Matthew Vaughn returns to theaters next February with “Argylle,” his latest loony spy feature. But in the build-up to his new film, the director has been candid about his career’s earlier work, particularly a film he walked away from: “X-Men: The Last Stand.” Vaughn was initially scheduled to direct the film, but he bailed on it after concerns about the budget and how fast producers wanted it (ironically, he did the same thing on Marvel’s “Thor” before Kenneth Branagh took over). In a new talk with the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast, Vaughn clarified the real reason left the picture, the blowback he received from 20th Century Fox, and the threats that his career was over. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.
“I was literally told by [20th Century Fox’s then-President Tom] Rothman and X people that you’ll never work in this town again,” Vaughn said. “You do not walk off an X-Men film; you’re an arrogant idiot; you’ve only done one film as a director; what are you doing?!’” Though perhaps conveniently, Vaughn left out that he dropped out of “X-Men: The Last Stand” only two weeks before filming began, and Fox had to emergency scramble to fill the director’s chair (which they did with Brett Ratner, who was hired six days later, following Vaughn’s exit announcement).
Vaughn cited family reasons at the time, but in this interview, he says, “I walked off X-Men, but there were a lot of lies, and I was naive because I didn’t realize they would’ve given me much more time and money [ed. something he said about his James Bond interview meeting] to solve it, and I wasn’t comfortable with some of the lies, not Rothman, but [other producers] told, and it was total lies,” he explained, going on re-tell the story that recently made the rounds of the producers basically lying to Halle Berry about her part in the movie to entice her to sign on again (you can read that story here).
Adding to that story, he says, “If you’re going to do that to an Oscar-winning actress, I’m f*cked,” and says that he basically quit on the spot, didn’t tell them, and flew back to London to field angry phone calls from the studio (“So they weren’t happy about that,” he said). And despite the threats, Vaughn not-so-miraculously did work in this town again, so much so that he would eventually go on to direct “X-Men: First Class,” with Vaughn suggesting his work on “Kick-Ass” made “X-Men” producers change their mind.
Vaughn even went to defend Rothman and said he became a creative partner who helped make “First Class” in ten months despite not having a script and a release date. “Everyone likes to slag Tom [Rothman] off because he’s a very loud, very opinionated, but he’s very clever underneath it all,” he said. “And once you navigate it and talk, sometimes louder back to him, but when you construct arguments to Tom, and he listens. He’s a lawyer deep down.”
“My secret weapon was like, ‘OK, we can do it your way, Tom, but if we do that, we’ll miss the release date,’ and he would back off very quickly,” Vaughn continued. “To his credit, when he was seeing the cut scenes, he loves film, underneath the bluster, shall we say, and he’s a guy that identifies problems brilliantly—not so much solutions, and I’ve told that to his face—but really, really good at knowing what the public wants and what they won’t like.”