It was late on in the day when a large crowd scurried away into Kapow!’s auditorium to escape the sun, only to find themselves sweltering in a full house for the panel of Joe Cornish’s Attack the Block. Set around an alien invasion from the perspective of a gang of youths and other denizens of their council estate, Attack the Block was one of the more eagerly awaited panels of the day, and this showed in the high spirits of both the crowd and the panel. Joining the attendees were director Cornish himself, and stars of the film John Boyega and Luke Treadaway, who play gang-leader Moses and out-of-his-depth drug dealer Brewis respectively.
The panel opened with Cornish being asked what had taken him so long to make a movie, a reference to the fact that he first appreared on British TV screens in the nineties. That programme, The Adam & Joe Show, was a pop-culture-riffing highlight of cult television of its time, and the love of films from both Cornish and co-host Adam Buxton was evident from the start of it, so what had prevented him making the leap to the big screen for so long? ‘I’m really lazy, there was a lot of good telly on‘ replied Cornish, in a typically self-effacing answer – whilst Cornish is undoubtedly modest about his efforts, his answers over the course of the panel revealed someone who is incredibly passionate and principled about film.
Explaining what inspired him to make the film, Cornish said he was looking to combine his love of gang films such as The Warriors and Rumble Fish with his love of creature-features like Critters, Gremlins and Tremors – and the three clips shown over the course of the hour indicated that he’s pulled it off to great success. Cornish also remarked that he found it strange that no one had ever set a film like this in the tower blocks of South London, which he referred to as ‘futuristic tropes‘ that were ‘built in the spirit of optimism after World War II‘ and therefore ripe for sci-fi use. Cornish revealed that his original pitch for the film was ‘La haine meets Aliens‘ – after the laughter had subsided he added that it was a bit less hard and more colorful than those films.
When discussing the slang used by the protagonists of the film, who all speak in the vernacular of South London, Cornish remarked that he wasn’t concerned about people not getting to grips with the language used, and cited books such as Butcher Boy, A Clockwork Orange and The Color Purple as examples of stories that use argot to great effect. In these books, Cornish explained, the reader is thrown into a world with no explanation for the terms that its characters use but come to understand what they mean through context and osmosis. He also countered that words like Bespin, Hoth and dilithium crystals were made-up words, but that everyone in the crowd knew what they meant – so he had no worries with how the characters of Attack the Block’s would be understood. John Boyega added that he was initially taken aback by the authenticity of the dialogue in the script, joking that he thought to himself ‘who wrote this, (British director) Noel Clarke?’ To this end he was surprised that it was the forty-something, middle-class and white Cornish who had penned the script, as the dialogue was so spot-on.
Cornish related a story about how E.T. producer Kathleen Kennedy had once said that Spielberg’s 1982 classic was ‘a film about divorce‘ as much as anything else. ‘A good science fiction film is always about something else‘ Cornish explained, telling the crowd that his film was also an allegory in that the youth of South London are ‘kids, demonized by the press as feral, beastial and amoral – we’ve taken those adjectives and turned them into a monster and set it on the kids‘ in effect allowing the so-called ‘hoodies’ of the area to fight the stereotypes they’ve been labelled as being. He also added that whilst the film does open with the protagonists carrying out a mugging, ‘the next eighty minutes are spent exploring why they do these things‘.
Effortlessly quotable, Cornish went in-depth discussing the music of the film, explaining how he ensured there was no non-diagetic music used througout, and that for the score for the film he aimed for something akin to ‘John Carpenter and John Williams going round to Roots Manuva’s house‘.
The subject of Cornish’s work on Marvel’s Ant-Man movie with Edgar Wright was brought up, where it was revealed that a new draft for the script had only just been turned in two days prior. Whilst he has a lot of respect for Robert Kirkman’s take on the character, the script is not based on Irredeemable Ant-Man.
As a final question, the idea of a sequel to Attack the Block was approached, with Cornish revealing that he had an idea courtesy of Edgar Wright, but that it would be sensible to avoid making it the next thing he does. When asked what would be the next thing he would be doing, Cornish smiled and said ‘a holiday. Starring me.’ With that, the panel was brought to a close.
The film looks like being an original wildly entertaining affair, with the clips shown through the panel revealing very little of the creatures attacking the gang and leaving the crowd very eager indeed to catch the film, which they can and will do when it opens in the UK May 11th, and in the US later in the year.
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Tags: attack the block, colin bell, joe cornish, kapow comic con, movies
About the Author
Written by Colin Bell
Raised in Scotland on a diet of Tintin and 2000 AD, Colin Jefferson Bell enters his 28th year on Planet Earth as one of the world's foremost experts in comic books that take place in his home country, and maintains his corner of the internet at It's Bloggerin' Time!. Colin Bell appears courtesy of his wife.
This is awesome!
I had not heard of this film. Thank you for putting it on my radar.
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