LEV: The first version of Kick-Ass that you actually wrote, it says in the book that it was mostly about Big Daddy and Hit Girl.
MARK: Yes, originally I had the book start there. Issue one was originally what I used in issue six. It was a year before I showed anyone, and I just looked at it and I thought, this is really good, and the characters are really good, but they’re just not human enough to be the leads. The comparison I always make is Star Wars starring Han Solo instead of Luke Skywalker. You needed to have the slightly duller, humanizing character as the reader’s point of entry into the story.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrKHu2UX1vA&hl=en_US&fs=1&]
So I put it on the back burner. Issue 6 was sitting there on my hard drive, and then I realized, I’m just going to make it autobiographical. Then it’s going to be easy. So I created the Dave character and brought Hit Girl and Big Daddy into the series a little bit later.
LEV: But you didn’t go so far as to set it in the town you grew up in, or anything like that.
MARK: One thing I’ve realized that if you set something in Scotland you have an absolute maximum audience probably of six million people. Even then 99% of them won’t be interested. There’s something amazing about America. The Empire State building means as much to someone in China as it does to some one in New York as it does to someone in Scotland. We all recognize Scorsese’s Mean Streets and that kind of thing in a way never would with something set in rural Scotland.
LEV: So at what point did Matthew Vaughn get involved? Because there’s this unusual thing where you’re working on the movie while still working on the comic …
MARK: Matthew and I have a mutual friend who’s a big TV guy over here called Jonathan Ross. Jonathan actually is the UK’s biggest fanboy. I think he has got the biggest collection of original comic artwork in the world. He doesn’t just have one copy of the first appearance of Spider-man, he’s got three copies, and each one’s like a couple hundred grand or something.
We’ve always just been friends on a personal level, never professional, and he was telling me that Matthew was doing the Thor movie at the time, and it wasn’t quite working out for Marvel, and he put me in touch with Matthew, and Matthew and I became friends — Matthew invites me down to the after-party after his last movie, Stardust, and we really hit it off. It was one of those odd things where when we had our first phone call, normally it’s that slightly awkward five minute call, and it ended up being three or four hours long. It was just insane.
So Matthew says, have you got any of your own books, that I could maybe adapt? All the good ones seem to be taken at Marvel and DC. I said yeah, actually, I’ve got this thing called Kick-Ass, I’m just writing issue three at the moment, I could send you the first two issues. So I sent him the first two, and he said, I absolutely love this, when are you going to finish three? I said, well hopefully tomorrow. I fired it down, and he said, when’s the next one? And I was all, for fuck’s sake! Because normally I’ll have to take a couple weeks to write something.
He got me down to the house — he’s got this amazing, big country estate — and then I found out that he’s married to Claudia Schiffer, which was a bit of a shock, you know? I spent a day at his house, and he blocked out the way that he wanted the screenplay to go. There’s a difference between a monthly format and a two-hour movie, and just structurally there had to be some changes. I remember thinking, this is as good as it gets. This guy is just wanting to make it the way I want it to be done, there’s no studio heads chucking in stupid ideas or anything like that, and Matthew was very confident about getting everything greenlit and moving quickly.