This past Friday, ATTACK THE BLOCK finally hit U.S. shores. As the summer movie of 2011, enough good can’t be said. So of course, we’re going to say some more as Fango chats with writer/director Joe Cornish about the film, its cast, its creatures and the monster way it's hit America.

FANGORIA: The aliens in the film are remarkably simple, but still so effective. Where did the design come from?

JOE CORNISH: Actually, I have a black cat. I’ve always grown up with a black cat and I used to love, and still love looking at its silhouette. When you look at a black cat, it’s like an illustration and it kind of moves like a shadow puppet. That was where the idea really came from. So we tested it out about six months before we started shooting to check that it worked, and we found a way to do it, and we got Spectral Motion involved, who make all Guillermo del Toro’s creatures, and we got a terrific special FX house and we figured out a way to use a small amount of CG to enhance something that was practical. The final thing about it is to actually have something there on set. I had a lot of young actors who were new to it and I didn’t want them reacting to tennis balls on sticks. When they attacked, I wanted something attacking them. If something smashed through a door or a window, I wanted it there and for their reaction to be real, so that’s what we ended up with; this brilliant creature performer called Terry Notary, who I met when I was working on TINTIN, and when I met him I thought, “This is fate, this is the one guy in the world who can do the best quadropad movement, the best animal movement, this is the guy that did the Banshee in AVATAR, Silver Surfer, Lou Letterier’s HULK, and for some fateful reason, here I am talking to the guy.” So he was one of the first people we signed up. So it was really an attempt to get the feel and energy and practical excitement of the movies that I used to love in the 80s.

FANG: ATTACK THE BLOCK kind really does capture the feeling of so many of its influences, and it seems to do so by not attempting to play on nostalgia. There are no blatant callbacks, it’s a contemporary story, etc.

CORNISH: I realize when I talk about the influences in ATTACK THE BLOCK, I list loads of things and loads of directors and loads of films and that’s because I didn’t want to be referencing any specific director, it was more the feeling that you used to get from those movies really. One thing about those movies that was very significant was that they were usually about young people or teenagers or sometimes-even children in jeopardy and kids in those films, in my memory at least, the actors were the correct age. These days, you tend to get actors in their early 20’s pretending to be sixteen with a close shave and some heavy makeup. Back then, it just felt like things were a little bit edgier, a little bit less conservative. THE GOONIES has swearing in it, and STAND BY ME has kids smoking and that was really exciting as a kid to see that stuff. People are more nervous about that now, but I think if it’s responsibly done, and done with care and passion, people understand that it’s not real and it can be a little more exciting and relevant perhaps.

FANG: How much were the kids involved with shaping their characters and bringing the air of authenticity to the film?

CORNISH: A lot. Obviously, I figured out what the characters were when I was writing, but casting was really exciting and all those kids are actors, they’re all performing. I completely used those kids as a resource. They had the ability to tweak every line of dialogue if they wanted to. I wrote the last couple of drafts of the script while we were rehearsing. I kind of shaped the characters around them as much as I could, but as a first time filmmaker, that was really exciting thing to hire actors and as a writer, you see the whole wood, but they take responsibility for each tree kind of thing. They can tell you about things they don’t understand or things that might not make total sense from within the point-of-view of the character. So yea, the answer is totally, they were collaborators.

FANG: How did you get Basement Jaxx involved on the soundtrack?

CORNISH: They were a suggestion of our music supervisor, a guy called Nick Angel who’s  really clever. We were talking about who we could use. I wanted to have a proper score in the film. I didn’t want to use rap and grime. I wanted to have a score that was shaped to the action like a good old school John Williams score and have that Carpenter feel as well; that kind of lo-fi electronica feel.  There’s something about Basement Jaxx, they’re really good at world music and there’s a kind of joy to what they do as well. Everything they do has a kind of balance and joy. The other perfect thing is they started in Brixton in South London. In fact, the first club that Basement Jaxx ran is on the corner of the road where we shot the mugging. So it just felt right. The pitch for it was—and this is before we had Basement Jaxx—imagine John Williams and John Carpenter locked in a room, getting really high and coming up with a score that was a hybrid of old school adventure music, orchestral music and electronica kind of thing, and they just really knocked it out of the park I think, Basement Jaxx. I’m really, really excited about what they did. They worked with a guy called Steve Price who was a music supervisor on LORD OF THE RINGS and a very brilliant guy who was waiting for his opportunity to compose a full score. They worked together and they just did a really good job.

FANG: So many moments in the film really go over. What’s your favorite?

CORNISH: I really like the scene where Moses gets arrested and gets put in the police van because I like that it’s got lots of different points of view. The gang is up on an elevated walkway, Sam is in the back of the police van, Moses is being arrested around the van and the creatures are closing in. So you’ve got five different things taking over and it’s one of those sequences where nothing’s happening but you’re waiting for something to happen and I love that kind of thing in movie. I love that sense of suspense and I love cross-cutting and thought it was fun to have a go at that kind of thing. Whether that’s ended up as the most effective sequence, I have no idea, but I really enjoyed shooting that and planning it and cutting it. It was fun to choose what point of view you show at any particular time and to think of all the different things that are happening concurrently and figure out what would be the most exciting one of those elements to cut to. That was maybe the one I enjoyed the most. But I enjoyed the whole thing. It was real wish fulfillment. I’ve been waiting to make a film for years and so I loved every minute of it.

FANG: Were you surprised by the constant momentum of the movie since premiering at SXSW?

CORNISH: I was kind of amazed and excited and thrilled and hugely appreciative. I’d never been to SXSW before, but that festival was made for people like me. The only thing I found frustrating about it was I couldn’t see all the other movies. I was doing press and I just wanted to see everything. My friend Ben Wheatley had a great film called KILL LIST. He’s a genius, that guy and I was desperate to see INSIDIOUS. I’d met James Wan, he’s a really, really good guy. There’s just a feeling of brotherhood there and shared interest and passion and enthusiasm. I was scared to show the film there. It was the first time we’d shown it to any public audience, and to show what is, a very British film to an American audience was kind of a leap in the dark, We didn’t know how people would respond. We were doing something quite old school and lo-fi with the aliens and we didn’t know how people would respond to them. I was terrified, but then after that first screening when people seemed to like it, it was really exciting and I just can’t get over the passion and enthusiasm of American bloggers. I think they’re a terrifically positive force. They certainly have been for my film. Just the honesty of the writing and the passion of the writing is terrific. It was a great experience. It was amazing. It was a complete surprise as well. I would’ve been pleased if it had scraped through with decent reaction, but for people to really get it and understand it and be passionate about it was extremely exciting and rewarding.

FANG: Have you considered your next move after making such an arrival?

CORNISH: Yea, I’m starting writing something but I’m very cautious about saying anything about it because it’ll take a long time to get it together, and I’d like it to be a kind of a surprise. I don’t want everybody to be all sick of it by the time it arrives. Edgar [Wright, executive producer] always says he regrets announcing HOT FUZZ after SHAUN OF THE DEAD, before they wrote it because then through the whole writing process, they were aware that people were sort of guessing what it was going to be and expecting it. So that’s one of the many things I’ve learned from Edgar is maybe to stay a little bit tight-lipped on that.

You can read Fango’s review right here and pick up FANGORIA #306 (on sale this month) for more of our talk with Cornish.

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