GUY Interviews a Guy: Joe Cornish, Writer & Director of Attack the Block

With Attack the Block, writer/director Joe Cornish hit a home run on his first time at bat. Behind this incredible film about a group of South London street-toughs defending their turf from aliens is a filmmaker primed to carve his own niche in our cinematic universe.

And now seemingly, the man’s about to be everywhere. Steven Spielberg just directed his Adventures of Tintin script that he co-wrote with screenwriter Stephen Moffat and Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright. Another script he wrote with Wright, Ant-Man, is currently in the hands of Marvel Studios, awaiting greenlight.

When we sat down for a chat in New York last week, we were there to discuss his work on Block. As I hope you’ll gather from this interview, Cornish is clearly a filmmaker with true passion for the medium he works in. And on this day, it was more than a little infectious:

Joe Cornish: Hey man, how you doing? Good to see you.

GUY: Hi, Tim Kelly with GUY.com and CHUD.com. How are you enjoying Con so far?

JC: I have been here for about an hour.

GUY: Okay, really?

JC: And it’s certainly less crowded than Sunday ago [he's joking, NYCC was wall-to-wall people]. And I like the fact it’s in New York.

GUY: Did you just land?

JC: I came in yesterday, yeah. They showed Attack the Block at the MOMA (Museum of Modern Art) which was very exciting. We did a little Q&A there and… then I went to sleep.

GUY: Very cool. They don’t show just anything there, either.

JC: [Jokingly, in actuality the man's considerably modest] No, apparently it has to be an enduring, everlasting classic.

GUY: Excellent. I think Attack the Block is that, so…

JC: [laughs] Yeah, I’m being humorously self-aggrandizing when I say that. [directly into the tape recorder] I don’t want the irony to be lost on the printed page.

GUY: I’ll be sure to make mention of that! One of the things I was most curious about was the monster design. It’s so simple, yet note perfect in the context of the film.

JC: Thank you!

GUY: How did you land on that design and did you have any other concepts that you flirted with going into filming?

JC: Not really, no. I always thought that design would work. And we tested it about six months before we started shooting. We went to the location and I had my cinematographer on board by then. And we just got a guy in a furry suit. We got a guy in a furry, kind of a monkey suit. And we sat him in all sorts of environments with smoke and wet-downs and backlight and frontlight and sidelight. We filmed in all sorts of different stocks and it kind of worked!

We just evolved it from there really. I think one of the nice things about it being a first film is I had quite a lot of time to think about everything. And that feels like one of the pressures of making a second film – that one might not have as much time [laughs].

GUY: Yeah, absolutely.

“I think one of the nice things about it being a first film is I had quite a lot of time to think about everything. And that feels like one of the pressures of making a second film – that one might not have as much time.”

JC: Yeah. So we just had time to have the idea, check that it worked, and it fell into place slowly really. The idea for the teeth came along a bit later, you know.

GUY: Were the teeth CG?

JC: The teeth are sometimes CG and sometimes practical. It’s a combination. In close-up they’re usually CG. But it was a good way to use our very limited CG budget effectively ’cause you just have to build one model of a jaw and then you reuse it – fairly easy to adjust the incandescence and stuff like that. That was done by a brilliant European company called Fido who worked very hard on that and did a really good job.

But, you know, I feel that’s the way to use CGI – to shoot as much as you can practically and then use it to fix and perfect.

GUY: It felt like District 9 in that respect. When you’re watching it you’re not really thinking about “Is this CG or is this practical?” It was very seamless. But here, it sounds like it was a lot more practical as opposed to CG.

JC: Oh, absolutely! That was very important to me because these were young, first-time actors. I didn’t want to make them react to a tennis ball on a stick or try to guess the eye line. So in Attack the Block when a creature jumps on a kid, it’s really happening. And when they’re smashing through the windows they’re really there. I think it made it much more visceral and physical for the actors.

Terry Notary, who was in the costume, would be very threatening to them [laughs]. And then genuinely try to chase them and catch them. There’s a good extra on the DVD, a kind of ten minute thing all about the creatures and all about Terry that shows you exactly how we did various different things. But yeah, that was very important to me – to have them physically there.

One of the first exciting ideas that came to me, or idea that I thought was exciting, was just the idea of an alien beast in a domestic environment. Weirdly, I don’t think I’d ever seen that – an alien beast crashing into someone’s living room or kitchen. And it seemed like such an obvious image and I just couldn’t believe no one had done it. I think if you tried to do that with CG it would be very difficult to get accurate physics, very difficult to get the detail of the interaction. So I immediately thought we’ll do it practically then kind of paint over it (via opaquely black rotoscoping in ATB‘s case), which is not dissimilar to what Neill (Blomkamp) did in District 9.

“Weirdly, I don’t think I’d ever seen that – an alien beast crashing into someone’s living room or kitchen. And it seemed like such an obvious image and I just couldn’t believe no one had done it.”

GUY: It was actually kind of refreshing. It reminded me of films I grew up with in the 80s with Critters, Gremlins¸ a lot of the Joe Dante-inspired stuff.

JC: They were absolutely the inspiration. Absolutely.

I loved those movies as a kid. When you watch those movies as a kid you felt like you could go home and play them. With your friends or with your toys, it felt like you could make them. It felt like the stuff you were watching had been touched.

GUY: Right, the texture of it.

JC: Well yeah, there’s something… maybe modern kids are like that with computers. They can go home and “Oh, I’m going to build a wire frame and render it.” But I used to go home and get cardboard and sticky tape and glue and I used to make these things! I made James Bond’s underwater car in The Spy Who Loved Me, I made a big cardboard E.T.

Because there’s a tactility to what you see on screen. It feels like, in the words of Sandra Bullock, it feels like “practical magic,” rather than computer magic.

GUY: And you feel like you can pet the alien. Not that you’d want to, but they look like…

JC: Yeah!

GUY: The texture and the fur of the beast…

“When you watch those movies as a kid you felt like you could go home and play them. With your friends or with your toys, it felt like you could make them. It felt like the stuff you were watching had been touched.”

JC: It’s more you feel like “I could do that. If I put enough time into it with my bare hands and some materials, I could do that.”

GUY: Right, it feels closer to home in that sense.

JC: Yeah, it doesn’t require too much technical knowledge. It feels like craft I think.

GUY: Absolutely. Obviously the film’s concept is a simple one, but it’s the characters that I felt really set it apart. Can you talk about the writing process a little bit? Was it difficult to make each character feel unique or was that something that manifested itself once you had your actors?

JC: Yeah, again that was an organic thing that kind of evolved. I’m very happy you feel that way.

What really made them come to life was casting – was the young actors themselves. I tried to look for very distinct personalities when we were casting. And then we basically had a week together on the script where we put a day or half a day into each actor’s character. So we’d all sit around and we’d discuss every single thing their character said, or why they said it and what they meant by it.

By doing that the actor got a real handle on who the person was and also some of it I kind of adjusted to fit their personalities a bit. And that just made everything easier. It meant that they could be themselves rather than act too much. They helped choose their costumes. So for me it’s all about letting them own the parts. It’s a cheap and easy way to get other people to work for you! [laughs]

I just let them run with it towards the end.

GUY: One thing I noticed, I saw the movie in May when it was prescreening in the States, and I think between that time and the time it was released there was a lot of concern that the dialogue was too heavily accented or the slang was too difficult to understand by American audiences. But it seemed like right away, after the screenings, you’d see the hashtags popping up on Twitter and everyone just kind of embraced it.

Were you more surprised by the fans’ reaction or the critics’ reaction expressing concern that the dialogue would be a challenge?

JC: Well I think only one person mentioned that and it got picked up by a lot of sites. I wasn’t concerned at all. As long as people are talking about the film I don’t mind. I was always aware when we developed it that that might be an obstacle for some people but I thought for an equal number of people it’d be an attraction. And sometimes that’s a reasonable tradeoff to make – to make something interesting rather than bland. Something that’s challenging rather than too sugary, I think, is cool.

You know, we simplified it and to be honest I don’t think anybody’s had a problem with it. The opposite, I think people dig it.

GUY: I think it’s one of those things too where you hear that, but then you go and see the movie and realize this was about nothing really.

JC: Yeah. Plus, we worked hard to make it… we deliberately used a small lexicon of terms. So you hear the same six or seven terms over and over again. The story is relatively linear and straightforward. The situations aren’t particularly complicated. So I just trusted that people would learn as they went along.

GUY: There’s definitely some interesting subtext in the film.

JC: Uh-huh.

GUY: What’s it say at the end that everybody is chanting “Moses?” (the name of the film’s lead character, played by John Boyega)

“And sometimes that’s a reasonable tradeoff to make – to make something interesting rather than bland. Something that’s challenging rather than too sugary, I think, is cool.”

JC: Well, what does it say at the end? I’m almost loathe to speak directly about that, because I kind of want the film to speak for itself. But for me, when Moses smiles at the end, it’s the first time that he’s… probably for the first time in awhile that he’s smiled in a relaxed, open way – the first time he’s done something positively altruistic for himself and his community.

GUY: He’s a leader throughout the film but he feels like a different kind of leader by the film’s end.

JC: Yeah, he’s done something altruistic. And he’s done something selfless for the first time. It’s important to me that he doesn’t get away with what he did in the beginning of the film, but at the same time there’s a positivity and an optimism and a hope that he’s learned and he’s changed and he’ll grow.

The ending of E.T. always fascinated me because it is very emotional and it’s actually very downbeat. It’s about separation. This kid is losing this friend but there’s something extremely uplifting about it even though it’s actually expressing loss. And Spielberg talked about it really interestingly at the time about “You don’t know what’s going to happen to Elliot, but you know he’s going to be a good kid.” I remember that quote.

And you do, you just realized that he’s learned something important. You can’t necessarily put your finger on it or you don’t want to be didactic about it. But you realize he has grown and changed in a good way, and I hope the same feeling comes across from Attack the Block. Even though Moses will have to take the consequences of what he did at the beginning of the film, he’s a better person at the end.

“Spielberg talked about it really interestingly at the time about ‘You don’t know what’s going to happen to Elliot, but you know he’s going to be a good kid.’ I remember that quote.”

GUY: It’s a great ending. Joe, thank you so much.

JC: Thank you so much!

A big thanks to Mr. Cornish and his people for allowing the time to sit down with me one-on-one in New York. Attack the Block arrives on DVD and Blu-ray today. I had the opportunity to review it over at CHUD and, as you may have guessed, I highly recommend it.