Suit two Sir!
Charm. Manners. GBH. The best-dressed spy franchise is back with Kingsman: The golden CirCle. Matthew Vaughn recruits Nick Setchfield for active duty
MATTheW VAuGhN hAs The perfect tagline for his new movie. It’s one you won’t be seeing on a billboard.
“No one will let me use it,” he tells SFX. “I want to scream out, ‘If you didn’t like the first Kingsman you’re going to fucking hate this one!’ And that’s the attitude I’ve made the film with.”
It’s a line that’s pure essence of Vaughn, so in your face you fear for your teeth. This is, after all, the provocateur who mixed fine tailoring, tar-black satire and delirious ultra-violence in 2014’s Kingsman: The Secret Service. Adapting the comic book by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons, it was a propulsive love letter to the spy-fi genre, charting London street kid eggsy’s metamorphosis from Burberry-clad no-hoper to immaculate gentleman agent. My Fair Lady with a higher body count.
Now Vaughn’s reactivating the dapper franchise with The Golden Circle. And, the helmer tells SFX, this one’s for the faithful.
“The one rule I had while making this sequel is that it’s for the fans of the first film. Despite everyone saying, ‘You need to expand the audience,’ I said, ‘The only thing I’m interested in is satisfying the people who liked the first one, and if more people come because of that, great.’ I’m not trying to get greedy about this. I want to reward the original fans of Kingsman, for them having faith in the movie and coming to see it and liking it.”
Not that Vaughn banked on a sequel while making The Secret Service. “I’m not even confident of a Kingsman 3!” he laughs. “I’ve been in situations where I’ve made films that I was really proud of that underperformed. I would have liked to have made more of them, but it didn’t happen. It was up to the public.”
As mission briefs go, following the hit original proved to be a daunting assignment. Turns out Vaughn’s bullishness isn’t quite as bulletproof as it appears.
“I was really nervous that I wouldn’t pull it off,” he confesses, “because there’s a lot more examples of bad sequels than good ones. I was just very apprehensive. When I wrote the screenplay with Jane [Goldman] we said, ‘Listen, we’ll write it as its own movie,’ not making the mistakes of sequels where everyone thinks, ‘Let’s make it bigger!’ People love these characters, so if you see the characters going on
I’m not taking the piss. This film is my love letter to spy movies
a new journey and then you learn more about them on that journey, it doesn’t feel like a sequel, it’s a continuation of a story. We didn’t want to just cash in and make the same movie again for more money and less integrity.”
Does a sequel give you a licence to go wilder? SFX has seen the first 30 minutes of The Golden Circle and it feels like Kingsman cranked up to 11. The agreeably preposterous opening scene – a taxi-racing thrill-ride, with added robotic body parts – is soundtracked, fittingly, by Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy”.
“I wasn’t trying to be wilder,” the helmer insists. “What I learned on the first film is that some scenes that people think are crazy and wild other people don’t, and vice versa. I learned very quickly that some people will say to me, ‘That church sequence is amazing! 80 people slaughtered! But God, a shot of that woman’s arse? That’s not acceptable!’ And someone else will say, ‘Oh, that bum joke’s very funny at the end. Do you really need to have the scene in the church?’
“I was writing scenes and sequences and moments that were right for the movie and right for the characters. I didn’t sit there thinking, ‘Oh, I’ve got to be wilder, I’ve got to be bigger.’ Let’s just do the next chapter. A lot of people ask me, ‘how are you going to top the church sequence?’ We’re not trying to top anything.” Vaughn knew that he wanted to explore his upwardly mobile hero, played by Taron egerton. Originally established as an inner city tearaway with a chip on his shoulder, eggsy’s now adjusting to service in Kingsman, the independent international intelligence agency that’s been entrusted with safeguarding the nation – and keeping Blighty’s sartorial standards high. “I wanted to get deeper into eggsy, and eggsy’s journey,” Vaughn tells SFX. “The sequels that work are the ones where you get to know the characters better. This one was about getting to know eggsy, seeing him solve dilemmas, growing up with him.” At the same time The Golden Circle expands the franchise’s mythology. As eggsy discovers America has its own counterpart to
Kingsman – statesman, an equally clandestine agency that counts such hollywood A-listers as Channing Tatum, halle Berry and Jeff Bridges among its personnel.
“There’s a bigger web out there,” says Vaughn, “but the fun thing is that it’s through eggsy’s eyes. eggsy doesn’t know about statesman, just like he didn’t know about Kingsman.”
When we last saw eggsy he was in suitedand-booted, super-suave mode, inheriting the style of late mentor harry hart [Colin Firth]. But he’s not forgetting his roots.
“he’s harry Palmer [Michael Caine’s chippy, working class spy from The Ipcress File] and James Bond mixed together. I think that it’s really important to see that he’s our modern day spy, that he’s his own thing. he’s a gentleman spy when he needs to be but he’s also a kid on the street when he needs to be. The mistake would be if he was just the suave gentleman spy. Then the conflict’s gone and the interest’s gone. he’s just become like every other wannabe James Bond movie, which we’re not trying to be.”
Golden boy
Wait, did we say the late harry hart? Not so fast. The Golden Circle resurrects Colin Firth’s impeccably mannered killing machine, despite a pretty definitive death scene in The Secret Service. Did Vaughn always know he wanted to bring him back?
“It was a quandary. I was like, ‘Am I really going to get away with it?’, because you are pushing boundaries. But I thought well, Kingsman’s all about pushing boundaries. secondly, people loved him, and I loved working with Colin, so on a selfish level I wanted Colin back on set. But on a Kingsman level there was such a big opportunity for how to bring him back, and the conflict that being back gave to the character. I needed Colin and harry hart, so we just wrote the script and I thought, ‘You know what, it works.’”
Any good spy caper lives or dies by its villain, Vaughn insists. The Golden Circle sees Julianne Moore on evil mastermind duty as Poppy, an entrepreneur with an unsettling line in cannibalistic burgers.
“I felt villains have got quite dull in movies,” he tells SFX. “They’re normally an Islamic terrorist or a rich megalomaniac. Well, you tell me, who was the last memorable villain you can remember in the spy world?”
erm… Javier Bardem in Skyfall? “his performance was great,” Vaughn agrees. “But what was he actually doing? It’s a little bit odd. You watch Skyfall and you go, ‘Well, hold on a minute, they’re all taunting each other and blowing each other up, but what does he actually want?’ It’s not like a villain plot where you’re like, ‘hoo! That’s going to affect us!’ so I try to make the villain have a point of view that you think is interesting, that you listen to. The problem that they identify in the world you sort of agree with – but their solution to the problem you definitely do not agree with.”
From globe-threatening villains to bladetipped shoes and submersible cars, this is a franchise that wears its influences on its impressively tailored sleeve.
“When I did Kingsman I was really aware that it was a love letter to spy movies,” says Vaughn. “When I did Kick-Ass that was a love letter to all the superhero films. I remember thinking, ‘As a filmmaker, what am I doing? Am I making a movie or am I making a long sketch?’ I’m not trying to be Austin Powers and I’m not taking the piss. It really is a love letter. You can’t help but be influenced by the movies you love. They stay in your head. But then you ask, ‘What’s my version of those films?’”
Kingsman: The Golden Circle is out on 20 September.