“I thought it would be exciting and interesting and dramatic to open that way,” he says. “We open with Jodie Whittaker’s character Sam walking into a stand-off with these fairly anonymous kids, but then all of a sudden, a meteor falls from the sky, and you might expect us to stay with her, but she runs off and instead we stay with the kids.”
“That for me was a very exciting moment,” Cornish continues. “I thought that opening the film this way might freak some people out, but I [think] that hopefully, if you’re the kind of viewer with a more adventurous mindset, you would be hooked you in. The rest of the film, as well as portraying the alien invasion, also attempts to explore why those kids arrived at those places at the beginning. It’s not your traditional story structure, though. Most films make you bend over backwards to make you love the protagonists, but with this one, I was determined not to do that.” Whittaker’s character appears again in the film, reluctantly teaming up with the gang to take down the aliens who have invaded their South London apartment block. It’s like Skins with an added dose of extraterrestrial critters, and it’s an extremely enjoyable ride.
The alien invasion movie is practically a genre unto itself at this point, and I ask Cornish if there are any particular examples of movies that inspire him. “Well, I would say that the film is particularly influenced by E.T.,” he says, “although that’s not exactly an invasion movie, unless you could one alien as an invasion. I like Critters a lot and I like Gremlins a lot, so those are the big ones. There’s Close Encounters, but that’s not strictly an invasion movie, either.” It’s interesting that Cornish should mention those three, because they all featured practical effects, a trait shared by Attack The Block. “As a film-goer, I find CGI monsters a bit samey,” Cornish says. “The fact that we couldn’t afford CGI when making this film [is] actually a blessing because it allowed us to create more old-school, practical creatures. The female alien is a performer in a suit, as are the males who come chasing after her, with a little bit of CGI post-production to remove rather than add detail.”
The alien invasion aspect of Attack The Block is fun and gory, but it’s just as interesting for its depiction of South London youngsters, a milieu Cornish researched a great deal before making the film. “Before I wrote the script, I spent months talking to youth groups in South London and asking them what they would do in certain far-out circumstances,” he tells me. “A lot of the references and the dialogue in the film comes out of that research, things people said to me when I shared the story with them. Also, it’s interesting to me that wherever they are in the world, whatever problems are going on around them, kids like to play. Sometimes, those games can get a bit mean. That’s what interested me.”
The various teenage gang members at the centre of the film speak in their own private language, with their own slang and vernacular, and see the world around them – and even the attacking aliens – through the prism of Pokémon and Harry Potter. “I like that aspect of the film,” Cornish says. “Science fiction has its own terminologies and private languages, and I saw that in the slang that young people use, too.” He even created the film’s creatures – fur-bearing aliens with sharp teeth and sinister snarls – as warped reflections of South London youth. “The media use words like ‘feral’, ‘immoral’ and ‘animals’ to describe people like the protagonist Moses and his friends, so I wanted to try and create creatures who were the personification of all those things.”
The cast of Attack The Block is stacked with first-time actors, which adds to the vibrancy and unpredictability of the whole enterprise. For Cornish, working with such an inexperienced cast was a pleasure. “The majority of the cast are between 12 and 17, and with the exception of about two, none had ever been in front of the camera before,” he says. “I’m a first-time director, and as a first-time director, you’re the least experienced person on the set, the crew will always have had more experience, so that really gave me a bond with the young actors. We were able to work through the process together. It felt good. They had so much energy, they were witty and funny and enthusiastic and dedicated, and I’m really proud of what we did.”
In recent months, there has been talk of a US remake of Attack The Block, or even possibly a TV series, but when I mention the idea to Wright, he is quick to pour cold water on it. “That’s something I mentioned at New York Comic Con that people picked up on, but there’s nothing happening yet,” he tells me. “Some people have mentioned the possibility, and I can’t stop my imagination from ticking over whenever I hear about it, but there’s definitely nothing in the works.”
BY ALASDAIR DUNCAN
