Attack The Block: Joe Cornish Interview

The inventive mind of Joe Cornish didn’t need to look too far for inspiration for his directorial debut Attack The Block. Mixing sci-fi, comedy and satire, it follows a group of teenagers who seek to defend their tower block from an alien invasion.

“I originally pitched the film as Aliens meets La Haine,” begins Cornish, adding that Ghostbusters, E.T., Terminator and Assault On Precinct 13 were all influential. The South Londoner’s thinking extended to “what it would be like if something like what happened in those films happened in the areas that I grew up with.” His choice of the location, the deserted Heygate Estate, was inspired by Logan’s Run and A Clockwork Orange: “This architecture that’s portrayed in contemporary films as grim and foreboding used to be this hugely optimistic futuristic design aesthetic.”

The story commences when a group of teenagers led by Moses (John Boyega) chase and kill an unidentified creature. Soon its alien family begins to wreak a terrible revenge. Moses’ gang, together with other residents including nurse Sam (Jodie Whittaker) and posh slacker Brewis (Luke Treadaway), are forced to fight back.

“We’re almost a heroic bunch of randoms,” says Whittaker. “I’m not the token girl in a short skirt crying and needing to be picked up by the guys. We’re normal and we don’t turn into people that suddenly have extraordinary powers.”

The block’s inhabitants represent a microcosm of London society. Treadaway’s character is a Withnailian stoner prone to such great one-liners as, “I’d go out there myself if I wasn’t so profoundly stoned.”

“I remember reading it and seeing a brilliant film in my head, but wondered whether that could be achieved,” he opines. “But it surpassed my expectations, it’s managed to combine all sorts of genres and styles, but it ties together with its own unique tone.”

Hugely important to the film’s tone is its unusual depiction of the alien enemy - as unlike the little green man cliché as could be imagined.

“As a punter, I’m a little bored, aesthetically, of CGI creatures. They all look the same, like there’s a Photoshop CGI plug-in that everyone’s using,” chuckles Cornish. “There’s too much detail. I was the best at drawing the Ghostbusters logo in my class, but to draw a dragon from Harry Potter, you need a fine art degree. I wanted to do something where its strength in its absence of detail rather than the amount of detail.”

“The enemy was first introduced to me in the form of a storyboard and then after that, I saw them in illustrated form by a really good cartoonist,” explains Boyega, whose role represents his feature film debut. “They are truly the blackest black! I swear it was like, ‘Soooo, who did you say was gonna be fighting those things?’”

While the action scenes demanded focus, Boyega enjoyed his downtime. “After some scenes, I would give the aliens a stroke and that’s when you see their cute side. Although inside the costume, it’s an angry stunt guy thinking, ’What is wrong with this kid?!’”

Words by Ben Hopkins