Prior to Bryan Singer returning to the X-Men franchise, X-Men: Days of Future Past director Matthew Vaughn was set to direct X-Men: Days of Future Past based on a treatment he’d written with writing partner Jane Goldman. However Vaughn would leave the project allowing for Singer to head back to the franchise he’d created.

While on the promotional tour for Kingsman: The Secret Service, we asked Vaughn about the decision to leave X-Men: Days of Future Past and what he made of the final project.

“It was a hard decision, I was in love with both projects,” Vaughn told us. “I wrote the treatment for X-Men [Days of the Future Past] but the script took forever to come in. And then I wrote [Kingsman: The Secret Service] in the meantime. It was actually a mixture of necessity as I was terrified another ‘fun spy movie’ would come out. Because I was thinking, ‘why has no one already done this? It seems so obvious’ – and so I thought, ‘do you know what’s going to happen? Someone will do it’. And I was right, you have Spy coming out, Grimsby, Man from U.N.C.L.E. – the ‘more fun spy movies’ are coming, and I wanted to be the first.”

“So I asked Fox if they could put back Days of Future Past and they said ‘absolutely not’,” he continued “And so I said, ‘alright, I’m going to do Kingsman then’. You know, X-Men is not my franchise, it really is Bryan [Singer]’s. Bryan let me play with his toys and I had the time of my life, rearranged them a bit and then handed them back.”

Vaughn then told us that he’d seen the movie, and that he really liked it.

“Do you know what, I thought it was really well done,” he said. “I was a little bit worried for me directing it because, time travel is so hard to pull off. And I think they all did a brilliant job. And Quicksilver was just genius – and that was Bryan, nothing to do with me.”

Kingsman: The Secret Service is set for release on February 13th in the UK and features a cast that includes Colin Firth (The King’s Speech), Taron Egerton (The Smoke), Samuel L. Jackson (Captain America: The Winter Soldier), Michael Caine (The Dark Knight Rises), Mark Strong (Kick-Ass), Jack Davenport (Pirates of the Caribbean), Sofia Boutella (StreetDance 2) and Mark Hamill (Star Wars: The Force Awakens).