As recapped here, one of the standout sequences in X-Men: Days Of Future Past involved Quicksilver’s nanosecond jaunt through the Pentagon kitchen and past several Secret Service operatives. That was how it ended up in Bryan Singer’s version but, of course, there was another take on the sequence, another solution to the script challenge of busting Michael Fassbender’s Magneto from solitary confinement. Matthew Vaughn, now on the Kingsman: The Secret Service promotional trail, helped birth that chapter of the X-franchise and conjured up another route into the building. A much more direct one.
“I had Juggernaut being thrown out of a plane at 20,000 feet,” Vaughn says on the Empire Podcast, confirming something Days Of Future Past writer/producer Simon Kinberg told us on that movie's spoiler special, “and using his head to go down a hole to get to the bottom of [The White House].” Juggernaut’s role in proceedings was ultimately subsumed by Evan Peters’ Quicksilver, but the first iteration began with a plane transporting Beast over Washington airspace. “I had Beast saying, ‘I have a plan,’ and him replying, ‘What’s the plan? What’s the plan?’, and they go higher and higher and Beast was going to go, ‘This is it!’ and chuck him out the window. Then he goes smashing through [The White House] with his and Magneto goes, ‘Who the fuck are you?’”
The final Singer take was, concedes Vaughn with a grin, “the best scene in the movie” as Quicksilver balletically negotiates the cream of the President’s security detachment. “I would have made the movie worse,” he laughs. “The Quicksilver one was better.”
With his latest, Kingsman: The Secret Service, now bringing postmodern spy mayhem to cinemas on both sides of the Atlantic, Vaughn stopped by **Empire **towers to chat about that and many other things in a podcast special. Tune into that here or read through the ten things we learned from the writer/director/producer here.