After multiple delays due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, director Matthew Vaughn's The King's Man has finally hit theaters. The film is a prequel to the first two installments, depicting the origins of the titular espionage organization. Ralph Fiennes leads a cast that also includes Gemma Arterton, Rhys Ifans, Djimon Hounsou, Matthew Goode, and more.
Screen Rant got an opportunity to talk with Vaughn about The King's Man long journey to the big screen, the prequel's origins, the future of the overall franchise, and much more.
Screen Rant: We're finally here to talk about The King's Man! I was thinking about this, “I interviewed Matthew Vaughn before. What was that for?" It was in 2019 for The King's Man when we were at New York Comic Con. What does it feel like to just finally get to this point?
Matthew Vaughn: Bizarre. I'm finishing off a movie literally today or tomorrow, and this was three years ago, we shot this, so my head is a little bit like scrambled eggs. I've got all these different spies whizzing around, but I'm glad that hopefully, people will see this on a big screen. There was obviously discussions over the last couple of years when it was finished, as you said, 2019 – I mean how bizarre is that – whether it did go streaming. I appreciate Disney held on because we did design this for the big screen.
Just to back it up a little bit, where did the idea of doing an origin story of The King's Man strike for you and how did that begin?
Matthew Vaughn: Well, the actual plot in the story was in Kingsman 1 when Harry is explaining to Eggsy who they are, why they were founded and when, blah, blah, blah. That was already written in stone. I actually re-watched a movie called The Man Who Would Be King, and I loved it. I forgot how much I loved it. And I remember how much I loved it as a kid. I sort of made a joke saying, “We should make The Man Who Would Be Kingsman.” And then I went, “hold on, there's something in there.”
Then, I just got obsessed with going well, "Hey, maybe I can get away with doing a big period, epic war drama and just say The Man Who Would Be Kingsman,” and everyone in Hollywood would go, "Oh, very exciting". And then watch and go, "What the fuck has he gone and done?" So that was sort of how it started. Once I saw the movie and we started writing it…Creativity, it's hard to explain. Why did you do something? Apart from, you wanted to. I just wanted to do it. I just felt it was the itch that needed to be scratched and we scratched away.
It's tonally different than the other Kingsman films, but there are these links and winks and nods, and this thread throughout. Can you talk about that process of separating them a little bit?
Matthew Vaughn: Well, it had to be different. You can't give birth to an 18-year-old man. This is the birth of Kingsman. If you want to get to a destination, the journey can't begin at the destination, right? You have to go somewhere totally different. I'm sure there will be a lot of fans watching the beginning, maybe going, "Oh, we went into the wrong screen. What the hell is this thing we're watching?" And by the way, it was tempting. We could cut 20, 25 minutes of the beginning out and start with all the fun stuff.
I always watched Deer Hunter. Deer Hunter really taught me as a kid, the setup of world. So when you go to a new world, and it becomes a different world, you really feel these characters and you go on the journey. So I sort of try to apply all these old fashion film techniques I learned as a kid and put it into this. To get to the Kingsman at the end of this movie, where it's getting more and more, I think by the end of the film, we're getting more into the language people would associate with Kingsman in the last 35, 40 minutes – and also, in the middle part with Rhys or with Rasputin. So wherever I could put Kingsman stuff in it, I would. But wherever I had to stay true to history and be respectful of the characters, I would as well. So there's a lot of stuff we cut out, which was definitely way too Kingsman-y. I had three Rasputin scenes, which would've probably given me an NC-17 rating.
He was bonkers. He was so entertaining.
Matthew Vaughn: You saw a toned-down version. That's all I can say.
Will we see those scenes someday?
Matthew Vaughn: Maybe one day, maybe. Yeah. Who knows?
It's not the first prequel that you've tackled. You did X-Men: First Class. How did those experiences compare? Was there anything that you learned from your experience on X-Men that you were able to apply here?
Matthew Vaughn: I think the main thing was, it gave me the thought, “If I can get away with doing the Cuban Missile Crisis with blue people running around, I can get away with this.” I think it gave me much more confidence to take what other people would call two... Which people are already saying it, some of the complaints at the moment are, "You've taken two genres and threw them together. What is this? What is it?" I'm like, "Well, it's a Matthew Vaughn film. I had it on Kick-Ass". Some of them go, "What? You're doing R-rated and superhero kids thing?" I always get this criticism for trying to be different, but I'll be bored if I wasn't trying to be different. And yeah, First Class definitely gave me the confidence that you can take a historical event and just play around with it a little, but still, stick to the historical facts.
Just larger picture plan for the Kingsman franchise as of now, what are you thinking about? There was Kingsman 3, but then there's some setup here, there's also a TV series that was talked about at some point. Where do we stand?
Matthew Vaughn: Where do we stand? God willing, next year, we are concluding the Eggsy-Harry relationship before they are great-granddad and granddad together, since they're both getting on. We're ready to go. We're hoping to shoot it mid-to-late summer.
If people like [The King’s Man], we'd love to do another one of these with the four characters at the end.
If we did a spinoff TV series, we have a whole really fun idea for Statesman. What's given me confidence, I thought Loki was brilliantly done. I mean, really well done. So I thought, "Hey, maybe we could do our version of that with the Statesmen, with the American characters, and that's the TV spinoff". But I don't know, I'm trying to get through this at the moment. So hopefully people will watch this, and this goes well enough that we do Kingsman 3 and this. The TV thing? It has to be good. I'm scared of television because it's such a different medium to what I'm used to. Loki, I was really impressed with Loki, when I saw Loki. I liked it a lot.
