2024 PREVIEW
18 THE SPY GENRE TURNS Inside Out
MATTHEW VAUGHN IS MAKING MISCHIEF AGAIN…
ARGYLLE
OUT 2 FEB
Spies like these: Elly (Bryce Dallas Howard) and Aiden (Sam Rockwell).
THE WAY MATTHEW Vaughn tells it, the idea for Argylle arrived all at once. From two completely different directions. First came a desire, cultivated during the pandemic, to show his daughters some films that had floated his boat growing up. “Thank fuck for the internet, because you could download all the movies,” he says. “Imagine there being lockdown in the old days, when you couldn’t even go to Blockbuster.” Among those he downloaded was Robert Zemeckis’ swashbuckling 1984 adventure Romancing The Stone. “They flipped for it,” he says. “Just flipped for it.”
So he started thinking about a movie that would recapture some of that Romancing The Stone snark and spark. “It was my first successful date movie,” Vaughn tells Empire in October, over brunch in a swish New York hotel restaurant. Before we can dwell on the ramifications of the word ‘successful’ in this anecdote, he ploughs on, thank Christ. “I thought, ‘It’s time to make a date movie that women are going to love, and men will tolerate.’”
And — in this telling of the story, some steps may have been shortened — that’s where he found a manuscript on his desk. It was from young, unknown, unpublished, first-time author Elly Conway. It was called Argylle, and detailed the adventures of Aubrey Argylle, a super-spy who made 007 look like one of those other, shittier 00 agents who get bumped off every now and again. It was very much in the wheelhouse of a director who had just made three Kingsman movies.
Yet that is not what Argylle, the film, ended up being. Partially because of the Kingsman series. “I was thinking, ‘I gotta do something different,’” admits Vaughn. “I wanted something to take me out of my comfort zone. That’s what I look for in movies. ‘Are we going to pull it off?’ And if we don’t, we at least try to do something different.”