He used to re-make films using cuddly toys in a Brixton bedsit on the Adam and Joe Show. Now Joe Cornish has made his own movie, a darkly funny, provocative horror. Next up, he's working with Steven Spielberg ? which holds terrors of its own?
Seven years ago, the comedian Joe Cornish was walking home through the south London streets he's lived in since he was a child, when, for the first time in his life, he was mugged. Cornish is a long man. A man whose 42-year-old arms swing contentedly in their sweatshirt sleeves like cats in a duvet cover; whose voice, lullabyish and sardonic-sounding, slips easily into a giggle. "This mugging violated certain boundaries," he explains, his hands holding his face in the way people do when they're trying to hold down a blush ? he's not used to talking about himself. "It made me think two things. First, it made me want to find the main kid and talk to him ? it didn't feel like an authentic situation. It was a pantomime, a ritual. And I knew he lived locally ? I'd seen him in the park, I was probably on the same level of Call of Duty as him, probably liked the same music. And I could see how young and scared he was." Cornish flickers his fingers towards his eyes to demonstrate fear. "And the second thing was, what would have happened if we had been interrupted by something fantastical?" And so began Attack the Block.
Joe Cornish is, in his words, the "taller, slightly-less-funny" member of Adam and Joe, the chuckling friends who met aged 13 at Westminster School and cleverly carved out a career in comedy together, first in TV (The Adam and Joe Show on Channel 4 from 1996 to 2001) then radio (in 2003 they took over from Ricky Gervais on XFM, and recently came back on air after a break from their Sony award-winning slot on BBC 6 Music).
The Adam and Joe Show, filmed in a mocked-up bedsit above the Body Shop in Brixton, relied on the pair's obsession with film to create deconstructed blockbusters, wiping the gloss from contemporary culture with a spat-on rag so it became something quite different, something far funnier. Remade using cuddly toys as actors, the psychological thriller Seven became the story of a murderer's obsession with Snow White's dwarfs ("You are the sixth dwarf. You are Dopey"), and 90s chart music was critiqued by Adam's father, "BaaadDad". "I'm not sure which of them has a radio for a head," he said, of Radiohead, "but he ought to try Classic FM and calm down."
Their 6 Music show, which feels like you're eavesdropping on a tipsy conversation between your brother's friends, is popular enough to have spawned albums of their comedy Song Wars and far-reaching catchphrases ? last year, live indie gigs all over Britain were shot through with audiences shouting "Stephen!", the origin of which was an Adam and Joe listener's letter. The brilliance of both shows lies in the audience's suspicion that the pair would still be making their videos and having their chats even if nobody else was listening.
Attack the Block, described by bloggers as a "hoodie horror'" is Cornish's directorial debut and, as he presents the first screening to a room of film geeks, he stutters with nerves. This despite his script having appeared on the Brit List, a chart of the best unproduced films in the UK (previously topped by The Men Who Stare At Goats and Nowhere Boy), and Cornish being called to Hollywood to work on the script of Steven Spielberg's first comic book adaptation The Adventures of Tintin, produced by Peter Jackson.
"Meeting those guys was like meeting my maker," he says, "Spielberg and Jackson's films are hugely important to me. But I didn't giggle. I got on with the work. I put it out of my mind who they were in order to function, but every now and then Spielberg would say, 'When I was making Jaws?', and suddenly my mind would freeze as I was reminded."
He describes Attack the Block as "a fucked-up version of ET", one of the films he mentions as having had an impact on his life, a life hung on movie hooks. "When I was 10 I rented Zombie Flesh Eaters, The Exorcist and Fame. The guy pretending to take a shit at the beginning of Fame freaked me out just as much as The Exorcist. And I used to buy Fangoria, the horror magazine, which made my mum wonder if I was going to be a serial killer."
While his film has moments of hilarity, and evokes the loneliness of ET ? the fantasy, the bizarre things happening in residential streets ? this is definitely a horror film. A political horror film, far less silly than fans may expect. There are monsters, aliens of the sort we haven't seen in the cinema for a long time.
"They're all the things that the press and people call those kids, made into a monster. People call these kids monsters, they call them feral, they call them animalistic, they say they've got no morals or values and all they care about is territory and competitiveness. So what if there was a creature that really was like that, and then you pitted the kids against it?"
Watching footage of the tsunami in Japan days after seeing the film, black shapes moving across the horizon, I was reminded of Cornish's monsters. "I wanted to come up with a creature you could draw," explains Cornish quickly, recalling his prowess as the best in his class at drawing Boba Fett. "Because I don't think you can do that with contemporary monster movies. CGI has become so powerful and it seems to come with an aesthetic of hyper-detail, too, an obsession with texture, fidelity to 'truthful' texture which seems disingenuous to me when you're creating fantasy creatures. You couldn't draw a creature from a Harry Potter film. You'd need a degree in fine art and a whole set of Rotrings." He grins. "I liked the idea of a creature that, instead of having hyper detail, had no detail at all."
The film, which starts with a mugging, follows the teenage gang as they unite to protect their south London estate from an alien attack ? the council block becomes a dim-lit sci-fi playground. Most of the actors were unknowns hired for their authenticity and ability to mould the script, with Luke Treadaway playing Brewis, a posh boy caught up in the battles. "Yes, if I was a character I would be Brewis," Cornish admits. "I spent a lot of my early 20s loitering in various Wandsworth estates procuring jazz-related herbs. You find yourself in false, peculiar situations. I'd sit in a dealer's flat alone and my paranoid mind would start wandering: what if a rival gang broke in and mistook me for the dealer? What if?"
For a person whose work is defined as much by his friendships as its successes, how did it feel to work alone? There's a small pause. "It was a bit lonely," he says. "I missed the presence of an Adam, a co-conspirator. I'd love to do something with him one day ? a musical, perhaps ? but I didn't want to put all his eggs in my basket. Sorry, that sounds faintly obscene."
Is working in a close partnership a traditional way to make a film? "I've never thought about whether it's a normal way of working, I've always had very intense friendships. And friendship is so important in film because it's all about taste. It's like you've had a dream you want to recreate, and you have to hire 150 people and explain the details of what you saw in your head so they can execute it. So it's important that they have the same kind of 'vision' as you. So when you find people who you share taste with, you keep them close. It saves time. And if they're fun, and nice, and beardy and cuddly like a little gonk, that's all the better."
Though Cornish studied film, at Bournemouth University, he says he "learned a lot more from making stupid crap with Adam. We used to make parodies of feature films, but it was really an excuse to analyse them ? we'd watch pirate videos over and over again, then we built the sets, lit them, wrote the scripts. It was a good way of examining something. Making Attack the Block was basically the same thing as making The Adam and Joe Show, but as an adult I stick fewer coat hangers up my actors than I did with stuffed toys."
Adulthood is something that seems to sit uncomfortably with Cornish, whose childhood obsessions still wiggle through his life; amplified now, his film references resonate through his work. "I used to dream about presenting a comedy show," he says, "and also about directing films. And on some sort of stupid level I've done both. I worry whether it's not really the best way to live one's life ? trying to fulfil the dreams you had as a child. Maybe it's quite a backwards approach. But it's the case with me, weirdly." What next then? He thinks. "I want to go on Take Me Out."
Adam and Joe's 6 Music show returned earlier this month, but, despite the work yet to do on the film, Cornish isn't worried ? there's little preparation required. "When we go into the studio we don't talk to each other until the microphones come on. We started to realise that the less we planned the better it was ? we like to surprise each other. We get on very well, but adult life has separated us geographically, so the radio show has become a really lovely thing. We learned early on that we had to support each other; it's easy to fall into pisstaking, the kind you get on a lot of panel shows. Neither of us is a big fan of that 'scoring points off each other' thing, so we realised we needed to just be nice to each other."
What if conversation runs out, I ask. He looks baffled. "If I sat in silence with Adam I'd start laughing. The situation of sitting in a radio studio with him would be revealed as being absolutely ridiculous. Silence would just, could just? never happen."
Adam and Joe completists will enjoy Buxton's hitherto unrevealed cameo in Attack the Block, as the American voiceover on a documentary about moths, but those looking for their snuggly comedy, their David Bowie impressions and skits about dying dogs, might be unnerved by the darkness of the film. "You realise what power and strength these kids have," Cornish says of the boys who mugged him, pulling at the sleeves of his hoodie. "How they can reduce an adult to dust."
Attack the Block opens on 13 May. Adam and Joe is on Saturdays from 10am-1pm on BBC 6 Music
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/apr/17/joe-cornish-television
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