A childhood love of horror films and a real life violent encounter led comedian Joe Cornish to write a movie about marauding hairy aliens and tough teens. He tells TARA BRADYabout getting down with the kids and how his film is a darker, scarier 'ET'
AS THE new comedy-horror Attack the Block opens, a tired young nurse (Jodie Whittaker) is walking home through a South London council estate. It’s bonfire night and the accompanying commotion of fireworks allows a group of teenage muggers to swiftly descend on the terrified woman.
But unbeknownst to the gang and their victim, the noisy night skies harbour a grander menace: a band of hirsute invading aliens.
The details – particularly the part about hairy marauders – have changed. But the episode is drawn from reality.
Seven years ago, comedian and filmmaker Joe Cornish was mugged on the Brixton streets where he’s lived his entire life. Even today, stretched lanky and long in a suite at London’s Soho Hotel, the generally jolly, articulate fellow is visibly jolted by the recollection.
“For decades, nothing bad had ever happened to me,” he says. “It was absolutely the exception not the rule. It was an anomaly. That’s why it interested me. I certainly didn’t think: ‘Oh typical bloody inner city London’, I thought: ‘How weird. Here’s this stereotype in front of me.’
“I didn’t even think it was real until I confronted it. The kid that did it was so young. And he was just as scared as me. It seemed like we were partaking in fiction or acting out something we had both seen on telly. I wanted to find out who he was and why he thought this was okay.”
Inspired by this encounter, Cornish’s subsequent explorations of the “hoodieverse” add interesting textures to a movie that is otherwise “a big silly, fun fantasy adventure film”. Composed mostly from hip grime-speak, and with its high-speed chases and bludgeoning interludes with extra-terrestrials, Attack the Block doubles as a neat primer in the rhythms of the street.
"I used the same slang words repeatedly, so even if you have no idea what these kids are saying, my movie will teach you the language. I spent months and months going around youth clubs talking kids through the script. I would record everything as if I were learning French or Italian. For me, there's a science-fiction element to that dialect. It's like Nadsat in A Clockwork Orange.I ended up with huge binders of verbatim transcripts until I got myself to a place where I felt I could write at least a slightly stylised, heightened version of how they spoke."
Attack the Block, which sees its adolescent assailants join forces with upstanding residents and local stoners (Nick Frost and Luke Treadaway) to fight off the encroaching aliens, has proved too much for some. Cornish admits he's been particularly perturbed by one British broadsheet. The newspaper's comments about Attack the Block'syoung hooded antihero Moses (played by charismatic newcomer John Boyega) have, he says, been less than generous.
“That critic wrote: ‘I would not forgive that boy from mugging that woman even if he did save the world from an alien invasion.’
“I don’t really know where to start. The film isn’t trying to absolve that kid of responsibility. It’s all about the consequences of his actions. It’s a completely reprehensible thing to do. But at the same time it’s a child making a mistake. It’s generally important to be compassionate, especially when you’re dealing with children.”
HAILED AS "THIS YEAR'S District 9" at the influential SWSX film festival in Austin, Texas, Attack the Block offers the same back-to-basics speculative fiction we've lately witnessed in Duncan Jones's Source Code and Garth Edwards's Monsters. Never mind about CGI, these films are all about "what ifs" and old-school arts and crafts.
Cornish sees the trend as a generational thing. In common with Quentin Tarantino and fellow-Britons Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, Cornish grew up during the golden age of the video store. More precisely, he enjoyed the halcyon days before talk of “video nasties”, and subsequent parental censorship.
"There's a whole generation of filmmakers around my age who love cinema because they were able to watch uncensored films before the adult world had legislated for it," says Cornish. "I remember birthday parties where the main event was frame advancing Damien: Omen 2or the fury scene in Carrie. I remember going to a sleepover and our parents saying 'Oh, just get a couple of videos'. So we watched Fame, Zombie Flesh Eatersand The Exorcist."
These brushes with gore don’t appear to have left any lasting psychological scars.
“Oh no,” cries Cornish. “I think secretly most people’s love of cinema comes from seeing something you weren’t allowed to see. It’s that feeling that you’re getting a glimpse into an adult world, into truths that are being withheld from you.
“People think you can’t deal with it. That’s like a red rag to a bull when you’re young isn’t it? And children are all about play. I think any child that grows up in the most basically reasonable environment understands the difference between reality and fantasy.”
Did anything freak him out?
"Abstraction. Surrealism. Atonal music. If my parents were listening to Radio 4 in the car and Lutoslawski came on I'd be wetting myself. Tommyfreaked the f**k out of me. I watched it alone at a relative's house in Devon on a little black-and-white television. I'm scared stiff thinking about it now."
Cornish, by his own admission, has taken his time about channelling these formative influences into a movie proper.
At 42, he's already watched several comedian chums, including Garth Jennings ( Son of Rambow, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy)and Edgar Wright ( Shaun of the Dead, Scott Pilgrim vs The World), helm major motion pictures.
“I wanted to wait for the right kind of idea,” says Cornish. “I didn’t want to rush into it. The history of the British film industry – and the Irish film industry, I’m sure – is that there are a great many first-time filmmakers, not so many second-time filmmakers and there are very few career filmmakers.”
Movies and pop culture have, nonetheless, always been part of the director’s DNA. Born and raised “on a nice street” in Brixton, south London, young Joe’s parents worked hard to send him to upmarket Westminster School where he soon fell in with Adam Buxton and Louis Theroux.
"Adam and I were in the same class," he recalls. "We were both fans of Not the Nine O'Clock News. They had a sketch where two spies met in a forest. So we started quoting 'The Eagle had Landed' and stuff at each other and that was that."
Shortly after graduating from film school, Cornish and Buxton began shooting the cult Channel 4 series The Adam and Joe Show, a delirious lo-fi sketch show that saw the comedy duo recreating blockbusters with cuddly toys. Fifteen years on and they can still be found doing similarly hilarious things on BBC 6 Music.
“The listeners pilot the show really,” says Cornish. “I think that like us, they’re from a generation that used to have a relationship with the BBC that was more interactive and creative than it is now.
"We all used to send in models to Blue Peterand drawings to Take Hart. You felt you could write to them and they'd write back and you'd see your stuff on there. So we always think the show is a bit like that. It's a place where creative people can interact and have fun."
While he's still gobsmacked by the cult appeal of the pair's "silly chatter", he's equally made up about his recent involvement in Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn.
“I’m one of three writers with Edgar [Wright] and Steven Moffat so my part is pretty fractional in a production this size,” he says.
"It was very exciting to meet three of my absolute heroes – Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson and Kathleen Kennedy. I'm the same age as [ET actor] Henry Thomas was when they made ETso that film was so important to me. Attack the Blockis a darker, scarier film but it's basically me thinking about ETagain."
Attack the Block opens on Friday
