RESUITED AND REBOOTED
WITH THE KING’S MAN, MATTHEW VAUGHN IS TAKING HIS GREATEST GAMBLE YET: A PREQUEL. WITH NONE OF THE ORIGINAL CAST. SET DURING WORLD WAR I. AND WITH NONE OF THE RUDE STUFF. HE TELLS EMPIRE WHY HE DID IT
IIN THE END, the penis had to go.
An elucidation: at a certain point in Matthew Vaughn’s The King’s Man, a prequel to his 2014 spy movie Kingsman: The Secret Service and 2017’s Kingsman: The Golden Circle, our intrepid heroes, the Duke of Oxford (Ralph Fiennes) and his son Conrad (Harris Dickinson), travel to Russia to get to grips with Rasputin (Rhys Ifans), the mad monk who has been poisoning Tsar Nicholas II’S mind. And, as it happens, body. Which has somewhat hampered any attempts to change the course of World War I.
Their plan: to dispatch him with a poisoned Bakewell tart. Easier said than done. Rasputin — as has been well-documented — is a monster, a rapacious, snarling beast composed almost entirely of huge, all-consuming appetites. And, at some point (we’re not saying how), his penis (prosthetic, of course) was going to enter the fray. “It needed a fucking wide lens,” laughs Vaughn. “There’s a few Rasputin moments where I went there.”
In Kingsmen prior, those moments might have found a way in. After all, this is a franchise which has — from the off, and not always to universal acclaim — ventured into areas even Bond feared to tread. Whether it’s a controversial anal sex gag at the end of the first movie, or a provocative touching-up incident in the middle of the second, Kingsman has turned the single entendre into an art form.
But not The King’s Man. As per Vaughn’s design, this has evolved into a classier affair. Certainly a more serious one, what with it tackling World War I. There’s no place here for a mad monk’s massive member, or any other such frippery. “I knew that some of my more crazy stuff would fuck up this movie. So I decided to get rid of it,” says Vaughn. “And I realised that the more conservative I was, the braver I was, weirdly.” In other words, manners maketh The King’s Man.
THE ORIGINAL PLAN FOR VAUGHN,
following the release of Kingsman: The Golden Circle in 2017, was to continue the aggressive expansion of the franchise. His franchise. 20th Century Fox — and now Disney — distribute the Kingsman movies, but the rights belong to Vaughn’s own studio, MARV. The productions are independently funded, and much of the money pumped in is his. Which means he has much to gain should they hit big (both Kingsman movies so far have grossed over $400 million worldwide), but also more to lose. Most directors
can walk away from a flop without it affecting them too adversely; they still get paid. If
Kingsman: The Secret Service, in particular, had flopped, Vaughn stood to lose his house.
So now it was a franchise, there was talk of a Statesman spin-off, which would focus on the American agents introduced in The Golden Circle. A prequel tentatively titled ‘Kingsman: The Great Game’, documenting the origins of the Kingsman intelligence organisation, was also mooted, potentially in the form of a TV show. And then there was Kingsman 3, provisionally subtitled ‘The Blue Blood’, which would culminate the adventures of Colin Firth’s Harry Hart and Taron Egerton’s Eggsy. It was that third option around which Vaughn had drawn a couple of red circles, marking it as his next project.
And then something changed. It is tempting to suggest that the negative critical reaction to
The Golden Circle, in particular the outcry over the aforementioned scene in which Eggsy has to plant a tracker in a very specific place on a woman — was the clincher for the director. But that would be wrong.
“Kingsman was my love letter to all spy movies and Bond,” explains the director.
“Kingsman 2 expanded on that, and it was me dialling up the fun and the silliness. Maybe
I went too far. It depends on what age group you are. It surprised me, some of the vitriol, to be honest. But I have no problem with people being disgusted by it, or saying, ‘You went too far.’ Great! That means you’re remembering it.”
Instead, the thing that triggered the change was that one night Vaughn revisited one of his favourite films, John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King. You know the one: Michael Caine and Sean Connery at the height of their powers. Adventure. Derring-do. And a darker tone than many remember. Somewhere in the middle of that, six words popped into Vaughn’s noggin that he just couldn’t shake. “‘The Man Who Would Be Kingsman’,” he laughs. “I forgot how wonderful a movie it was. Why is nobody making movies like that anymore? Big, epic, fun adventures, with heart and proper storytelling.”
So, like Ross Geller with a new sofa, he pivoted. “As a director, I’ve got to be excited about what I’m doing. Franchises die because they either stick to the wrong formula, or they’re just about trying to cash in. And everyone was saying, ‘You’ve gotta do Kingsman 3 next, then you can do this.’ No-one goes off after number two and does this. Yeah, well, my instinct says, ‘Fuck it. That’s what I want to do.’”
Placing Kingsman 3 on hold — even going so far as to source another director for it — Vaughn threw himself into the prequel, with a simple mandate: to make a Kingsman movie that at times, particularly during the first half hour or so, wouldn’t feel like a Kingsman movie. It would be a more old-fashioned affair, shot with the same lenses as Lawrence Of Arabia, with long takes and fewer cuts. “It does start slowly morphing [into a Kingsman movie] towards the end,” Vaughn says. “But it’s more restrained.
You’re not going to have to have earplugs to watch the action because it’s swords and punching. It’s not people being thrown through buildings.”
With regular writing partner Jane Goldman unavailable due to her involvement with a prequel of her own, the ill-fated spin-off Game Of Thrones series at HBO, he teamed up with Karl Gajdusek (Oblivion) and set to work. They had a time period: World War I or, as Vaughn pointedly puts it, “the most pointless stupid fucking horrible war of all time”, which was largely dictated by a speech Colin Firth gives in the first Kingsman. They had a tone to aim for. Everything else was up for grabs, as long as it answered one question in particular: ‘How did Kingsman become Kingsman?’
TURIN, ITALY — DOUBLING FOR SAINT
Petersburg; 5 May 2019 — doubling for 30 December 1916. It’s the last day of principal photography on the film that is now known as The King’s Man. Empire sits next to Vaughn at a bank of monitors crammed into a corner of the extravagantly opulent Palazzo Reale. Or the Royal Palace of Turin, if your Duolingo know-how doesn’t extend that far just yet.
On the other side of a wall, in a glamorous state room bedecked with gold and marble and boasting the kind of floor that demands you wear those stupid little plastic shoe coverings, Ralph Fiennes is sparring with Rasputin/rhys Ifans.
Verbally, for now. As a prelude to an epic duel which will involve knives, freezing-cold water and the odd burst of Cossack dance-fighting, the Oxfords have arrived in Russia, tuxedoed to the nines, and have inveigled their way into a grand ball, at which their mark is the guest of honour. Noticing the Englishmen, Rasputin sneers at them dismissively, demanding that they get him a drink. Oxford is having none of this. “Get me a fucking drink,” he barks. Rasputin is intrigued. The trap is set.
Rasputin, who Ifans plays with hissing relish, isn’t the only real-life figure in play here. There’s General Kitchener (Charles Dance), the nearidentical trio of cousins King George V, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Tsar Nicholas II (all played by Tom Hollander, to accentuate the family ties), and even Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose frankly inept assassination led to both the formation of a rock band and, perhaps more importantly, World War I. Mixing real-life and fantasy is a trick Vaughn has pulled off before, notably in X-men: First Class, where Magneto and chums got mixed up in the Cuban Missile Crisis. “I did it with blue people,” he laughs. “Now I’ll have to do it with agents.”
Agents, of sorts. When we first meet the fictitious heroes whom Vaughn weaves into the fabric of history, Forrest Gump-style, Kingsman is just a tailor’s shop in London and Oxford is just a pacifistic war hero determined to protect his only son, Conrad, from the horrors of a world determined to war. Their flesh-and-blood father/son relationship is very different, and testy in a different way, from Harry and Eggsy’s surrogate situation. “The need to protect your kids is reflected in Oxford,” says Vaughn. “My kids are getting older and I’m going through this now. But one of the themes of the film for me is the responsibility of people in power to lead by example. Conrad is an extension of that. He has this sense of duty.”
For Conrad, the dashing young nobleman who wants to head to the battlefields of the Great
War, where nothing could be nobler than to pro patria mori, Vaughn — who has given the likes of Charlie Cox, Aaron Taylor-johnson, Chloë Grace Moretz and, of course, Taron Egerton their big breaks — turned to Harris Dickinson, fast-rising star of Beach Rats.
“I was scared every day,” Dickinson laughs. “My first day was a flying scene, and I’m in the back of the plane. That was proper, man. My mum called me up and said, ‘How was your first day?’ ‘Yeah, it was good. Just me and Ralph in a plane.’”
And for Oxford, the pacifist who enters the fray to prevent the deaths of millions, Vaughn had a very short shortlist. “I was thinking about who could, or should, have played Bond 25 years ago,” explains Vaughn. “When he was in his thirties, he would have nailed it.” There was just one potential problem: the last movie of this type Fiennes had starred in was The Avengers.
No, not that one. The other one. The disastrous 1998 blockbuster that swallowed careers whole. Fiennes barely escaped with his. He hasn’t swung an umbrella in anger since. “Are you going to remind him about that?” laughs Vaughn. “I want to be in the room when that happens.”
In fairness, when Empire does tentatively broach the subject with Fiennes, he’s in full agreement. “Well, as we know, The Avengers
was a disaster,” he says. “It was a big turkey. I had fun making it, but I definitely went through a sort of self-questioning about going into similar territory. But I could see what Matthew had done, and I felt confident. So I took that anxiety of, somehow, The Avengers coming back to haunt me and put it to one side after some thought.”
There was something about The King’s Man
that appealed to him. Partially it was Vaughn himself, and the chance to work on a big-budget movie where the buck stops with one man. “I’ve been on films where they’re directed virtually by committee,” says Fiennes. “The director doesn’t have full control, and he has to defer to producers or studio executives. It’s hell. It’s a really hard way to work. So it was great on a big-budget movie like this that the director could decide what he wanted. And Matthew listens. If I had a query or a suggestion or voiced some concern, he would absolutely listen.”
FAST-FORWARD JUST OVER A YEAR
from that day in Turin, and what Vaughn wants, more than anything, is for people to see his film. At the time of going to press — and we can’t stress that strongly enough — The King’s Man is set to be one of the first movies to emerge from the fog of Covid-19 and venture boldly into cinemas. When we last speak, on Zoom, Vaughn has just put the finishing touches to the film, says he’s screened it for a handful of viewers (“People say they’ve cried in it, which is a new one for me!”), and is cautiously optimistic it will open in September. “They’re as confident as they were before,” he says of Disney and its plans for release. “But Covid has changed everything at the moment. It’s very important that it’s got to be safe.”
If he’s nervous, he’s hiding it well. But if he were, he could be forgiven; a film that was already a gamble, switching popular characters for new ones and a modern milieu for period garb, may be about to enter into a marketplace where returns are far from assured.
But, should The King’s Man fare well when it hits screens, Vaughn isn’t done there. While he has other stories he wants to tell, including one he’s been trying to get off the ground since he was in his mid-twenties, for the foreseeable he’s very much in the Kingsman business.
“I want Kingsman to be around for a long time,” he says. “What I want it to be is, whatever angle we take, you may hate it, you may love it, but you won’t be bored.”
The Statesman spin-off is still ticking along. There are tentative plans for more adventures in this new world. And then there’s Kingsman 3. “We’ve put seeds for what’s going to happen in Kingsman 3 all the way back into this,” Vaughn teases. “And it’s going to be very different.”
And, with the unnamed director who had been attached moving on to a new project, it may have a new hand at the tiller as well: Matthew Vaughn. So energised was he by his time on The King’s Man that he’s giving serious thought to finishing the trilogy, before passing on the baton and taking a role in the box seats. “I actually don’t know what I want to do,” he admits. “There is an opportunity for a director to really change it up, but I’m considering it. But we need to make it, because I don’t want Colin in a Zimmer frame, or Eggsy with nappies. So we need to get on with it.”
That’s far in the future, dependent on the capricious nature of a killer virus. But to fill the gap, it looks like there could be one more Kingsman movie. “I’ve cut so much out of this film that there’s going to be a 40-minute longer version,” reveals Vaughn. “I’ll do ‘The King’s Man Vaughn Cut’. I’ve got a few really dirty fucking jokes in there. There’s another Rasputin fight scene, and one scene where even I think I went too far.”
He hasn’t gone totally conservative, then. The mad monk’s member might yet have its day…