Talking with Joe Cornish About Attack the Block
Until recently, Joe Cornish was mostly known as a successful British comic, writer and television personality. More recently he has also become known as a feature film director director, thanks to tremendous reception for his feature film directorial debut– Attack the Block. He recently stopped by the SiriusXM studios to talk with Ron Bennington about Attack the Block. What follows are some of the excerpts from that interview.
Ron Bennington: First of all Joe, congratulations. This is unexpected. Unexpected, I guess, for you and unexpected for us the audience as well. It reminds me of what it used to be like when I was younger and your friends would tell you to go see a movie., rather than get hit with a ton of hype coming in to it.
Joe Cornish: Yeah, I kind of wish there had been a ton of hype. I guess what we’re saying is this movie hasn’t been massively marketed. It’s very much being carried on word of mouth. People who genuinely dig it, and I know what you mean. These days movies have to have a lot of hype and advertising dollar to get into people’s brains, but Attack the Block is a film that is made with sincerity and passion. It’s been received with real enthusiasm by movie fans and that’s a nice thing. You know, it’s not a manufactured buzz, it’s a real buzz.
Ron Bennington: Right. The problem with the manufactured buzz is that we end up seeing so much about it before we walk in. We lose that old movie experience, and the fact that the film opens with these kids acting less than heroic right off the bat, is surprising to today’s audience.
Joe Cornish: Indeed, yeah, well you know, things have become pretty conservative in terms of movies. I’m a child of the 80s, I’m a big fan of 70s and 80s cinema and, I think characters in stories used to be a little more interesting then. There used to be a bit more grit, a bit more ambiguity. You know movies today…you know the most popular screen writing book currently is called Save the Cat. It’s a great book, a very good book. I recommend aspiring writers to read it, but its whole premise is the protagonist has to save a cat in the first five minutes. The protagonist has to do something that makes you think they’re a good person so you care for them. Now that’s a very good screen writing rule, but for me it’s not the only rule, and I think audiences are seeing the same film. They’re seeing the same story over and over again in different clothing, and you know, Attack the Block is very different to the extent that not only does my lead character not save a cat, he kills the cat.
Ron Bennington: Right, he really does kill the cat. And then the other part of that, of course, is if you’re raised to be a hero, if everything is set up for you to be a hero, how heroic is that? Where in the case of Moses, where he decides, “No, this is mine,” it takes him a full movie to get to that point.
Joe Cornish: Right, he changes. He’s a character who develops and changes, absolutely. But you know, that’s not massively unusual. I’m thinking of the lead characters in John Carpenter’s films, Snake Plissken was on death row, I’m thinking of Riddick, Vin Diesel’s character in Pitch Black who’s a murderer, I’m thinking of Assault on Precinct 13 where the cop gives the murderer a shotgun and lets him out of the cell and they fight side-by-side. You know, going all the way back to Jimmy Cagney in Public Enemy, to Fritz Lang’s M that’s about a child killer, to Scarface, to The Godfather. There used to be a rich heritage of movies in which bad people have to face up to the consequences of their actions, or there’s just a little more texture to the characterization.
Ron Bennington: See, I think what happened is somehow we stopped trusting the audience, because some people are going to say, “I’m not happy with this because this kid should have been punished. There’s no place that he’s shown his punishment,” and I don’t think that we could have– particularly in Hollywood films– that there can be a place for the audience to work it out for themselves, and you’ve gone just the opposite of that.
Joe Cornish: Yeah, I think Attack the Block is a pretty moral film. I think Moses is actually punished. If you watch the film the thing that he does at the beginning invokes everything that happens and he loses some friends. He has a pretty hard time of it.
Ron Bennington: And you’ve done something different with the aliens. Again, I think the aliens tend to look like, in most movies, they are some variation of Close Encounters. We’ve got this one picture of an alien, one picture of the spaceship, one picture of “This is the way it’s supposed to look,” and you’ve said, “No, here’s another place that we’re going.”
Joe Cornish: Absolutely. I completely agree with you. I love the aliens in Spielberg’s films and I think the Close Encounters aliens are terrific, but recently it’s like the same alien gets all the work. I don’t know where he drinks or who his agent is, but he’s getting all the jobs. And there’s another thing about the digital work in those movies where, because digital enables you to be hyper-realistic, everyone is hyper-realistic. For me it’s lost the sense of authorship and style that there used to be in old-time movies. You know, I used to love to draw the Ghostbusters Stay-Puff Marshmallow man and I loved to draw E.T. You try drawing a dragon out of Harry Potter or the monster in Cloverfield; you need a fine art degree. I love the simplicity and the graphicness of those old-school monsters, so we’ve gone for something similar. We’ve used a practical costume, a creature performer, and then we’ve used CGI to actually remove detail rather than add it. So, we used something more similar to a 2D animation technique.
Ron Bennington: And almost…what you’ve done with the teeth takes so much of your focus there right away, that the rest of it just feels…monster-y to you, it’s not detailed.
Joe Cornish: Yeah, well it’s that old thing that what you don’t see than what you do see. So you see the teeth of our monster and you see the outline of our monster, but you don’t’ see anything in between and your brain has to figure it out.
Ron Bennington: And again, not to bring up Spielberg again, but look at Jaws, what he did with, most of the time, just a fin, or some moving water, and that’s always scarier. It’s always scarier to go, “I don’t quite know what grabbed that person, but it’s out there.”
Joe Cornish: Yeah absolutely. You know, that’s a famous thing isn’t it? It’s like people getting freaked out at the ear being cut off in Reservoir Dogs or the murder scene in Psycho. People always remember much more graphic shit than they actually saw, and that’s good film making for me. Whereas movies that just show people being tortured or beaten over the head with a hammer or something—for me that’s less creative.
Ron Bennington: Well, you brought up Reservoir Dogs and I think sometimes it’s the limits of what you can do that makes creativity happen. The fact that you can’t throw millions of dollars at a problem, or hand it over to some art house and say, “Here, come back to me,” that you’re forced to, and somehow it’s more organic – it’s more human.
Joe Cornish: Yeah, necessity is the mother of invention. Absolutely. I was really inspired by the first Terminator, by Spielberg’s Duel…
Ron Bennington: I love the first Terminator.
Joe Cornish: It’s a fucking brilliant film and some of the stuff in that movie is shot in the guy’s garage. Like, the final shot where the Terminator’s eye goes out …that’s shot with a couple of pieces of foam with just the camera man and the director in the garage and it’s as good if not better than a multi-million dollar movie.
Ron Bennington: Yeah and he took so much and put it into that one film that after that, they started to give him gigantic amounts of money, but he proved, very early on, that he could make that happen. Something else that you do in your film that I found fascinating was, at no point do we know what outside “The Block” thinks about what’s happening there. Maybe at the end when the police have…you know, whatever, but at no point where we’re like, “Alright, now it’s being explained to us.”
Joe Cornish: Yeah, well that’s an Assault on Precinct 13 thing. The brilliant thing about Assault on Precinct 13 is the way no other police can help them. The way the gang stays in the shadows the whole time – the gang that are assaulting the precinct. And also, I thought it was a cool thing in my film because I’m trying to say something about that world, and about how the outside authorities don’t really care that much…
Ron Bennington: As long as it stays inside.
Joe Cornish: Yeah, as long as it stays in that area the rest of the world don’t really care. I mean, if you haven’t seen the film that might not make sense, but when you see it…you know because we’re dealing with lower-income kids. We’re dealing with a kind of housing project, so the police don’t really bother to go there. The military don’t really care. But it’s a localized invasion and it happens on Guy Fawkes Night which is this annual fireworks celebration in the UK and so the fireworks conceal the meteors coming down.
Ron Bennington: And the kids carry the movie, you know what I mean? Your casting right there, if you screw that up at all, you’re done. You’re really done. But Moses ends up being this Denzel Washington kid. What this kid can do in a close-up, it makes the movie for you.
Joe Cornish: I agree. I was lucky, man. We saw 1,500 young people from around South London and we have 11-16 year olds in the film. All apart from two of which have never been in front of a camera ever before and the lead actor, John Boyega, is one of those kids that have never been in front of a camera before. I saw him in a play; he was on stage for 10 minutes and we just kind of cast him right there and then. He’s terrific. He’s 19 now and Spike Lee saw Attack the Block and Spike Lee has cast John Boyega in the lead for his new HBO series based on the life on Mike Tyson, so this is like a 17-year-old kid that’s gone from nothing in South London immediately to playing a lead in a Spike Lee film which I’m really proud of him for and he deserves it. He’s so good.
Ron Bennington: That’s amazing. But, I can see it, and it’s because there’s so much internal stuff which, again, when do we see that in a sci-fi film anymore?
Joe Cornish: Well again, that was a Carpenter thing. Snake Plissken’s character, very taciturn; I really like those old-school heroes that don’t say much. That’s cinematic. Cinema’s not about talking, it’s about faces and looks and action and sequences, for me anyway. And I thought that would be a cool challenge to have a hero who doesn’t say much. But then he has this crazy sidekick, this little kid called Pest, who does all the talking. This kind of stoner kid, so hopefully there’s some fun dialogue in the film too.
Ron Bennington: There is another time when we find out that the aliens have focused on him which I thought was just brilliant. Small little part of the movie, we didn’t know why that other character was in the movie – I was waiting for him to get wasted before then – but it’s those little brilliant moments that, for me, I think it keeps the movie building. What I loved about this is that your time invested kept being rewarded as an audience member, you know.
Joe Cornish: Cool. Well I tried to keep it simple. I say again,
I just like movies where shit happens. I just like it to go, go, go. One of my favorite films ever is Evil Dead II. I love Terminator, I love Terminator 2. Terminator starts with a flash of lightning and the Terminator arriving. Bang! Go! Evil Dead starts with them arriving at that house, opening the book, reading the incantation. Raiders of the Lost Ark, one of my favorite movies, just starts. I don’t know, I think it’s all these screen writing books that give people this template and it’s meant that we’re getting the same movie over, and over, and over, and over again.
Ron Bennington: It’s almost the way of how not to be clever. How to get away from the sweat and aggravation that cleverness…
Joe Cornish: Well, the feeling is that, “I’ve got to do it right,” and the feeling of “rightness” being how everybody else does it. I guess this is something you can only really do with a low-budget, and I’m lucky because it’s a British film so I was able to make it very independently and the production company gave me lots of freedom and confidence. I’m sure it’s much harder to do within the studio system, but it’s something that independent films can do, and that’s why I like independent genre films because they can play with the same toys that the studios are doing, but do it in a more fucked-up, interesting way.
Ron Bennington: And like you said, it is a British film, so to the American ear, you have to spend a couple of minutes, but you do catch on to it, and this can happen across the board no matter what kind of film that you’re watching. You could be watching a Czech film, if you give it a couple of minutes, it becomes about human beings on some kind of a journey. It’s just great not to see a film shot in L.A. sometimes.
Joe Cornish: I agree with you, that’s what I love about European film. I love movies where I don’t recognize the cast because I believe they are who they are, and yeah, absolutely, there’s something brilliant about foreign films.
Ron Bennington: And yet, I guess every country has an inner-city. Every country has these Lost Boys. These kids have created their own set of rules and their own tribes, but they’re not that different from even ancient tribes.
Joe Cornish: Yeah, it’s a big thing, I think. Part of what the film is about is about the strength and energy of teenagers in particular. Particularly teenaged boys, and how strong you are at that age, how much energy you have, how you are in conflict with the world, but kind of humorous conflict. And what the movie is trying to say is…pay attention to these kids, pay attention to the power they have, because if you don’t, and it goes wrong, you’re dealing with quite a strong negative force.
And if you do pay attention to them and you care for them, then you’re potentially dealing with an equally strong positive force, but you have to pay attention because there’s nothing stronger than big groups of young men.
Ron Bennington: Absolutely, that was the entire Khmer Rouge…
Joe Cornish: You know, look at the Arab Spring. You know, if the world’s economy continues doing what it’s doing, then that’s the issue.
Ron Bennington: Yeah, that is the issue. And if they don’t feel like they have a stake in the game…
Joe Cornish: …yeah, it’s dangerous…
Ron Bennington: …it’s like, “What can we get immediately”? And that’s exactly where the kids are at the beginning of the film.
Joe Cornish: Well he’s trying to survive. The kid does a very bad thing. He robs a woman and I got that idea because I was robbed myself by similar kids, and in no way am I saying that’s the right thing to do, but I think it’s a very interesting dramatic premise to start the film on, and Moses is doing that because he needs to eat…he doesn’t have any money and he needs to eat.
Ron Bennington: So where do you take this? Now that you’ve had this success, is the next film really pressure for you? Is that on the line?
Joe Cornish: No, I’m going to relax about it, really. I’ll probably fuck it up and it’ll be really disappointing. In fact, that’s what I’m going to call it, that might be the title of the film.
Ron Bennington: Are you going to stay with science fiction or is there other genres?
Joe Cornish: Well, I love fantasy, I’d be slightly broader than that, I really love fantasy and I always have since I was a kid. I particularly love the combination of the real-world and fantasy. You know, all those movies I love when I grew up like E.T. or Gremlins or Predator that started as a war movie and 
ended up as…or Ghostbusters even, that kind of this entrepreneurial company that ends up…I love that mixture of the real-world and pure, 100% bullshit.
Ron Bennington: Well, we will definitely be looking forward to your fuck up. I’ll be there for it and I’ll be like, “Oh, the last one was so much better. Jesus.”
Joe Cornish: Cool, I look forward to that interview. There will be a lot more extreme language in that interview I can tell you.
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