, I was like, ‘hey, what do you do?’ It was good for me, because I’d so relied on my AD and DPs, as that triumvirate when you make a film, and here I was sort of on my own, naked, running around. At first it scared the hell out of me, but I got used to it. So as a director I feel much more confident after this one.

Q: Obviously this isn’t the first time you were brought into an X-Men movie, you were originally slated to direct X-Men 3. How would that have differed, and more to the point, looking back are you pleased that it didn’t come to be?

MV: X-Men was a weird process. The reason I pulled out of it was because, I genuinely didn’t think I had enough time to make the film – and they were giving me much more time on that than on this one – and that world was already created. What was far more satisfying about this one was, because of Stardust and Kick-Ass, I was far more comfortable about bigger-budget special effects and all that shit , but I loved the idea I could recast every character, set up a new world, and do my version of an X-Men movie. X3 ultimately, you’re following a trend, and my X3  would have been – you know I storyboarded the whole bloody film, did the script – I think my X3 would have been at least 40 minutes longer, and it would have had  – I think they didn’t let the emotions of those characters – I can remember when I was writing those scenes, when Jean Grey turns round to Wolverine and says ‘kill me’, and the deaths at the end, and Professor X's death, I was writing that shit with them, and I just felt they didn’t let the emotion and the drama play in that film. It  became just wall t-to-wall noise and action –how long was it, like 98 minutes or something, not even that, 89 it might have been – I would have let it breathe, and have far more dramatic elements to it, I think. But then they probably wouldn’t have let me do that. Fox were great on this film. Fox have got this really bad reputation, but they were true allies on this. They really let me get on with it.

Q: You say that you’ve created this world. It’s clearly a prequel, but is it a prequel in the sense that Star Trek is a prequel? If it comes to a point where it’s going to clash with the continuity of the other films are you just going to say, ‘bugger it, let’s just make a good movie’?

MV: Totally. Why would I give a shit about the other ones? We’ve started a whole new – for me I wanted to do my version, and a version where it was more similar to the comics at the beginning, they came out in the 60s. I really enjoyed X1 and X2, I think Bryan did a great job, but I think X3 and then Wolverine, they went off and – The whole superhero genre has been fucked up by a lot of Hollywood trying for big explosions, and lots of glossy and corny costumes and outfit – I was very inspired by what Nolan did with Batman Begins. I’m a big Burton fan, and then you see what happened with, the first two Burton Batmans were great, and then Schumacher took over, and you were just like, ‘what the fuck is going on?’ and they got worse and worse, and they kept making them, and they were getting camper and I just thought – I really enjoyed Batman Begins, a lot more than I thought I would when I first saw it, especially the first half more than the second half, and I just thought, ‘why not try to do the same thing?’ putting a realism, making the characters and genre of X-Men relevant to a modern day audience.
I think superhero films need to change. I’ve said this before, I think superhero films are on the verge of a genre dying anyway if Hollywood – Thor’s done well – that was weird as well, I was meant to direct Thor, so watching that one – but, it’s doing well. No-one’s seen Green Lantern? I don’t know what that’s going to be like. I love superhero films, I want more to be made, but I get nervous. I think they need to be taken seriously as a genre. I think the difference between Iron Man and Iron Man 2 shows, if you don’t really nail it, you can suddenly go, ‘what is this?’

Q: This is the third film you’ve co-written with Jane Goldman…

MV: Fourth actually. We’ve got another one coming out next month.

Q: This is the third we’ve seen. And of course you’re going to be working on Kick-Ass 2 together as well…

MV: Maybe. Everyone says we’re doing that, but I don’t know yet. The weird thing about Kick-Ass 2 is, I enjoyed it so much, but I’m a big believer that if you’re going to do a sequel it’s got to be as good as the first one, if not better. I just don’t know how I can – The business frame of mind is just to do Kick-Ass 2, just shoot it  and get it out there, and it’ll make a lot of money, but I really do love that movie, it was a very special moment to me making that film. I’m not saying it was as good as Pulp Fiction, but I think if Tarantino made Pulp Fiction 2, you’d be like, ‘OK… let’s see what you come up with’ and everything that made Kick-Ass original and fun, I think if you do it again, it could be crass. I’m not saying it won’t happen, but it would have to have something about it which made me feel comfortable that the audience would enjoy it as well.

Q: How do you and Jane work together? Do you actually sit down in a room and write together and bounce ideas off one another, or do you write separately and e-mail scripts back and forth?

MV: I normally bang out a very rough draft on my own, and send it over to her. She normally rewrites it, and then, when she’s rewritten it, we get in a room together and do the final coming together of the script. And then we give it to people.

Q: She’s suggested before that your speciality is very structural, and hers the fine points. Is that a fair distinction to make?

MV: I build the whole universe, the characters and all that…

Q: and that pretty much holds tight?

MV: Yeah, it doesn’t change at all, because I’m anal about structure, so it doesn’t change at all.

Q: I think one of the impressive things about this film was that the structure leads us to something that was inevitable, but it happens in an unexpected way.

MV: The first scene I wrote was the Auschwitz, or the concentration camp, scene with the little kid. I thought, ‘what’s the best way of doing a prequel?’ and I had the idea to start it, shot-for-shot with the beginning of the X-Men world, and then, let’s see what happened after he pulled the gate. That scene, for me, is the crux of the movie. It makes you feel sorry for Magneto, it makes you want to see him kick some fucking Nazi’s arse, and I also thought –the whole thing of Nazism, they were very obsessed with genetic mutation, and the whole blue eye, blonde hair shit, and all the experiments they did – I just thought it was a very natural way of starting, and then flipping to Professor X, you’ve got Magneto in a fucking concentration camp,  and you’ve got Professor X wandering around this huge mansion, and I thought, ‘what a great way of starting it off?’

So they were the first things I wrote, and then, I was always imagining, but you have to figure out: how do they become friends? How do they then fall out? How does Professor X get crippled? And how does Magneto become Magneto? Was the end goal, but it was hard, because Fox kept saying, ‘this movies all about the friendship between them’, and I was like, ‘guys, they only get to see each other for three fucking weeks’, I had to somehow make it believable that you care, and Bryan came up with the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I didn’t know much about it. I was English, and we didn’t really learn about that much in school, and when I read about the Cuban Missile Crisis, I thought our version made more sense in history than the real version. The idea that we nearly went to nuclear war, you just go, ‘I cannot believe that happened’, where ultimately, if there’s a bad super villain making all that shit happen, it makes far more sense.

It was Magneto I was obsessed with, Shaw is the villain, but you’re now seeing all those elements of Shaw, going into Magneto, that was, for me, the far more interesting arc. With Professor X, he’s a bit of a pious, sanctimonious, boring character, in that he’s got too much fucking power. It’s very hard writing when you’ve got some guy who can just freeze people, or read everyone’s mind, you’re just going, ‘how do you handle this guy?’ So I did like the idea of James and I going, ‘let’s make him more of a rogue’, ‘let’s make him fun’, and then how he slowly starts realizing there are other mutants out there, and gets slowly more responsible, but for me Magneto is the driving force, that was the character I most related to, and the most fun you can have.

Q: When Xavier is at university, at the beginning of the film, he’s quite cocky. I think his relationship with Erik is what does start to mellow him.

MV: Yep. I think when he realises there are other mutants out there, and because of Shaw, realising that the worst thing that can happen is mutants being hated because Shaw’s trying to kill everyone.

Q: You’ve talked about James Bond in reference to how you could see the character of Erik for Michael’s performance. Did you have a similar archetype for McAvoy as Xavier?

MV: Not really, actually.

Q: How did you direct him then? We’re you referential to Patrick Stewart in the other films?

MV: No we weren’t, in fact it was the opposite. I said, ‘don’t worry about Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, I think they did a great job, but you’ve got to make these characters your own?’ I think, the way I was saying to James was, lets’ make the character more fun, so that you slowly see him becoming the Professor X of – the professor. When we first meet him, he’s not a professor, and we were trying to show that transition. It’s just not as fun. Seeing Magneto growing into a villain is far more interesting than seeing a guy sadly becoming a cripple, and becoming a teacher, ultimately. It’s not quite the arc you want to see as much, but I think James did a fabulous job, because it’s the hardest character to make interesting.

Q: You talked about gender issues a little bit there, and the way women were treated in the 60s. The film’s also set around the time of the civil rights movement. What thinking did you have about race issues?

MV: We talked about it, because they say X-Men was based on Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, but I think I had enough of a political subplot in this movie. We’ve already discussed, in the next one, does the Civil Rights movement become part of if we do a sequel. That’s a real hot potato, as well, still, so I think we decided to stay clear.

Q: I’d love to see that.

MV: You can only put so much in a film, in the sequel, it could happen. I don’t know yet, I don’t really like talking about sequels because the film could tank, and that’s that for everyone.

Matthew Vaughn Interviewed

Drew McWeeny interviews Matthew Vaughn:

I asked him about his choice to use Sebastien Shaw as the main villain in this one.  The filmmaker reveals, "He was the villain… no, the character, that I was most afraid of.  I kept thinking, 'Are we going to pull Shaw off?' And the comic book version made me nervous, and I would argue with Lauren [Shuler-Donner] about it, and she'd say, 'He must have the ponytail and the cravat.' And I would argue, 'He is going to look like an Austin Powers villain, Lauren.  We cannot do that.  I have to make the movie work, and Kevin Bacon with a ponytail and a cravat dressed as an 18th-century fop will look ridiculous.'"

That's a fine line with the world of the X-Men, though, between what works on film and what looks totally ridiculous.


"Oh, absolutely, but Shaw walks the finest line, even if he did have that look in all the comics," Vaughn says. "Also with him, it's the power. It's such a hard thing to illustrate, the whole absorbing energy and all that shit, and we only really finished his powers up about two weeks ago.  That's when I saw them all for the first time.  Thank god I liked it, because it was pretty damn tough."

The Singer films were obviously a guide for the visual approach to this world, but there are plenty of tweaks that have been brought in by Vaughn and his team. 

When asked how he made those choices, Vaughn replied, "There were two main influences I had.  First, I watched all the early Bond movies again.  'You Only Live Twice,' I watched a couple of times.  I really wanted it to feel like a '60s Bond film, but with a little bit of reality it could be grounded in.  I wanted there to be just a hint of this world of the mutants coming through.  A mutant in this world having powers needed to be the equivalent of you or I sneezing, as normal as possible, at least until the humans start seeing it for the first time.  And creating a look for the movie was crazy, because I ended up having five DPs on this film.  It was very good for me to get out of my comfort zone.  Normally, I feel like the core team on a film is the DP, me, and the ADs, but on this one I had five DPs and four different ADs.  It was a very steep learning curve for me, and I felt a bit naked out there. I had to just sort of bark orders and hope that they were getting through, and I'm thrilled that it seems like the film is working for people."

From when he got hired to when the movie opens, it was ten months.  That's an unbelievable turn-around.  I asked what shape the script was in, and what work he and Jane Goldman did on it. 

"Total rewrite.  Total rewrite," Vaughn says bluntly. "The story was there, but it didn't have what I thought was the fun, and the Bond-style stuff wasn't in there, and I said to Jane, 'Let's start the film off with the exact scene from the first film.'  Jane and I just had a vision that we got out there as quickly as possible.  We really respected Bryan's idea of the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis background.  The main difference between this and anything else I've ever done is that I'm very anal when it comes to prep and storyboarding everything, and on this, we didn't have time for any of that.  I sort of shot this movie on nothing more than pure instinct, making huge decisions every point in the day.  Things that normally would take me weeks of consideration, I'd have to make that choice in seconds on this one, and luckily, it seems to… it was a very different way for me to be making a movie, and there were times I wasn't sure.  Post was an incredible experience, because that's when Fox and I were united as a team, and I can even say about Mr. Rothman that… see, for much of this, I was like a boxer on the ropes, and I became like Rocky being beaten up by Clubber Lang.  And Rothman became my Burgess Meredith character, my Mickey.  He got me up again.  They became my allies on this and got me through it.  It was very rewarding.  I was very shocked, because Mr. Rothman has quite a reputation.  He helped me get through this, and some of his ideas were quite brilliant."

Would Vaughn be willing to do this again with this cast and this world?

"Yeah, definitely.  I really loved working with them, and with Michael [Fassbender] and James [McAvoy], the chemistry was really lovely," Vaughn says.  "I've got some ideas for the opening for the next film.  I thought it would be fun to open with the Kennedy Assassination, and we reveal that the magic bullet was controlled by Magneto.  That would explain the physics of it, and we see that he's pissed off because Kennedy took all the credit for saving the world and mutants weren't even mentioned.  And we could go from there, and I've got some fun ideas about what other mutants to bring in.  I don't want to tempt fate, though.  If the film's a hit, of course I'd be interested.  I really enjoyed making it."

I told him I would be okay with an entire film of young Erik racing around the world to kill Nazis, and I hope that's the official backstory for the character moving forward. 

We also talked about putting together a big ensemble like this and how important it was to give them all something to do.  He noted, "There's no point having a character onscreen if they're don't really add to the equation.  I think it's very important in 'X-Men' movies, with all of these characters, to keep them active and interesting.  It's a juggling act.  I think it's important to give the audience different storylines and characters to cut to in these.  All of my films have been like this, though, so I think I'd be more nervous if I had to make a film that focused on just one character instead of this sort of thing."

Finally, we discussed the fact that Fassbender and McAvoy aren't really doing any sort of callbacks to Patrick Stewart or Ian McKellan, who played the older versions of these characters, and I asked how much those performances informed the choices made by these new younger actors.
 
"We told them that Ian and Patrick played it so you could see that there was a friendship there once," Vaughn reveals.  "I said, 'That's the only thing to take from it, guys. You are playing your own characters now, and I don't want to hear any impressions in there at all.'  It's like when Daniel Craig played Bond.  People would say, 'Oh, he's like Connery,' but they just mean he's tough, not that he's doing an impression of Connery.  You have to create your own versions, and you have to have room to grow in whatever you're doing, and not just go over ground someone else has already covered."

http://www.hitfix.com/blogs/motion-captured/posts/interview-director-matthew-vaughn-on-making-x-men-first-class-feel-fresh

New Images

New TotalFilm Images

http://www.superherohype.com/news/articles/165517-new-x-men-first-class-promo-shots

Director Matthew Vaughn Talks Sequel Plans

Matthew Vaughn speaking to Total Film says:

“First Class is similar to Batman Begins, where you have the fun of introducing the characters and getting to know them, but that takes time. But with the second one you can just get on with it and have a rollicking good time.  That’s the main difference between Begins and The Dark Knight.”

While First Class takes place in 1962, Vaughn tells TotalFilm to expect a more 50s-aesthetic since it takes about five years for a decade to find its own style.  So where would Vaughn like a sequel to pick up?

“The fun thing about this for me would be doing [a sequel] in the latter part of the decade, where you’ve got The Stones, The Beatles, Flower Power…”

http://www.totalfilm.com/news/x-men-first-class-sequel-plans-revealed

X-Men: First Class Set Visit

At the tail-end of November IGN headed to Pinewood Studios on the outskirts of London to meet the brand-new X-Men on the set of 2011's most eagerly anticipated blockbusters.

A reboot of sorts, X-Men: First Class is set in 1962 - against the back-drop of the Cold War - and introduces the world to Charles Xavier before he became Professor X, Erik Lehnsherr before he became Magneto, and a huge cast of mutant characters.

Produced by Bryan Singer and directed by Kick-Ass helmer Matthew Vaughn, First Class is an attempt to kick-start the franchise following the critical and commercial disappointment of X-Men: The Last Stand, and while there will certainly be nods to the recent trilogy, the plan is to launch First Class as very much a standalone film. 

"This is going to be very different", explains Vaughn during a break between shots. "What I'm doing no one has done in superhero films. It's James Bond, it's a political thriller and it's an X-Men movie. It's not like the other X-Men movies which I think is important. I think they need to sort of take on a new... you know, what Batman Begins did for all those Batman movies? We bloody well need it. I'm not saying it's going to be as good as Batman Begins, but it's the same sort of attitude."

 James McAvoy - best known for his work in Wanted and The Last King of Scotland - plays Charles Xavier, although his will be a very different take on the character to Patrick Stewart's previous incarnation.

"It's set in a completely different time and you are also taking these people to a much earlier point in their personal development as well as their physical and super development", explains McAvoy as he sips on a cup of tea in his trailer.

"What's fun is you get to figure out who they were. For me Charles is a monk. He's like a selfless, egoless, almost sexless force for the betterment of humanity and mortality. And getting to kind of go 'Well, he's got to be different from that' is quite fun because the complete opposite is an ego-fuelled, sexed-up, self-serving dude. And we've not gone too far from that... he's definitely got an ego and he's definitely got a sex drive as well."

Indeed, throughout the day there were hints regarding Xavier's luck on the lady front, both with a young mutant and with Rose Byrne's character - geneticist Dr. Moira MacTaggert.

On the other side of the fence, playing Charles' soon-to-be-nemesis, is 300 and Inglourious Basterds star Michael Fassbender.

Yet while Erik Lehnsherr could be seen as the villain of the piece, the actor says he was attracted by the part's ambiguity. "I don't really think in terms of good and evil. I think about what he wants to get and how motivated he is and what sort of morals he has got in place. It's like I see him very much as a Machiavellian character. The end justifies the means. And you know, he is in a situation where he is really right!"

And what of the relationship between the two characters, the most complex within the X-Men universe and the beating heart of First Class?

"Charles has this sort of empathy for everybody", continues McAvoy. "He has this connection to everybody because he can feel and see their experiences; their memories are his memories. But he wasn't looking for Erik; he didn't know he was there and he suddenly felt Erik and perhaps he has never connected to anybody quite the same way that he connected to Erik, you know? Maybe because of the nature of the horrible things that happened to him and the level of anger that he carries. That makes a big impression on him, not just because he feels empathy for him, but also because it's a big challenge to fix someone and to try to help someone like that."

Neither McAvoy nor Fassbender were shooting the day we visited, but they very kindly stopped by the set for lengthy interviews - to be published at a later date - in which they discussed Nazi-hunting, hair-loss, Murderball, superhero love triangles and Erik's hatred for Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon); Hellfire Club member and the real villain of the piece.

We did however get to witness Vaughn shooting an action-packed set-piece involving an assault on the MIB HQ.

The sequence in question revolved around a group of Shaw's men - led by the devlish Azael (Jason Flemyng) - laying waste to a team of security guards before attacking the compound's recreation room.

Inside, a clearly terrified group of young mutants panic, with their number including Raven (Jennifer Lawrence), Hank (Nicholas Hoult), Angel (Zoe Kravitz), Darwin (Edi Gathegi), Alex (Lucas Till) and Cassidy (Caleb Landry Jones). We grabbed face time with each and every one of them in between shots, which will form our forthcoming 'Mutants of X-Men: First Class' piece.

So with that being saved for a later date, what can we tell you now? Well it looks like X-Men: First Class will be an utterly original take on the superhero genre, setting it apart in a summer chock-full of masked men.

The 1960s setting will ensure that the movie is smothered in cool, from the soundtrack to the costumes to the locations, while a multitude of Bond-like gadgets, vehicles and villainous lairs will doubtless be a welcome addition to the franchise.

In setting the story against the back-drop of real-life historical events - most notably the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Civil Rights movement - First Class is grounded in reality, meaning that the stakes will be higher than in previous movies.

And with a cast that combines the cream of Hollywood's young acting talent with established stars like McAvoy, Fassbender and Bacon, Vaughn may just have assembled the most exciting ensemble of 2011.

Will that be enough to defeat the likes of Thor, Captain America and the Green Lantern at the global box office? Only time will tell, but in the meantime we'll be posting interviews with everyone involved in X-Men: First Class - including an exclusive one-on-one with the film's producer Bryan Singer - right up until the film's release at the end of May.

http://ie.movies.ign.com/articles/115/1153951p1.html

Matthew Vaughn speaks to Empire

"I've always wanted to do a movie set in the '60s. The difference is that now I have experience. On X3 [which he was at one point set to direct] it was cast and I just had to tell the story. Here we have to recast every role, recreate the '60s - which is not easy - and redesign everything. We've been playing catch-up, but it's working."

"I wasn't trying to cast the young Patrick [Stewart] or Ian [McKellen]. I was trying to cast the young Professor X and Magneto; what those characters are in my mind. For me, I'm trying to make a movie that stands on its own two feet. Hopefully there'll be a lot more of this version of the franchise. "


http://www.comicbookmovie.com/fansites/BrentSprecher/news/?a=29296

Director Matthew Vaughn says 'imagine Bond'...and 'Twilight'

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How would you describe First Class to the uninitiated?
MATTHEW VAUGHN: 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.

If Magneto is Bond, then what about Charles Xavier?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.

I know you’re under tight restrictions about what you can reveal regarding the plot, but, well, what else can you say?In 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.

And there are flashbacks with Erik and Charles as young children?They’re not flashbacks — we start there. It starts in 1942, and then works its way up to 1962.

Did you have any concerns about how, no matter what you do, you may anger some of the die-hard fans?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.

Is the movie related at all to the First Class comics?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.

You were going to direct X-Men: The Last Stand and then dropped out two months before filming started. The story is that you thought you weren’t going to have enough time to see your vision through…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.

How did you settle on James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender as Professor X and Magneto, respectively?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.

And, please, one more story tease?It’s got a lot of teenage angst. The Twilight girls will like it.

http://insidemovies.ew.com/2011/01/22/x-men-first-class-matthew-vaughn/

Matthew Vaughn Talks Leaked Photos

“I freaked out on them yesterday. I don’t know where the hell that came from. I don’t think it’s a Fox image. It’s not a pre-approved image. When I found out, I said, what the fuck is this shit, and Fox is running around trying to figure out what happened as well. I agree. It’s like a bad photoshop, which maybe it was by someone. It didn’t reflect the movie. I was shocked when I saw it. I was like ‘Jesus Christ’…"

“I’m a fan of X-Men. We’re not bastardizing X-Men, I’m trying to get them back to being whole again."

"The costumes are blue and yellow as well, because fuck it, lets take it back it the original. Also, by the way, those costumes are hardly in the movie. The main costumes are like these cool 60’s James Bond…”

http://www.slashfilm.com/exclusive-matthew-vaughn-reveals-magneto-professor-xmen-class/

A Report from the Set

Matthew Vaughn

“I’m at that stage where I feel like a boxer against the ropes,” the director said as his crew prepared for the next shot on a location set in Long Beach. “I’m just throwing punches and taking them as they come and making sure I don’t hit the canvas.”

“We’re filming at the moment, we’ve a lot to get done,” said a weary Vaughn. “I’ve never worked under such time pressure. The good thing about the independent world is I never even knew if I was going to get distribution. I’m used to finishing a film and then crossing your fingers that someone is going to like it. This is totally doing it the other way around. We’ve definitely got a release date and we’ve got to make it.”

Asked if he’s concerned about the glut of superhero film competition this summer — with “Captain America: The First Avenger,” “Green Lantern” and  ”Thor” – Vaughn said that, if anything, it’s the other guys who should be nervous. “With ‘Green Lantern,’ I don’t know about that one, I couldn’t get my head around the trailer, to be honest … look, I will say the following: X-Men as a brand is bigger than Captain America, Thor and the Green Lantern, all put together.”

James McAvoy

“This isn’t a reboot, so I’m not replacing anyone, in which case you might want to try to be as different as possible and stay away from what had been done before,” James McAvoy said on Monday during a break from a rescue scene that required water-tank work. “This is a prequel, so I’m the same character, just younger, but the challenge for me – and for Michael — is to show the same person in a different place in their life; to show someone before they’re this bad guy, before they’re this saint. Charles wasn’t always a … monk, this selfless, sexless monk that he becomes.”

Bryan Singer

“It is an excellent cast,” Bryan Singer said. He added that no one is more aware of the high-bar set by McKellen and Stewart. “I’m very sensitive to it. Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy are two of the best actors working today and that was needed to fill those shoes. Short of digitally recreating Patrick and Ian in their 20s I cant think of anyone who would be more equipped for this than these two guys. The challenge of that is what attracted James, I’m sure of it. That’s why the guy who starred in ‘Atonement’ would want to play a comic-book character in the first place because it was a role established by a really fine actor.”

“The biggest challenge is introducing an audience to these characters in a different time – characters the audience is familiar with but now see played by younger actors and in a story taking place in a different time. We have to establish this universe. We had the challenge with the first ‘X-Men’ film, which came at a time when there were no comic-book movies [of this sort] and no template to launch from and yet you’ve got to do that. You have to put your characters out there and introduce them to a quizzical public that sort of recognizes them. But that very thing is the exciting part of it.”

http://herocomplex.latimes.com/2011/01/19/x-menfirst-class-three-exclusive-photos-and-a-report-from-the-stressed-out-set/