Matthew Vaughn Interview

MATTHEW VAUGHN: Where’s your revenue from? Mostly from advertising?

CHRIS NEUMER: Both. We have… if we sell our cover ads, that’s it we’re done.

MATTHEW VAUGHN: You’ve only got three cover adds.

CHRIS NEUMER: That’s what I’m saying. It’s nice.…

MATTHEW VAUGHN: Where’s your revenue from? Mostly from advertising?

CHRIS NEUMER: Both. We have… if we sell our cover ads, that’s it we’re done.

MATTHEW VAUGHN: You’ve only got three cover adds.

CHRIS NEUMER: That’s what I’m saying. It’s nice.

MATTHEW VAUGHN: I see what you did there.

CHRIS NEUMER: So people go, you don’t have many ads, you’re going to go out of business, and I go, “No.”

MATTHEW VAUGHN:  “No, we’re okay.”

CHRIS NEUMER: And it’s also nice because being the boss gives me the chance to interview and talk to the people that I want to and—

MATTHEW VAUGHN: I’ll take that as a plus since you’re talking to me.

CHRIS NEUMER: I started the magazine in 1997 and Stardust is the first movie I’ve ever gone back to for a second screening.

MATTHEW VAUGHN: Oh yeah?

CHRIS NEUMER: I absolutely loved it.  At the risk of sounding too kiss-ass—

MATTHEW VAUGHN: Don’t risk that.

CHRIS NEUMER: (laughs) True.  But I want you to know, I hate everything.  I mean, I hate everything.  But I loved Stardust.  It was phenomenal. It was just kismet.  I just happened to see Live Free or Die Hard.

MATTHEW VAUGHN: I haven’t seen it yet.

MATTHEW VAUGHN’S MANAGER: (laughs) I have.  I saw it a couple weeks ago.

CHRIS NEUMER: It wasn’t a bad movie per se, but it didn’t respect the audience.

MATTHEW VAUGHN’S MANAGER: No, that’s a very good point.

CHRIS NEUMER: I’ve basically been ranting like a crazy person to anyone who will listen to me about this one scene where one of the lead characters is standing in front of a window.  There is a professional sniper in a window across the street.  I’m not talking 100 yards away, I’m talking 20 yards away—

MATTHEW VAUGHN’S MANAGER: With the scope.

CHRIS NEUMER: With the scope.  The sniper has the guy IN the scope.  They cut to the shot where you can see the crosshairs and the character is right in the middle of the crosshairs.  The sniper pulls the trigger… and misses.

MATTHEW VAUGHN’S MANAGER: Right before the wall explodes and all that.

CHRIS NEUMER: Yes.   I turned to the person I saw the movie with and asked, “How did he miss?”  They didn’t even do that thing where the guy says, “Oh, I dropped my pen!”

MATTHEW VAUGHN: And he bends over.

CHRIS NEUMER: Right.  They didn’t even do that.  I loved the fact that, at the end of your film, when Yvaine kills the witch with the light, one of the film snobs in the screening room started to say, “Why didn’t she just do that earlier?” and then the character asks, “Why didn’t you just do that earlier?” and she says, “I needed you to do it.”  I loved it.  You thought, “What is the audience going to think when they see this?” and let’s head that off first.

MATTHEW VAUGHN: Yeah.

CHRIS NEUMER: Was that the impulse for including that line?

MATTHEW VAUGHN: 100 percent.  Yeah.  I always try to look at films as an audience member and I get so pissed off when I watch something and it turns out like you were saying.  I’m like, “Huh?  Well, that made no sense!  That was too convenient.”  What I hate is what I call convenient and coincidental filmmaking.  Especially when you’re trying to make a classy film, you’ve got to give it as much grounding in reality as possible so that you believe in it, instead of doing ridiculous things.  If the foundation is strong and the audience can relate to that you can get away with just about anything.  If the foundation is weak, you’ve lost the audience.  No, the shining thing was, as much as possible, about—well, you know, she can’t shine unless she’s happy.  In the beginning of the movie, she’s miserable and has no glow.  When she gets the bath she starts glowing.  When they kiss, she glows.  When they fall into the hedge and she’s like, “C’mon, kiss me now,” she’s glowing and he starts talking about how immortality is lonely and, [snaps his fingers] the glow is gone.

CHRIS NEUMER: I think I can actually see that glow in my own life with the ladies.

MATTHEW VAUGHN: (laughs) I know!  It’s very thought out.  So why didn’t she shine earlier?  Because she couldn’t.  When she’s lying near the wall to cross it, she has a broken heart and doesn’t care if she dies.  She’s done.  She doesn’t care and she doesn’t fight. She’s got no will to live. When he comes in, then she starts glowing.  She realizes what’s going on.  She needed to feel good.

CHRIS NEUMER: I do understand that.  And, as an audience member, I thank you for putting that in there.  But, sometimes I do that thing where I think to myself, if this was an even bigger studio movie, why wouldn’t that be in there?  I know you can’t speak for other people, but you don’t see that respect for the audience in a lot of films.  Is there something unique to you that made you include that line?

MATTHEW VAUGHN: (stammers) I don’t know?  I can’t talk for other directors, you’re right.  I’m quite good at navigating the studio system to get what’s right for the movie on screen.  I’ve got to be honest, after making this film, a lot of directors whom I’ve either publicly or non-publicly called a hack, I’ve called them hacks, I’ve suddenly realized if studios have their way—and with most directors they do—they bully and make them change things and try to and suddenly you’ve got film made by studio committee.  I’ve watched movies while thinking, “How did that director make such a bad film?”  Now, I will give the benefit of the doubt with 90% of directors I used to think were pretty crap.  They are crap because they haven’t fought for their vision, so they’re still weak in that point, but they probably had no choice.

CHRIS NEUMER: I did an interview recently with Shawn Ryan, the creator/producer of The Shield.  He said something that I found very interesting.  He said that smart has become a niche.  I asked him to expand on it and he couldn’t.  He said, “That’s television.”  I figured I’d ask you, since you have experience with smart and studio, do you find that to be true?  Is smart becoming a niche genre in film?

MATTHEW VAUGHN: That’s a dangerous statement to make in Hollywood.  It’s like, “You guys are all stupid!”  (laughs)  But, I do think I agree.  It hasn’t happened in film yet—I can’t stand television and now there are suddenly all these shows I want to watch.  I’m amazed.  I’m buying DVDs of television shows.

CHRIS NEUMER: You say that and I have to ask, what shows?

MATTHEW VAUGHN: I love Curb Your Enthusiasm.  I find it very clever and very funny.  I do like 24.  I liked the first couple of series’.  Not the present.

CHRIS NEUMER: Yeah, last season should have been called 21.

MATTHEW VAUGHN: (laughs) Yeah.  What else?  Entourage, I quite like, but maybe it’s because it’s my life.  My agent is Ari Emmanuel so I sit there in hysterics saying, “They got you right again!”  He’s saying, “No, they’re exaggerating it!”  “Nope, they’re under playing it!”

CHRIS NEUMER: I enjoy it when they mention their manager’s names.  I’ll call one up and be like, “They just mentioned you again!”  She’ll say, “I know…”

MATTHEW VAUGHN: Have you seen the Medellin trailer they stuck up on the internet?

CHRIS NEUMER: No.

MATTHEW VAUGHN: They’re very smart the way they marketed it.  They’re doing all these cute things off screen as well as on.  There’s also an English show I love called Peep Show, which you should get.  The whole thing is shot from point-of-views.  The whole show.  You have to give it time, but if you like British humor, it’s good.  It’s as good as it gets.  It’s very well written and very dark.  Very on the edge.

CHRIS NEUMER: With what you were saying about smart not being a niche in film just yet—

MATTHEW VAUGHN: I think there’s also what I call pretentious smart.  You have to be careful.  I really liked Traffic and I really liked Syriana for what it was, I thought it got a little bit, uh, boom, boom, boom.  ‘Smart’ is a dangerous word like ‘cool’ is a dangerous word.  I’m a big believer that most movies don’t bother telling you a story because you have to be reasonably intelligent to make A go to B go to C.  Some of the Hollywood meetings I’ve had, man…  I had a friend who was editing a movie, who he is I’d rather not say, and he asked me what I thought [of his film].  I said, “You set up this, but it never pays off.”  I hate that when in movies there is a set up but no pay off.  It drives me insane and a lot of movies do it.  My friend’s producer went, “What are you fucking talking about?  It’s a comedy.  All that matters is making them laugh.  If you make them laugh, they’ll come.”  I went, “Why don’t you make them laugh and tell a good story.  Then they’ll really come.”  “Fuck that, it’s too long.  Just get to the next joke and make it quicker.  Get rid of that.”  My friend was like, “Okay.”  I said, “Dude, just tell the story.”  That does happen.

CHRIS NEUMER: Just focusing on your particular situation, this barrage of press has to be brutal for you.  I perused a number of interviews you’d done and it seemed like all the questions were the same.  I’ve never seen anything like it.  It’s like, “Matthew, I’m not sure if you know this, but you made some gangster films previously and now you’ve made a fantasy film?”

MATTHEW VAUGHN: (laughs)

CHRIS NEUMER: And it keeps going on.  “You also might not have noticed this, but you worked with Robert DeNiro.  What was that like?”  I thought, “I’d want to kill myself.”  Have you been bracing yourself—

MATTHEW VAUGHN: Yes.  Yes.  Yes.  I’m thinking about leaping out these windows.  You’re right.  I do think this whole junket thing is a necessary evil.  But I do it.  You’re right.  I don’t understand why people don’t just say, “Okay, we’re going to do a press conference where we’re going to answer all the generic questions.”  Then everyone can just take it.  And if anyone wants to do something different, it seems crazy, to ask  “What’s it like working with Bob?”  You go, okay.  “What’s the film about?”  What’s the film about?  You’ve seen the movie!  I shouldn’t need to tell you.  You shouldn’t rely on me to come up with some lines.

CHRIS NEUMER: I don’t like any questions—and they’re not even questions, really—where the person says, “Talk to me about…”

MATTHEW VAUGHN: Those are bad.

CHRIS NEUMER: I’d make the worst celebrity ever.  I’d be angry all the time and yelling at people.

MATTHEW VAUGHN’S MANAGER:  The funny thing is, with all the access to media, you’d think people would think, “The important thing is for me to try and find a new angle.”

MATTHEW VAUGHN: The problem is that I sometimes start to answer the same question differently.

CHRIS NEUMER: (laughs) I noticed that.

MATTHEW VAUGHN: I get so bored, I go, “Well, yeah, blah blah blah. Fuck it.” And it’s terrible, because I remember on Layer Cake at one of the important interviews I ended up just talking shit, I couldn’t help myself.

CHRIS NEUMER: I read at least four different versions of how you came across the book of Layer Cake. I got the basics down, but then sometimes the book would be there, sometimes it would come a little later. I was like, “This is kind of interesting.”

MATTHEW VAUGHN: The Layer Cake thing is so great that no one would actually believe it. And in the end people were just saying, “No one will believe that you were given the book and then you bumped into the author six hours later on a train.” And that was the truth. It really was.

CHRIS NEUMER: There’s a lot of stuff like that in life, where if you put it in a film, no one would believe it. Or people would just tear you a new one.

MATTHEW VAUGHN: Yeah. They’d say, “That’s illogical shit.” Because snipers do miss from 20 meters.

CHRIS NEUMER: (laughs) When he had him in the crosshairs! Ugh. We won’t even get into the part when they had no satellite, no phone, no nothing, and then they used OnStar to get the car started.

MATTHEW VAUGHN: Yeah.

MATTHEW VAUGHN’S MANAGER:  Have you got two of these [recorders].

CHRIS NEUMER: Yeah. For backup. I was out in Robert Altman’s house in Malibu, and I just brought my one, you never think about two.

MATTHEW VAUGHN: And it didn’t work?

CHRIS NEUMER: It didn’t work. And I happened to have one extra but still, I said, “Wow, this is a bad time.” So, I come prepared. Or I guess what I should say is that what you’re saying is twice as important as normal.

MATTHEW VAUGHN: Or Altman?

CHRIS NEUMER: (laughs) You’ve mentioned that there’s been some battles that you’ve had with studios. Are there certain battles that you’ve found, I’m talking more on general terms, that are worth fighting, and others where you just go, “Fine, we’ll do it that way.”

MATTHEW VAUGHN: I’ve learned to have a few more battles than were necessary so I could lose some battles, because what I learned about the studios – it’s like being back at playground politics – where as long as they felt like they got their little bit then they were happy. That’s just in general. I once had a very surreal conversation where my lawyer said, “Just pretend to be upset about this clause when you agree to it.” And I was like, “I’m fine with it,” and he said, “Just pretend to be upset.” And I went, “You pretend to be upset. I’m not going to pretend to be upset. That’s ridiculous.” But Hollywood is a strange place.

CHRIS NEUMER: That’s like when you have to submit the really hard R-rated cut to the MPAA first and when they say, “You need to change a lot of this” You go, “Okay, I’ll take this out, take that out.”

MATTHEW VAUGHN: Yeah. It’s that sort of thing. And then after a while they probably get embarrassed asking for more changes and they go, “Okay have your piece.”

CHRIS NEUMER: They actually get embarrassed?

MATTHEW VAUGHN: I don’t know, you tell me. People. It’s like if you keep asking someone to change things, and they’ve changed it eight times you go…

CHRIS NEUMER: Boy you must not deal with many publicists.

MATTHEW VAUGHN: I try not to.

CHRIS NEUMER: There’s—I hear you.

MATTHEW VAUGHN: No offense.

MATTHEW’S PUBLICIST: (laughs)

MATTHEW VAUGHN:  I think publicists get confused of what their job is nowadays, because publicists—that’s why there aren’t any more movie stars any more. Because they don’t do press: Do the press, become famous and then become a pain in the ass, but not the other way around.

CHRIS NEUMER: It only takes one person to become famous for being a pain in the ass, and the model went straight to hell. I saw a quote of yours where you said, if you can work with good actors your job becomes significantly easier so you don’t even have to deal with them. And I just wondered, specifically for your style, what makes an actor good?

MATTHEW VAUGHN: Well, they can act. That sounds crazy. But I’ve worked with actors, well, they say they’re actors, and they can’t.  Good actors need direction and good actors take direction. My definition of a good actor is where they come in and say a line and I say, “You know what? Wasn’t quite right… can you do it like this?” and they take the information that I give them, they process it and then deliver what I ask. That’s what I mean about working with good actors. People who understand their craft and can do it. Sometimes you work with people who can’t act and you spend the whole day trying to get them to sound not wooden or to do something, like they get it right and you say, “Fantastic, now we’re coming in for a close-up,” and they do it totally different. We’re not doing different takes to give you a choice, it’s so we can edit the movie. You know, can you hit your mark? And they can’t. So, that…

CHRIS NEUMER: And can you not look down while you’re trying to hit your mark?

MATTHEW VAUGHN: Exactly, and then look like you’re waiting for the person to finish the line so that you can say your line. No, listen to what the person’s saying. You can tell they’re not listening to what the person’s saying, they’re just going, “ahhhhhh. HI!” That’s why I’m very anal about the whole casting process.

CHRIS NEUMER: Is there a way that you can divulge that information on whether they will take that—

MATTHEW VAUGHN: In the audition.

CHRIS NEUMER: I was thinking how I would lie and say I could ride horses if it meant me getting a role—

MATTHEW VAUGHN: Yeah, and they’ll do that. And I actually said to one actor, “Can you ride a horse?” He went, “Yeah.” I said, “Well, I’m just going to tell you, we’ll be riding horses next week, and you’ve told me you can ride so I won’t have to worry about you coming off.” And you see them sort of getting a little bit edgy and then you’ll say, “You can’t ride. Cut out the lying.” I’ll push them. People come into my auditions and I do push the boundaries, even if they give a perfect reading, I’ll say, “Do you mind doing it like this?” Different. Just to see have they got that in them.  How many toys have they got in their bag?  And do they listen?  Because most actors don’t listen.

MATTHEW VAUGHN’S MANAGER: What did you think of Charlie [Cox, in Stardust]?

CHRIS NEUMER: I thought he was good.  There are people who are really, really good who you can’t. I don’t know. Joe Gordon Leavitt, who’s an American. He was in Brick and Mysterious Skin. I think he’s excellent, but he’s actually working on being good. Charlie, I think I read where you said he was relatively unknown so you could bring him from zero to hero.

MATTHEW VAUGHN: It’s a hard thing to get right.

CHRIS NEUMER: Especially if you’re shooting significantly out of sequence.

MATTHEW VAUGHN: All out of sequence. That poor guy. It was a baptism by fire. He was on a horse. He had to do everything. He was a trooper. I truly believe, when I said Daniel [Craig] was going to be a star everyone laughed at me, I think Charlie’s got the same thing. What Daniel and Charlie have in common is that they’re both very, very good actors. And whenever girls see them, they throw themselves at Daniel and they throw themselves at Charlie.

CHRIS NEUMER: Yeah, it’s a good thing Charlie’s not here or I’d throw myself right on him.

MATTHEW VAUGHN: Charlie’s a good guy. You should meet Charlie. You should talk to him.

CHRIS NEUMER: I was actually going to ask if anyone knew anything about him.

MATTHEW VAUGHN: What do you want to know? I can tell you about him.

CHRIS NEUMER: We did a story on up and coming actresses and their experiences working as actresses and life in Hollywood as you’re trying to become a star and it was one of the most interesting stories I’ve ever done just hearing about the process, the work, the study and all that.

MATTHEW VAUGHN: He’s stuck in London.

CHRIS NEUMER: Anything else you want to add or throw forth?

MATTHEW VAUGHN: Not really. I’m much better at being asked questions than talking.

CHRIS NEUMER: So many people have certain points they want to hit and they want to hit hard. Oh man I forgot to ask you about Claudia Schiffer—I don’t know if you know this, but you’re married to her—and Guy Richie producing, I didn’t get to my second page.

MATTHEW VAUGHN: I’m disappointed.

 

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