Comedian and broadcaster JOE CORNISH talks about writing and directing his first feature film, ATTACK THE BLOCK, ditching CGI monsters, and the pleasures of shooting at night.
**ATTACK THE BLOCK is in UK cinemas from 13 May
MMM: This film was inspired by an event that happened to you in 2001…
Cornish: Yes, I was mugged. It was quite a pathetic mugging… it was quite young kids, and it made me want to talk to the kids that had done it, because it seemed like a very unreal situation… what he did in the real world is obviously reprehensible and it was quite traumatic and really bad, but I’ve lived in that area all my life and it was the first bad thing that happened to me and it seemed very anomalous. So, I wanted to talk to that kid and find out why he made that choice.
And it also started me thinking about the movies I loved when I was growing up around then, the kind of American creature features and gang movies that I used to love. So I started thinking along both those lines, and that’s how I researched the film really, by talking to lots of kids in South-East London, some of whom had done similar things.
MMM: Given everything that’s brought you to this point, what was it like calling ‘action’ on your first day of shooting?
Cornish: It was fun. It’s a wishful film for me really. I’ve wanted to make a film since I knew what they were, since I was 11 or 12. Whenever it got tiring or difficult, which it did, I would just think that this is an amazing opportunity and a real privilege to get to do it. I’m 42 now… I’ve waited a while to make it so I wanted to do everything I could to make it as good as I could make it.
MMM: Anything surprising about the job?
Cornish: A lot! I’m a film fan and an enthusiast, and I spent a lot of my career mocking films, and I’ll think twice in future because I really had no idea the amount of incredibly hard work so many people put in. I now have huge respect for anybody who completes a feature film, no matter how awful it is. It’s like having a dream, a very particular vivid dream, and then hiring 150 people to realise that thing you have in your head. And then every detail of it, what a cup looks like or a piece of clothing, areas of this dream you didn’t really focus on in your head, you have to focus on.
And it seems like nature’s against filmmaking – the wind will be going in the wrong direction, God doesn’t want it to happen, it’s unnatural! So it’s a struggle and you have to work really hard, but it’s massively rewarding, particularly this film as we had relative newcomers which made it really exciting every day. And we all fed off their passion for the film.
MMM: What influenced the look of the creatures? And how big a factor was it that you didn’t rely heavily on CGI?
Cornish: It was important to me because, as a consumer, I feel the aesthetic of CGI creatures is a little bit homogenised from one film to another. And there’s also an ability with CGI to do great detail, but as someone who enjoys drawing and art I don’t think that truthful detail is necessarily the be-all and end-all. You can be impressionistic. I remember the movies when I grew up. If you saw a special effect in the 80s, it was either a puppet or a painting or some kind of model. And that’s the terrain of kids. So in the 80s, you’d see a movie and, no matter how sophisticated it was, you’d feel you could go home and make it and point a light at it.
It’s hard with this kind of thing to separate your young mind from your adult mind, but it feels as if I was more engaged in the reality then than I am now as an adult consumer watching CGI things. So, I wanted to try and do that again. It was important for me that our creatures were practical, that when they attacked our characters that they were there. And then, obviously we couldn’t afford CGI! But for me, that was a thing that could be a plus rather than a minus. I connected the economy with that stuff I remembered from my childhood and saw an opportunity to make a positive out of a potential negative.
MMM: So did you draw on films you saw as a kid?
Cornish: Absolutely. I feel I grew up at an amazing time for the cinema. All these incredible directors making films for teenagers and adolescents that they don’t necessarily do anymore. Things are very segmented these days – a horror will be very horrible and very sick; a family film will be very broad. I feel in the 80s, you didn’t quite know what you were going to get. It was quite shocking for the guy’s head to explode at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Or the language the kids in the Goonies used. There used to be slightly transgressive stuff that you don’t get anymore.
MMM: What was it like shooting at night, when the film’s set, as opposed to working during the day?
Cornish: I loved it! For me, it felt like after-school fun! You know, you’d get off school at 3.30pm or 4pm, and then you’d do your homework and life would kick in about 5pm. And our shoot kicked in about 5pm. In fact, when we went in the studio, it felt a bit like a 9 to 5. And for those first 5 weeks, it did feel like a secret, little elicit, late-night tomfoolery thing we were up to.
But to shoot the film at night was very important to me because I’ve seen a lot of British council estate movies and I wanted to make mine look different, and I thought about the films I love that have a very potent atmosphere, like Alien, Blade Runner, Streets of Fire, or the Warriors, and they’re all exclusively set at night – no daylight photography whatsoever.
And a thing that I liked about that proposition was that it would force us to think about light in every single shot. So we thought about everywhere we could put lights, whether it was the lights in the little boys’ trainers, the lights in the teeth of the monsters.
It’s Tom’s [Thomas Townend, cinematographer] first big feature film and I think he’s a genius. He gives the film exactly that look I was looking for. And to do stuff with smoke and backlight… for me, digital modern films are so clear; if you look at an 80s film, there’s a terrific texture and richness and atmosphere. And sometimes I think that contemporary films are like looking through a perfectly clear window. I think it’s slightly more artful, and Tom really agreed and connected with that.
MMM: What kind of reaction did you get from residents where you were filming at night?
Cornish: Well, the night we shot the scene where they throw fireworks at the police van, that was next to a big residential street. You find out a lot about residential streets when you shoot in them. And I think they had on-going problems with a group of foreign students who’d rented a house and were having parties every night. So there was already quite a tinderbox atmosphere there.
So when we started chucking fireworks, a proper woman out of the Dandy from 1976 with a rolling pin and a hanky round her head came out, and she just walked in to the middle of the set and started screaming during a shot, ‘Get your tuppence-ha’ppeny film and fuck off out of my street,’ shaking her fist. One of our very nice production people had to talk her down. But if someone like me was filming in my street, I’d be her!
We shot on the Heygate Estate, which is now being demolished, and it was pretty much empty so we had this terrific playground where we could do bike chases and make noise without actually disturbing anybody. But the council did charge us about £100 to take off each bit of hoarding from the windows, so anytime was wanted to put a light behind the windows, kerching for Lambeth council! So I expect to see local education standards rising ‘cause we took off a lot of window covers!
MMM: You did a lot of research to get the dialogue right for the film…
Cornish: Yes, we did lots of research because, obviously, I’m a bit less street than Prince Charles so I had to make sure I was knowledgeable and being as truthful as I could be about that world. And even though I was grew up in Stockwell and Brixton, I was ferried off to posh schools every day.
So, once I put together the basic outline of the story, we went to loads of youth clubs around South London and talked to 100s of kids. And then I’d write a draft and then go back again and focus on particular areas. Even though it’s all a bit heightened for the movie, we did work hard to make it as authentic as we could.
MMM: How deeply did you have to think about the opening scenes in terms of not alienating the audience?
Cornish: The beginning of the film was something we absolutely thought about and talked about a lot. We were completely conscious that we were starting with a stereotype. It was something that excited me about writing it. I think that contemporary films are quite conservative now. There’s a fear of anti-heroes – there were a lot more in films of the 60s, 70s, and 80s.
I watched the Blu-ray of Taxi Driver the other day, and that’s an extraordinarily harsh, grim film, compared to what’s seen to be edgy now. Bonnie and Clyde, Public Enemy with Jimmy Cagney in the 40s, a lot of characters in John Carpenter’s movies like Assault on Precinct 13 and Escape from New York… cinema has a rich history of anti-heroes that are not designed to be taken literally; they’re designed to take you on a narrative journey. And that’s something that really interested me and something I don’t see a lot of. And it surprised me that some audiences find that so brave, really.
I think, actually, if you go through literature and the history of cinema, and got rid of any character that was morally ambiguous, you’d get rid of a lot of very fascinating characters. But, absolutely, we wanted to challenge the audience. When Sam runs away and we stick with the gang, not her, that was the moment in my head that the script grew from really; the feeling that the audience would go, ‘what, these kids, really?’ And then to earn that back, and get to a place where you could, not necessarily sympathise with the character of Moses, but empathise and humanise him was the whole raison d’être of the film.
