Last night I attended a very early screening of director Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman: The Secret Service , which is based on the comic by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons and set in the world of British super-spies. The film, which represents the X-Men: First Class and Kick-Ass helmer’s latest collaboration with Millar (who also created Kick-Ass), isn’t scheduled for release until February, so Fox has asked that we hold our review until closer to then. But I can say that the Colin Firth/Samuel L. Jackson starrer is fun and intense, an over-the-top love letter to the gadgets-and-glitz era of James Bond, but one that’s infused with the director’s hyper-violent action sensibility as well.

Choosing Kingsman Over X-Men: Days of Future Past

Matthew Vaughn and James McAvoy on the set of X-Men: First Class

Reawakening a Sense of Fun in Spy Movies

Changing the Comic to Make a Better Movie

Making a Very British Movie for an International Audience

I also attended a breakfast with Vaughn this morning along with several other members of the press to talk about Kingsman, its development, and how he had to make the tough choice between directing this film or X-Men: Days of Future Past. Read on for that and more…“It started in a pub with Mark, and we were drunk,” Vaughn told us. “We sort of were complaining about how spy movies had become really quite serious. We said, ‘Let's do a fun [one].’ … Mark went off and wrote a version, and I read it. I was like, ‘F#@k, maybe we should do this for real.’ Then he went ahead, finished the comic off. Then I was working on Days of Future Past, and I'd finished the treatment. Then the [Kingsman] script fell out of me -- just one of those things. I remember Fox going, ‘What are you talking about?’ because the two scripts came in at the same time. I was like, ‘Aw, s#!t.’ It was a really tough decision whether to do Days of Future Past or do this. But then I was like, ‘F#@k, somebody else is going to wake up and do a fun spy movie. Then I will have written a bloody screenplay that no one will want to make.’ So I probably made the craziest decision of my life to turn down an $800 million gorilla to do Kingsman. But Kingsman's more me anyway.”Vaughn mentioned that one of the reasons he wanted to make Kingsman was because spy movies are so serious these days.“[I wanted to get back to] a sense of fun,” he explained. “The gadgets -- just being pure entertainment, not heavy. I think superhero films are going up their a$$es as well. Marvel, thank God, when I saw Guardians of the Galaxy, I was like, ‘Yeah! This is a film that's entertaining, it's taken some risks, it managed to make me care about a raccoon and a tree. This is a f#@king genius piece of filmmaking.’ I'm like, ‘How can I be caring and enjoying this so much?’”He brought up the most recent Bond film, Skyfall, by way of example.“Skyfall is pretty exhausting, isn't it?” he said. “It's serious. I wanted to make this a film where The Spy Who Loved Me comes on, it's on TV, and you go, ‘Oh, f#@k it, I'll watch this for five minutes.’ An hour later you're like, ‘Oh, s#!t. I've got to watch the ending now.’ You have to be in the mood for it. Skyfall's a great film. I thought Skyfall was really good, but… And I was terrified, because I had just finished the script, and everyone was telling me, ‘Skyfall's gone back to the old Bond! It's fun, it's this, it's this!’ And I watched it going, ‘This is good, but it's not...’ It's not Kingsman; let's put it that way.”“Well, I changed it because comics and movies aren't exactly the same thing,” Vaughn said of his deviations from the book. “That's the thing you've got to remember. It's a different medium. Some things that work in a comic don't work in a film, and vice versa. I had just had this moment where I was like -- have you seen My Fair Lady? It would have been a bit weird if Rex Harrison suddenly turned around and went, ‘Don't worry, my dear, I did it. I came from the street.’ There's no journey if the uncle in the comic takes [Taron Egerton's character Eggsy] under his wing and teaches him. Then you're like, ‘I'm watching a sequel.’ If he's already done it, where's the art? Then the other idea is, after a while, I actually throw the comic away, because the movie has to work as a film. Some things remain, and other things I forget about, and other things that look so good in the comic I can't forget about and they stay.”“You know, I'm English, there's a British crew, there's a celebration of Britain and Englishness,” Vaughn said of his film. “There's a lot of English humor, which is quite... the studio, for example, they saw the cut. They were like, ‘Alright, you've got to get rid of the church. You've got to get rid of the head exploding. Get rid of the lisp. Get rid of the McDonald's scene.’ I'm sitting there going, ‘F#@k! That's the whole movie!’ ‘The Americans aren't going to get it, your quirky little British humor. Trust us, the Americans aren't going to get this.’ I'm like, ‘Oh, f#@k, really? I'm not American, so how the f#@k do I know what Americans will get or not get?’ It was stupid of me to think I understood American culture. So I said, ‘Well, guys, that's the film. If American's aren't gonna get it, they're not gonna get it. That's not my problem.’ So that's where that comes from.”And interestingly enough, the film seemed to go over very well at the screening last night -- which took place, mind you, in America. Also, Vaughn added that it was not his intention to poke fun at other nationalities, including Americans.“I actually love America,” he said. “The only thing I was poking fun at is British people are always cast as the villains. So I thought, ‘I want to see an American villain for once.’ So that's the only reference. The White House and Obama-ish president -- there's no other symbol about a global power than the White House. If I used 10 Downing Street, most people would go, ‘What's that little black door? Where is that? Who is that?’ So I needed to show that [Sam Jackson’s character] Valentine was -- when you hear Valentine saying, ‘Politicians are s#!t,’ you pull back and go, ‘Oh, f#@k! He's in the White House! This guy's powerful.’”