ROYAL COMMAND
SOMETIMES FILMMAKING IS ABOUT entertaining the masses – all those unseen, unknowable faces in the dark. And sometimes all that graft and money and talent is about making the movie that you want to see. The kind of movie that first electrified your blood as a kid. If you can combine those two impulses, you’re winning.
All immaculate tailoring and fine, upstanding ultraviolence, 2014’s Kingsman: The Secret Service – and 2017 sequel The Golden Circle – scratched a cinematic itch for writer/director Matthew Vaughn: high-gloss, high-tech spycraft as defined by James Bond. New franchise extension The King’s Man takes its cue from a quite different breed of big-screen escapism, one that made history its canvas.
“This whole movie came out of me thinking, ‘What happened to the big epic adventure films I grew up on?’” Vaughn says. “These big, big films that the family could watch. I remember as a 10-year-old liking Gandhi – why the fuck would I like Gandhi as a 10-year-old? It was the scale of it. Lawrence Of Arabia, The Man Who Would Be King…”
1975’s Caine and Connery caper – a ripping, Raj-era yarn set in an uncharted Afghanistan – was the key influence, he admits. “My joking name for this movie is The Man Who Would Be Kingsman! I remember seeing that film as a kid and being blown away by it. I couldn’t remember why, so I watched it again and I was shocked by the influence it’s had, whether it’s Spielberg with Raiders Of The Lost Ark… There’s a scene on a bridge which is virtually identical to Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom. It was epic, it was an adventure, it was funny, it was poignant, it had political messages, it had landscapes. It had everything. And I was like, ‘That is the sort of film that I want to make.’
“I remember
