-By Mark Pilkington

A lifelong comic-book fan and a veteran of the British gangster genre (having produced Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch and directed Layer Cake), English filmmaker Matthew Vaughn gets a chance to combine both passions with his new movie, Kick-Ass. As Vaughn explains, “It’s best described as a mixture of Superbad, Kill Bill and Spider-Man all rolled into one. It’s a very postmodern look at superhero films, done in an action-comedy manner.”

Adapted from a comic book, the April Lionsgate release tells the story of Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson), an all-American high school geek who dreams of one day becoming a superhero. Frustrated at the obstacles life throws at him, he decides to take matters into his own hands and orders a mail-order scuba-diving outfit, which he turns into a superhero costume. Taking to the streets in the guise of “Kick-Ass,” he starts his crime-fighting life by breaking up an attempted mugging, and unwittingly has his exploits filmed and subsequently posted on YouTube. This in turn inspires two masked vigilantes, Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and Hit Girl (Chloe Moretz), who take on the might of the local mafia boss (Mark Strong). Things starts to become complicated for Kick-Ass, as he becomes embroiled in the gang war that follows, and a childhood dream quickly turns into a living nightmare.

Vaughn explains how the project came together. “When we started working on it, the comic hadn’t even been written. Basically, I met up with [writer] Mark Millar and he pitched this idea he had for a comic. I thought the idea was brilliant. He sort of wrote the comic as we wrote the script, so it was a very organic, hand-in-hand process. We basically stole the best ideas from each other!”

Vaughn co-wrote the script with Jane Goldman, with whom he collaborated on the fantasy-romance Stardust. “She is a comic-book fan herself, and of course her husband Jonathan [Ross, the British TV host] is an absolute comic-book nutcase. You may think you know comic books and think you know your stuff, but when you come across someone like Jonathan...he’s on another level entirely.”

Kick-Ass is played by 19-year-old Englishman Aaron Johnson, the actor cast as the young John Lennon in Nowhere Boy. He auditioned with an American accent, an accent that was so convincing the director didn’t even realize that he was a fellow Englishman. “I had no idea,” Vaughn confesses. “I vowed to myself that I wouldn’t cast a non-American in the role, but we got so desperate we were even flying kids in from Australia once we had exhausted the American resources. We were casting the net wide, but couldn’t find the lead—then we came across Aaron. He walked into the auditions and was just perfect for the role. He came in doing an American accent, and he got the role immediately. He was ten out of ten.”

Not only was Johnson’s accent impressive, so was his performance. “He’s the real McCoy,” enthuses the director. “I thought the hardest thing about this movie was to find Hit Girl, but we found her pretty damn quick. The problem with a lot of young actors these days is that they are more interested in being famous than they are being a good actor. Aaron is totally the opposite; he really takes his craft seriously. He’s already honed it to a tee. He’s not just interested in becoming a famous heartthrob; he wants to be an actor for a long, long time. And I think he will be. He’s doing it the right way round—being famous for being a good actor, not just being famous for being famous, which is a new phenomenon we all have to live with unfortunately.”

With any adaptation of a comic book, there is the ever-present issue of pleasing its fan-base, many of whom can be extremely critical when it comes to the big-screen portrayal of their favorite characters. Does Vaughn feel the same pressure with Kick-Ass as he would with other more established film adaptations? “I basically wrote the script and filmed it with the full consent of the guy who made the comic,” he explains, “so if a fan is pissed off with it, then I can say, ‘Hey, screw you—the guy who wrote the comic thinks it’s a good idea...’ It’s been an organic process creating the film with the comic-book author, so why they wouldn’t be happy, I don’t know. I’m sure I’ll find out soon...”

One group of people who have already made it clear that they are not happy with the film is the Australian Family Association. They branded the movie a “disgrace” after seeing a preview clip of 12-year-old Chloe Moretz as Hit Girl, who uses the word “cunt” before launching herself into a full-blooded fight with gang members.

“They haven’t seen the finished movie, which always makes me laugh when people starting going on about how outrageous it is,” sighs Vaughn. “It’s a character who says it—I’m not encouraging young girls to use language like that, but at the same time I’m not going around encouraging young girls to kill 40 or 50 people. What amazes me is no one seems to have a problem with her hacking people’s limbs off! But she says one small word before she kills five people and then people have a problem with it. The point is, she’s a soldier, an assassin. SAS soldiers use that language before they go in to sort out the Taliban, and no one would even think about telling them what they could say. The choice of language they use doesn’t matter. They’re on a mission, and she’s on a mission. I think she’ll pick up some pretty bad habits if she’s being trained to be a lethal assassin. The rules that apply to a normal 10 or 11-year-old girl do not apply to this person. If people are really offended by this, then let’s talk about the fact that she’s killing people before the fact that she’s swearing.”