The lovely Scottish James McAvoy has taken a bit of time during the X-Men: First Class promotional tour to toss a bone (so to speak) to the Yanks, who McAvoy claims aren’t nearly as pedestrian as British filmmakers would hope. According to McAvoy, British filmmakers knowingly “dumb down” their movies to make them much more accessible to American moviegoers, and he believes that this approach backfires. Well, I’m not sure that the effect is as detrimental as McAvoy suggests, but he deserves some serious points for stating the matter as such:

“We dumb our movies down because we want Americans to understand them. The Americans watch it and go ‘[T]his is a really unsophisticated dumbed down movie. Why would we want this? Why do we like this? We don’t’.

“It’s like we’re patronising them and short changing ourselves,” said McAvoy.

McAvoy plays a young Charles Xavier in the latest X-Men installment.

It is a prequel to the previous four films which have taken over $1.5bn (£900m) worldwide. In it we find out how the mutant superhero saga started.

“It was a big responsibility. The fifth X-Men needs to be different. You can’t keep putting out films with the same tone and vibe. I think this does that.

“It;s about what might have been. It’s about brothers and then them tearing each other apart.”

The film was made at Pinewood studios and was directed by Matthew Vaughn. His previous films include Kick Ass and Layer Cake.

It may have the British stamp all over it but it is backed by US studio Twentieth Century Fox who will see the profits.

Jason Flemyng plays a demonic teleporting character called Azazel in the film.

Commenting on American franchises being made in the UK he said: “Filming this at Pinewood was fantastic because it was like the old 1950’s studio. It was packed. I’ve never seen a studio that busy and I loved it. But it’s difficult. It’s great everyone’s working but we kind of need to develop and work up our own stuff so that some of that money comes back into the British film industry.”

The stellar cast list also includes Michael Fassbender, Mad Men star January Jones and Kevin Bacon.

He had some advice for British filmmakers: “I think the whole thing is to keep trying to make the best possible movie that you can and hopefully the cream rises to the top. And sometimes you know you look at something like The Kings Speech, which is made for relatively little money compared to X-Men and it just keeps making money, making money, making money.”

[From Sky News]

It’s difficult to tell (from the way that Sky News arranged this article) whether some of these quotes are coming from Jason Flemyng or Kevin Bacon, but the copy would lead one to conclude that it’s all McAvoy here. To a degree, I believe that he’s correct about Brit perceptions of U.S. audiences, but the tricky thing is that these assumptions are dead on when it comes to most summer popcorn movies. Just look at the success of the previous X-Men movies, which even most American comic book fans admit are really horrible pieces of cinema, yet they still went and watched them (sometimes even more than once). Perhaps McAvoy is really trying to tell us that X-Men: First Class is merely smarter than the rest of the movies, which is already pretty clear from the trailer itself.

In any case, McAvoy’s gesture of goodwill for U.S. audiences is appreciated. Now, if only he would take off those jeans for the ladies too.

Photos courtesy of AllMoviePhoto and WENN