|
|
| Interview: The Stars Are Matthew Vaughn's Destination |
by Peter Sobczynski
Stepping away from the ironic gangster sagas that he is best known for, Matthew Vaughn sits down to talk about his latest work, the elaborate comedy-fantasy "Stardust," and also explains the reasons for his departure from "X-Men 3."
Having made a name for himself in England as the producer of Guy Ritchie’s high-octane gangster films “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” and “Snatch” (yeah, he also produced Ritchie’s misbegotten “Swept Away” remake but let us be polite) and as the writer-director of his own crime saga, the critically acclaimed “Layer Cake,” Matthew Vaughn has taken a most unexpected turn for his second directorial effort. Instead of another film with tough-talking criminals, stylish violence and jet-black humor, “Stardust” is instead a witty and elaborate comedy-fantasy in the vein of “The Princess Bride” or the old “Fractured Fairy Tales” from the old Bullwinkle TV series. In the film, based on the book by Neil Gaiman, young Tristran (Charlie Cox) ventures into the magical world of Stormhold to retrieve a fallen star to present to the snobby woman (Sienna Miller) that he loves. When he arrives at the impact site, he discovers that the star is actually in the form of a beautiful young woman named Yvaine (Claire Danes). Nevertheless, he endeavors to present Yvaine to his betrothed and as the two make their way back home, they encounter numerous villains, the chief one being a nasty witch played by Michelle Pfeiffer, who want to use Yvaine for their own nefarious purposes, as well as characters such as a black-market dealer in black magic (Ricky Gervais) and sky pirate Captain Shakespeare (Robert De Niro), a fearsome individual who turns out to be much different than his reputation might suggest.
Recently, Vaughn sat down to discuss the change-of-pace that is “Stardust” and the challenges of making a big-budget fantasy film with a sense of humor about itself and even talks about his high-profile departure from “X-Men 3.”
What was it that first got you interested in film—was there a particular movie or person that really sparked your interest?
“Star Wars”—that was the one. I remember being a kid in 1977 watching it. In England, there was a Disney cinema that we all went to for their movies—they were fun but they didn’t grab you by the balls. I went to “Star Wars” and knew nothing about it—it was one of those things that was more of a slow build in England and it was a whole different cinema experience back then because you didn’t have all the hype like there is now. I remember being young enough to not understand why Darth Vader’s ship took over the princess’s because since Princess Leia was a princess, I assumed she had the big ship and Darth Vader was in the smaller one—it took me about five years to realize that it was actually the other way around. “Raiders of the Lost Ark” was another one—I saw “Superman,” which I thought was all right but it didn’t blow me away but “Raiders” was better than “Star Wars.” “Star Wars” is probably one of my top 10 movies but when you watch it now, it does have its cringey moments with the dialogue while “Raiders” is as good as it gets.
Obviously, “Stardust” is a much different film from those that you have been previously associated with, both as a producer (“Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” and “Snatch”) and as a director (“Layer Cake”). How did you wind coming to this particular project?
I read the book and I loved it—this was about five years ago—and met with Neil Gaiman and told him that I wanted to produce it. I tried to get Terry Gilliam to do it but he said no because he had just done “The Brothers Grimm” and didn’t want to do another period fantasy thing. Then the whole “X-Men 3” thing didn’t work out and since I had always loved the book and had subconsciously been making the movie in my head, I sat down to write it and did a first draft in two weeks. I dialed Neil and told him that I really wanted to do it. He came down to the country and we took a walk and I told him that I really wanted to write and direct it and he said “You’ve been so passionate about it for so long—what harm can be done by you writing a screenplay?” I rang him about two weeks later and told him that I had a first draft that was essentially a blueprint for the film but now I needed someone to help flesh the characters out and turn it into a proper screenplay. He suggested a girl named Jane and she came on and six weeks later, we had our shooting script.
Were you consciously trying to find a project that would take you away from the gangster genre that you had become linked with in your previous films?
I think that deep down, I probably was but I honestly think that you make a film because you want to make a film and not because you are trying to make a quota or are trying to be different. I think it can be a mistake to make decisions based on too much thought and with “Stardust,” I just knew that I had to make this film because I knew it would be one that I could be proud of. Ironically, I’m not really a big gangster film person at all—I sort of fell into the gangster world, which I guess a lot of people do, for real. I think that in the future, the films that I do will be much closer to “Stardust” than to the gangster genre.
“Stardust” is also much larger in size and scope than anything that you have previously worked on before. Is it harder to do a film like this where you have all these resources—a large budget, big-name stars and tons of special effects—at hand along with higher expectations or to do something like “Layer Cake,” a film that was less expensive to make but one where it was your first time in charge of everything?
I genuinely believe that making a movie, no matter what the budget, is always just as hard and just as easy as the others. My job as a director is to tell a good story and make it as engaging as possible and whether you are making a film for $100,000 or $100,000,000, those rules still apply. Now technically, I was doing things with this that I had never done before but on “Layer Cake,” I was doing everything that I hadn’t done before. With both films, we didn’t have enough money to make everything easy but I also think that having too much money can make you lazy with some things at times.
 |
One of the things that struck me right off the bat was the tone of the film. Most fantasy films today tend to be very dark and grim in tone—even the Harry Potter stories have gotten darker as they have progressed—and are very heavy and self-serious. With “Stardust,” the tone is much lighter and goofier and it feels at times as if the story is being made up as it goes along—it feels closer to something like “The Princess Bride” or the “Fractured Fairy Tales” that used to run on “Bullwinkle” than “The Lord of the Rings.” Considering that whimsy is a sensation that is difficult to maintain for the length of a feature film—one wrong step and you run the risk of simply becoming annoying—how much of a challenge was it to achieve and maintain that tone?
That was the biggest challenge for me, the tone, because it is a very thin line. I told everyone to take it very seriously. I just said that this was a real situation and that in this world, using magic was the same thing as us receiving a credit-card bill—it was just an ordinary occurrence. I tried to make it feel as modern as possible. “Whimsical” is a dangerous word because I think that if you try to be whimsical, it can turn out to be embarrassing. I did a lot of takes where we would experiment, I would ask them to push things and then to bring them back, so that I knew I had a lot of choices when editing—if worse came to worse, I could turn it into a hard-core chase movie or a romantic movie or a slapstick comedy.
Oftentimes, it seems that what works well on the page in terms of fantasy writing does not always translate well to the big screen. Therefore, how difficult of a job was it to translate Gaiman’s book into cinematic terms without losing what made it unique in the first place?
At first, Neil had a heart attack when he saw the draft because in the book, he spends 70 pages with Tristran’s father—you see his life to the point where he has very graphic sex with an elf—and I cut all that out. I told him that Tristran was our hero and that we couldn’t spend loads of time with his dad because audiences would get really angry if we spent 30-45 minutes with him and then began the real story. Narrative is very different in books because you can meander or go back or spend a chapter discussing how to turn on a light and you can get away with it. Neil was very good about and besides, it is still his baby—I just took it and dressed it up a bit.
“Stardust has a very eclectic cast—there are newcomers like Charlie Cox, familiar faces like Claire Danes, Sienna Miller and Ricky Gervais and big-name stars like Michelle Pfeiffer, Peter O’Toole and Robert De Niro. What were you going for when you were assembling this particular cast?
I wanted the unknown to be an unknown. Tristran had to be an unknown if you are to believe that he starts off as this sweet kid and becomes a hero in the end. Most films don’t quite pull this off and give you Orlando Bloom with greasy hair and glasses and a stutter—lo and behold, the glasses come off and bang! One of the reasons that “Star Wars” was so great was that you had no idea who the people playing the good guys were—since you didn’t know them, Mark Hamill was Luke Skywalker and Harrison Ford was Han Solo. I think people relate to that more because you aren’t thinking “Oh, that’s Jack Nicholson!”
Yeah, the only known actors in “Star Wars” at the time were Peter Cushing and Alec Guinness and it is likely that they were pretty much unfamiliar to younger audiences anyway.
Maybe that film actually had more of an impact than I realized because that is why I wanted Peter O’Toole and Robert De Niro—you have this kid but then you have him opposite Michelle Pfeiffer and De Niro and it feels more like a magical journey in that he is encountering all of these movie stars.
De Niro has done a lot of comedy roles in recent years that have played off of his persona as a tough and serious actor but in “Stardust,” he goes way out on a limb—I don’t think he has been this cheerfully over-the-top in a film since the underrated “The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle.”
When I wrote the part, I sort of wrote it with him in mind because you needed a tough guy who you would believe when he says that he is going to kill you before he slams the door and changes. That is my favorite moment to watch with an audience because when he slams the door and says “Well, that went well,” the audience just goes “Huh?” because they are trying to figure out what is going on—they have just seen Tristran being thrown off the boat and there he is and now De Niro is speaking differently. When the doors open to the boudoir, it is pretty amazing to watch the audience go from confusion to shock to laughter.
What has it been like showing the film to audiences in general? When I first saw the film, I just assumed that it was going to be a typical fantasy extravaganza and had no idea about the comedic tone. How has it been to show it to audiences who may be walking in with similar expectations to the ones I had?
I’ve only seen it with about five audiences so far. In London, a whole bunch of hoodies came in because it was advertised as being from the producer of “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” and the director of “Layer Cake” and they told us that “Stardust” was a slang name for cocaine, which we probably shouldn’t mention again. They all came and at first, they were like “Huh” but the film did win them over. That is why I am here now to get the message out. Ultimately, I tried to make a movie that was fun.
“Stardust” is your first film as a director since “Layer Cake” but there were a couple of high-profile films that your name came up in conjunction with and I wanted to ask about what happened with them. The first, and perhaps lesser-known, is that you were supposedly offered the gig of directing your “Layer Cake” star Daniel Craig in “Casino Royale.”
That was just a rumor. I think what happened is that when Daniel was cast as Bond, people just thought of me. I had some meetings on it and we did talk about it and when Daniel was cast, some people thought of us as a package. So Bond, no. Now you can ask me about “X-Men 3.”
On that one, you were hired and were pretty far into pre-production when you suddenly left the project, which would eventually be taken over by Brett Ratner. What happened there?
It was a purely logistical decision. I really wanted to make the film and then I went through the entire schedule and realized that the film that I wanted to make couldn’t be done. I sat down with Fox and told them that if they wanted to hit that May 22 release date, they could do it but the quality would have to go out the window. They said that they had to put it out on that date. It wasn’t a bad break-up—I think everyone thought that we had a big falling-out because we had done the script, the storyboards, the locations and the cast. I definitely got the ship going but I wanted to make sure that it would be as good as “X2” and I didn’t think that I could do it.
link directly to this feature at http://hollywoodbitchslap.com/feature.php?feature=2238
originally posted: 08/12/07 14:35:41
last updated: 08/18/07 17:24:29
![[printer]](/images/icon/printer.gif) printer-friendly format
|
 |
|
Articles 
subscribe to this feed
