Joe Cornish’s ATTACK THE BLOCK is one of the most remarkably assured directorial debuts in recent memory, a funny and genuinely frightening sci-fi/horror hybrid that compares favorably to the early work of John Carpenter and Joe Dante. But while the film owes a great debt surface-wise to classics like ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 and GREMLINS, it honors more than their aesthetics. By setting the film in a sketchy South London neighborhood, and choosing as his heroes a group of burgeoning young criminals, Cornish has imbued his alien invasion film with some rather incisive social commentary; like Napoleon Wilson, we find that there’s more to these kids than initially appeared. There’s a lot packed into ATTACK THE BLOCK’s taut eighty-eight-minute runtime. Viscerally and intellectually, it’s the most satisfying piece of pop entertainment I’ve seen since DISTRICT 9.
Though Cornish is famous in the UK for his sketch comedy shenanigans with Adam Buxton on Channel 4’s sublime THE ADAM AND JOE SHOW (and, subsequently, their BBC 6 radio program ADAM AND JOE), he’s pretty much an unknown quantity in the U.S., where ATTACK THE BLOCK is finally hitting theaters this Friday. This will hopefully change over the next few months, as Screen Gems platforms the movie across the country. And if that doesn’t do the trick, there’s always Steven Spielberg’s THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN: SECRET OF THE UNICORN, which Cornish rewrote with Edgar Wright. Then there’s Cornish and Wright’s ANT MAN movie for Marvel Studios, which could get greenlit any day now.
While I’d love to see ANT MAN move forward, I’m far more interested in watching Cornish develop as a writer-director. As you’ll learn in the below interview, filmmaking has always been the dream for Cornish. His lovely anecdote about the agony of waiting half a year to see E.T. in theaters really hit home for me; having grown up in a small Ohio town with two moviegoing options, I remember what it was like to wait and wait for a film to arrive, only to have to wait another six months (if not a year) for it to turn up on video. That's when you'd fill the void with stills in magazines and recorded TV spots, imagining how the movie might play (and sometimes being let down when you finally saw it). Cornish is one of us. He isn’t in this for the money; he’s out to create memories. And with ATTACK THE BLOCK, he’s off to an brilliant start.
(If you’re wondering whether ATTACK THE BLOCK is playing at a theater near you this weekend, I’ve posted a full list of locations with links below.)
Beaks: My initial reaction to the film was to think of John Carpenter and Joe Dante. I was impressed by the deft integration of theme, and the subtext of what is really at play here with these kids and living in this apartment complex, and the way that you put the exclamation point on it with (Highlight for spoiler) Moses hanging from the Union Jack. It’s a reminder of how these films can be really sturdy vessels for social commentary. Back when you were just in the idea stage, was that something you were keen to address with this movie?
Joe Cornish: Yeah, absolutely. I was born in London and I grew up in Stockwell, which is right next to Brixton in South London, so I’ve always lived in a very multicultural community. I love that area. I love the people there. I love the atmosphere. It’s my home. So, yeah, this story is about the character of that kid and about people’s perceptions of kids like that, and it is attempting to, I suppose, take the stereotype as portrayed in the media and other movies, and deconstruct it using the tool of light absorbing alien creatures with phosphorescent teeth: the ultimate tool for social analysis.
Beaks: I’ve seen it three times now, and it’s effortless the way that everything seems to tie in: why the monsters are there, how they are brought into the story, and the fact that Moses takes it upon himself as the person who, because of the crime he commits early in the film, must see this through. This is his burden.
Cornish: Well, this is the thing. Central to me is the fact that they are like children and kids from everywhere. When you are a kid, you are not allowed to be particularly emotional; if you show vulnerability, it’s seen as weakness when you are a child. Wouldn’t you say that’s true?
Beaks: Absolutely.
Cornish: And your agenda is to show to your friends that you are strong, that you know the world and you know about the world, and you are ready for it and you can deal with it. That’s what makes you powerful as a kid. So when you take those things that are true for all kids, and think about a kid who grows up in a tough environment - a kid who may perceive that the world is actually actively against them, whether it be through racism or social prejudice or difficulty of getting a job or lack of education or social support. Once you add those things into the mix, you end up with children who find themselves building up a front that’s so tough; they have to show themselves to be so impervious and invulnerable and strong that it becomes a problem. This film is just trying to take away that front and show you that if you demonize these kids, you are forgetting at least a huge amount of their humanity an dimensionality. Plus, it’s a movie with kids on dirt bikes hacking at aliens with samurai swords, so I don’t want to get too deep about it. But definitely that was the idea. That’s what made me want to write it: a sense of compassion and heart and love for the characters, and wanting to show how loyal and tough and smart and… how this skill set that they have built up to protect themselves can be used for good or bad.
Beaks: And to show also a love for the genre. There are so many “maybe this is a hat tip, maybe its not” moments. Like the kids running into the shed to kill the alien: that seems like a nod to E.T.
Cornish: Oh definitely. In Britain in the ‘80s, we didn’t get American movies. We would sometimes have to wait six or seven months, so all of my richer friends who went to America on holiday would come back and tell me these amazing things they had seen, and I’d have to sit on my hands. So I would scour the pages of STARBURST and FANGORIA – any magazines I could get. And by the time these movies came out, I would be so excited. With E.T., there was a review on the BBC Radio and they played the audio from that scene: “You stay here mom, we’ll check it out!” I recorded it, and I would play it over and over again. I found the sound of crickets and cicadas in the American suburban night amazingly exotic, because I had only ever heard that sound in the Mediterranean before. Plus that scene had something brilliant, which is where Elliot wakes up and he can’t speak. (Imitating Henry Thomas) “Mom…” I had night terrors as a kid where I would wake up and be unable to speak, and I had never read that in a book before. So to see it in a big fantasy movie… that movie was just an amazingly truthful depiction of a kid’s life. So, yeah, E.T. is almost a mental problem for me. I might need to seek some help.
Beaks: No, I think anyone who saw that movie and was impressionable at that age… I came home the other night at like two in the morning and threw on the TV and the last 30 minutes of ET were on and of course I was in tears by the end of that, like I’m just like “I can’t help it.” JC: It’s an amazing, amazing film. Beaks: That period from 1980 to ’86, with Spielberg and Carpenter and Dante thriving, was a real boom time for genre films that had something more on their mind. But lately, save for something like DISTRICT 9, nearly everything is on the surface. So when people go to see ATTACK THE BLOCK, they don’t really want to read much into it; they just take it at face value - which is fine. But I feel like something’s been lost.
Cornish: [ATTACK THE BLOCK] was certainly inspired by Carpenter. Carpenter is a true and obvious reference. THE THING and ASSAULT ON PRECINT 13 have famous levels of social subtext that are there if you want to see them - or not if you don’t. But then E.T. is a pretty compassionate film about divorce; if that was just a film about a boy and an alien, it wouldn’t have the emotional impact that it does. It’s an amazing screenplay, brilliantly fusing a kid’s grief about divorce with this creature that he then falls in love with and loses; it’s about loss and separation and stuff. So I think any good sci-fi film has to say something truthful about the world. It can’t just be complete astral bullshit; otherwise, we wouldn’t even be able to comprehend it. I think everything worth its salt has some sort of relevance. I even like how GREMLINS is about the death of the American manufacturing industry; [Billy’s] dad is an inventor and his inventions go wrong and they go to Chinatown and… even if that subtext falls away, history just forgets it, it was probably there in the mind of the person who wrote it, because you’ve got to have something that you feel to motivate yourself to write. I do anyway.
Beaks: So how long did it take you to write this screenplay?
Cornish: I did lots of drafts. What kind of measure? Like the first draft or how long did I take developing it?
Beaks: From conceiving of it to actually having a draft that you could take to Big Talk.
Cornish: Man, I’ve had ideas for films rattling around my head since I was about fifteen. This one started rattling around in about 2001, when I myself was mugged. I had the idea of the first ten minutes: I had the idea for the mugging, the meteor coming down, and then staying with the gang. Then I just let it bounce around my brain for a few years, and let other ideas cluster on top of it, and just thought about it as I was walking around and chatted to friends about it. Then I saw SIGNS a couple of years later, and that started me thinking about that John Sayles script NIGHT SKIES, and how much I loved alien siege movies, and what would happen if a SIGNS-like scenario happened around where I lived. So it was like a slow snowballing.
Beaks: You’ve mentioned that you like to write screenplays like Walter Hill: terse, with just the basic details.
Cornish: Yeah, Walter Hill is a huge inspiration. I would recommend anyone check out his screenplays, the way they are written, how minimal and effective they are. But for me it was about not writing. It was about not writing until I felt ready, and doing enough research and having enough ideas that I would never be staring at a blank page; I would always have enough ammunition. Then it’s a question of only writing what you absolutely have to, and that’s what you feel like when you read Walter Hill: everything matters. It’s like, as he writes, he is questioning whether it’s worth setting it down in his head before he sets it down [on paper]; he would only put down the shit that he absolutely can’t tell the story without. So that’s what I tried to do. But I wasn’t premeditated or schematic about it; I just did it on instinct. I’m happy that people appreciate it and understand it, but I just kind of fumbled it and did what I thought felt right.
So [Hill] was a real inspiration, and Carpenter’s films, dialogue-wise, were a real inspiration as well. I watched HALLOWEEN just before I started writing, and it’s really inspiring how functional the dialogue is in that movie. It’s not super clever. The characters don’t have great exposition speeches about their past. It’s more like, “What’s your homework tonight?” “Will I see you later?” “What are you doing later?” It’s very casual real stuff, and that was very inspiring as well.
Beaks: And this being your feature directing debut, how long did it take for you to really feel like you knew how to run a set? Or did you ever feel like you got the hang of it?
Cornish: Yeah, I think so. When I finished the last day, I was like, “Okay, now I get it” (Laughs) You can only do the first time one time, and this was my first time, so of course I realized a huge amount that I didn’t know at the beginning. But I was quite shouty in the first week or so. I sort of didn’t understand the [Assistant Director’s] job. I was doing it myself, and I was kind of shouting at everybody. I was running to the monitor, because I was so keen to move fast. I would crouch by the monitor, and I would put a blanket over myself and the monitor so that I could really focus on it. And then Nira Park, the producer, had to come up and say “Joe, you need to chill out a bit and take a step back and include the crew a bit more. They might like to see the monitor as well. And leave the shouting to the first AD.” When I realized all of that, it was actually really liberating because I thought, “Oh cool! I can just defer all of that stuff to the AD, and then just concentrate on what I need to concentrate on.” But in short, I behaved like a bit of a prick, and then managed to scale down the prick-osity to, I think, deal-able levels.
[Both Laugh]
Beaks: Was it a challenge figuring out how to shoot the creatures?
Cornish: Yeah, it was a moving target. I mean, we tested it and we really thought it through; we locked it down as much as we possibly could. But everything in filmmaking is a movie target; everything will change, and there will always be things you don’t anticipate, things that you just couldn’t possibly have imagined will go wrong or look different or be weird. [The creatures] were furry, they had to be coiffed in the right way, and sometimes the performers couldn’t see where they were going. It was a whole nest of [problems]. The whole process… you know full well it’s just troubleshooting twenty-four hours a day. But I had a pretty solid idea of what I wanted to do with them, and how I wanted them to look, and how I’d do it. Freakishly enough, it kind of worked. It worked within our expectations.
Beaks: What percentage of the movie is CG vs. practical?
Cornish: I’m not telling you! I’m not even giving you a percentage, stats man!
Beaks: (Laughing) I had to ask.
Cornish: I’m excited by the fact that you can’t figure it out.
Beaks: That’s fine. Actually, that’s the way it should be. I love we can’t figure it out.
Cornish: It will come out. We have done some pieces for the DVD release in the UK that show you how we did it. It’s like a good magic trick: if you really want to find out how David Copperfield levitates, then you can put that into Google and you will find out. But sometimes its better not to know.
Beaks: So you have worked with Spielberg. What was that process like, turning in pages and getting notes from Steven Spielberg?
Cornish: I felt just like you would feel if you met Mr. Spielberg. You may have done so. You get super nervous. I felt the same way with Peter Jackson, who is also a hero. You get nervous, you get self conscious, but the wonderful thing is you pretty quickly get over it because they are good guys, and they are pretty down to earth and straight forward and respectful and intelligent and articulate and kind of normal. That’s even more rewarding, when suddenly you realize that you can be relaxed and straight around people at that level. It’s pretty cool. But it was a great privilege to do it. I kind of wouldn’t have been there without Edgar [Wright], who got me on to both ANT MAN and TINTIN, so I feel very grateful towards him. It’s amazing. I mean, you know how much [Spielberg’s] stuff means to me. But he likes the English; he’s shot films in England. He’s a very good collaborator, and I was privileged to be briefly someone he collaborated with.
Beaks: So where do you go from here? Are you looking to try different genres?
Cornish: It’s not about genre for me; it’s about story. It’s always entirely about story. That’s how ATTACK THE BLOCK started: I wanted to tell the story of that kid, and I wanted to juxtapose it with an alien story. I’ve got some ideas for stories I’d like to tell, and they may or may not be genre. They may or they may not have effects in them. They may or they may not be funny or scary. I don’t know, man. I’ve been waiting to do this for so long; I’ve got thirty years of ideas and ambition. I can’t wait, if I do get the opportunity, to try out some of the other ideas.
Beaks: Are any of those ideas ones that you’ve had since you were, like, fifteen?
Cornish: Yeah.
Beaks: That’s awesome.
Cornish: But I do update them.
Beaks: They mutate.
Cornish: But everybody has that, right? I bet you’ve got a few knocking around in there.
Beaks: Yeah, but people like to hear that because it’s like “Thank god I’m not the only one who’s been obsessing on this idea for fucking twenty years.”
Cornish: The secret is to do it. Don’t let anyone stop you. Don’t doubt yourself. Just do it. That’s all I did; I just had a go and I feel lucky that people are responding. I’m glad I did have a go, you know?
I’m glad he did, too. He made a great movie.
ATTACK THE BLOCK opens this Friday, July 29th, in limited release. It's playing at the below theaters this weekend, then expanding throughout August. This is one of the year's best films, the kind without which this site wouldn't exist. Trust me, you are going to love this fucking movie.
Faithfully submitted,
