The director of the “Kick-Ass” and “Kingsman” sagas returns to the incident involving Halle Berry which led him to leave the “X-Men 3” project…
It was during his Saturday night panel at New York Comic Con (via The Hollywood Reporter) that Matthew Vaughn reflected on some of his experiences in Hollywood – including the one that led him to abandon filming X-Men l The Final Showdown (2006).
At the time, the director was attached to the project, a project that studio executives tried to hide from him, as he recounted during the panel.
“I walked into the office of one of the executives and saw an X3 script, and I immediately saw that it was much thicker. I asked what this draft was. He said, ‘Don’t worry about that,’ and I said, ‘No, no. I am the director. I’m worried about this draft.’ He wouldn’t tell me, so I took it literally – it was a crazy moment – I opened the first page and it said: ‘Africa. Storm. Children die without water. She creates a storm and saves all these children.’”
If he finds the idea “pretty cool”, Matthew Vaughn quickly learns that this is just a ruse to get Halle Berry to sign her contract. Indeed, this scene was their bait, a scene she wanted to see in the film. Once the contract was concluded, the scene would be deleted.
“[J’ai demandé :] ‘What is this ?’ [Ils ont dit :] ‘Oh, it’s Halle Berry’s script.’ I replied: ‘OK but she hasn’t signed yet.’ ‘But this is what she wants, and once she signs, we’ll throw it in the trash,’” said the director while recounting the executive’s response. “I was like, ‘Wow, you’re going to do that to an Oscar winner who plays Storm? I’m getting out of here.’ So I stopped at that point.”
FROM X-MEN TO KICK-ASS
Matthew Vaughn thus leaves the project – he will, however, return to later direct X-Men: The Beginning (2011) – and embarks on the adventure Kick-Ass (2010) for which he had to literally mortgage his house in order to finance the first film. No distributor wanted the project until the day the first clips of the film were shown at San Diego Comic-Con…
“Thank God for Hall H, because we showed the movie there, or they showed clips from the movie – after Avatar so I really thought it was screwed. The fans went so crazy that the Hollywood sheep decided that maybe there was something here that would please the fans. So they went for it.”
Copyright Metropolitan FilmExport Matthew Vaughn on the set of “Kick-Ass”
KICK-ASS, A REBOOT IN PREPARATION
Speaking of Kick-Assthe director has not said his last word regarding the franchise: a reboot is in fact in preparation.
“Kick-Ass kind of changed people’s perception of what a superhero movie was at that time. So we’re going to start again.”
The reboot does not concern, for the moment, the original actors including Aaron Taylor-Johnson, soon to star in Kraven The Hunter for Marvel. However, Matthew Vaughn specifies that they could end up making a comeback: “We would like to bring them back after the reboot. This reboot goes on a tangent that I can’t really talk about at the moment. But it’s fun.”
Among the prolific director’s other projects: a musical comedy in preparation, Argylle, his next spy thriller with Bryce Dallas Howard, Henry Cavill, Sam Rockwell and Dua Lipa, scheduled for January 31, 2024 (trailer to discover here below), and Kingsman 3, still with Taron Egerton and Colin Firth, also scheduled for release sometime next year.
In the meantime, rediscover Kick-Ass streaming on Amazon Prime Video.