NOVEL CONCEPT

Matthew Vaughn puts Bond through the blender…

‘You know, one of the biggest arguments I have with my children is trying to get them to watch old movies,’ smiles Matthew Vaughn (Kick-Ass, Kingsman: The Secret Service) from beneath his trademark baseball cap. ‘These are the movies I fell in love with at the cinema. In one week, I watched, with them, Charade and North by Northwest. I was like, “This is amazing.” And they were like, “But it’s a bunch of old people”. Actually, they were a lot younger than Brad Pitt and Cruise and stuff – they just looked older!’

There’s a reason Vaughn is telling Total Film how he spent his lockdown herding the kids in front of the TV. He’s explaining why he chose to make his new movie, Argylle. A meta-spy adventure, it sees a bestselling author of espionage books suddenly caught up in a real-life globe-trotting thrill ride involving secret agents, cool gadgets and sleek vehicles.

‘And then I put on Romancing the Stone, and they flipped for it,’ he continues. ‘They first went, “Dad, why is no one making movies like that?” And then they pointed at me, and went, “You could do something like that.”’

Much as Vaughn loves Robert Zemeckis’ funny, thrilling tale of a mousy romance novelist plonked into the Colombian jungle for a real-life adventure involving murder, kidnap and treasure, Vaughn wasn’t so sure it was something he’d want to riff on. Until, that is, he spoke to screenwriter Jason Fuchs, and read Elly Conway’s soon-to-be-published novel about super-spy Argylle. A light bulb went off, so bright it probably blazed through that baseball cap. ‘Because I had Romancing the Stone in my head, I went, “That’s an adventure movie. Why don’t we do that with spies? We’ll take that as a hook.”’

‘I WANT TO BE ENTERTAINING, AND I WANT TO DO MOVIES I LOVE’

MATTHEW VAUGHN

What we have, then, is meta-mischief mayhem as introverted spy novelist Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard) finds herself in terrible danger alongside her cat (the real-life puss of Vaughn’s wife Claudia Schiffer) when the plot of her latest book happens to overlap with covert events in the real world. Director Ritter (Bryan Cranston), head of a shadowy syndicate, sends a squad of killers to take her out, but ace spy Aiden Wilde (Sam Rockwell) comes to her aid. And so begins a hurtling adventure full of secrets, spectacle and set-pieces.

But that’s only half of it. Viewers will also be treated to the events in Conway’s latest bestseller, in which Agent Argylle (Henry Cavill) and his partner Wyatt (John Cena) embark on a kamikaze enterprise. Just how Vaughn slides between the real and fictional worlds he’s presenting, we’ll have to wait and see. But you can bet he’ll do it in a fun, sly way.

‘I was discussing it with one of the guys I work with, and he said, “You should rename your movie company... It shouldn’t be Marv, it should be Mischief Movies,”’ grins Vaughn.

‘It’s all done with love. I think a lot of people will tackle genres – whether it’s spies, Star Wars, comics – in quite a serious way. I take my movies seriously, but I also know that comics, as a kid, was a way that I escaped, whether it was Watchmen or Whizzer and Chips. I want to be entertaining, and I want to do the movies I love, but I can’t just remake them, and put nothing on them.’

Whether it’s Kick-Ass or Kingsman, Vaughn likes to give genres a spin. You don’t need binoculars or a rifle scope to spot a Matthew Vaughn movie a mile away – they’re stylish, subversive and jammed with action that’s frenetic and inventive. As we talk, he tells TF about the script for the movie he’s making after Argylle, and promises there’s a scene in it that makes the church massacre and exploding heads in Kingsman: The Secret Service look tame. As for Argylle, you need only look at the first trailer to see that it’s going to be one hell of a ride. As well as the crack cast already mentioned, it stars Samuel L. Jackson, Catherine O’Hara, Sofia Boutella, Ariana DeBose, Rob Delaney and singer-songwriter Dua Lipa – the last as a take on the classic Bond woman. Vaughn promises a lot of ‘cool shit’, though he won’t go into details because he wants viewers to come to it fresh.

‘Well, the good news about the trailer is that that’s only cut from the first 28 minutes of the movie,’ he says. ‘I was really, really impressed by Universal and Apple when I said, “I want to do a trailer from the first 28 minutes, because there is some fucking mind-blowing cool shit – but it wouldn’t be as great if you saw it in the trailer.” I said, “Look, let’s just give everyone enough so that they understand the tone of the film, the style of the movie, the actors. And then let everyone enjoy the fucking cinematic experience.”’

We’ll be the first in line.