The LA Times had the chance to speak to Kick-Ass director Matthew Vaughn recently, who shared an interesting story about a recent movie-going experience.
Vaughn has been working away on his next film — an adaptation of the Marvel comic book series X-Men: First Class — and decided to go out and take a peek at Christopher Nolan’s Inception. What seemed like a normal night at the movies actually turned into a tricky situation; Vaughn realized that some aspects of his movie were going to be very similar to things he saw in Inception. Most would probably just ignore this, but Vaughn is clearly determined to make something unique and thus, decided to remove these parts of his movie.
I saw ‘Inception,’ which I loved. But my heart sank when I saw that a few of the ideas we had were up [on the screen]. So it’s either leave it in and look as if you’re copying or change things. We completely ripped out about 12 pages of the script and the storyboards.
The cut material was basically a trippy fight scene with Professor X (James McAvoy) and some other mutants involving spinning rooms and other crazy sequences.
Realistically, not much is shiny and new these days. I can understand tweaking scenes to ensure that they don’t mirror Nolan’s, but removing them completely seems unnecessary, especially if they’re crucial. Hopefully Vaughn eventually decides just to re-create these scenes differently than he originally had them if they are important.
X-Men: First Class is currently set for a June 3, 2011 release date. I’ve always been unsure that it can be pulled off by then, and if they’re still only on storyboards it seems even more unlikely. On the other hand, no one thought Quentin Tarantino would pull off Inglourious Basterds in a year and he proved us all wrong.
