With the likes of “Skyline,” “Battle: Los Angeles” and “Cowboys and Aliens” all on the way in the next twelve months, alien invasions seem to be reaching the kind of ubiquity previously reserved for zombie flicks and Tyler Perry movies. But the one that we’re looking forward to more than any of the others is probably the smallest dog in the fight: “Attack the Block,” the directorial debut of Joe Cornish.
Cornish is a British comedian and radio DJ, who’s a long-time friend and collaborator of Edgar Wright, sharing credit with the “Scott Pilgrim” helmer on their scripts for “Ant-Man” and “The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn.” His debut as director, “Attack the Block,” from Wright’s usual producer Nira Park’s company Big Talk, went before cameras earlier in the year, and, in the new print issue of Empire, Cornish spilled the beans on the production, which focuses on a South London council estate coming under attack from aliens.
Cornish reveals that the film was partly inspired by a carjacking he suffered in 2001, and partly by both M. Night Shyamalan’s “Signs” and John Sayles’ unmade script “Dark Skies,” which Spielberg was going to direct before “E.T..” Cornish relates “I thought, ‘What would happen if that [an alien invasion] happened in Stockwell or Brixton?’ It occurred to me that if it did, the kids who pulled me out of my car would probably be the first people I’d turn towards to protect me.”
The film mixes newcomers, most notably John Boyega and Alex Esmail, as leads Moses and Pest, with more established names like Jodie Whittaker (“Venus”), Nick Frost (“Hot Fuzz”) and Luke Treadaway (“Clash of the Titans”), and the creatures they battle will be achieved with a minimum of CGI: “They’re certainly not ‘District 9’-y, CGI creatures. It was very important to me that they were in the room with the kids, so they have something real to react to. So we used a combination of in-camera stuff. We also hired this brilliant creature-design guy called Terry Notary. He was the movement expert for Simon Pegg and Nick Frost on ‘Tintin,’ he did the ‘Hulk’ stuff, he did all the viperwolves in ‘Avatar.'”
Many, including us, have been expecting something close to “Shaun Of The Dead”-with-aliens from the picture, and, while that’s not a bad starting point, Cornish is aiming for something a little more serious: “It’s not ironic, it’s not tongue-in-cheek. Things that happen are pretty far-fetched, but the idea is that it’s grounded… We’ve aimed for 50 per cent kitchen-sink realism, 50 per cent escapist, ’80s-style adventure movie.” We managed to get our grubby hands on a draft of the script recently, and that’s about bang on.
In a ‘Director’s Statement’ at the front of the script, Cornish uses “Assault on Precinct 13,” “La Haine” and “Aliens” as reference points, as well as early John Carpenter, “The Terminator” and “The Warriors,” and all are certainly recognizably in there, without the film ever becoming a slave to its influences. It’s a terrific read; lean, funny and exciting, with some killer set-pieces, and enough of a political undercurrent to give it real substance. The film hits the U.K. next spring, and we’re counting the days.
John Sayles' script was called Night Skies.