Attack the Block was a hot ticket at the SXSW film festival, with some audiences lining up at 9:30 for the midnight show to see British teens fight invading aliens. The very next morning after the midnight premiere, director Joe Cornish and producer Edgar Wright met with a few journalists for breakfast. With the two guys bantering, I got a lot of material out of the questions I chimed in with between sips of much needed coffee.
CraveOnline: We’ve seen great producer/director collaborations like Spielberg/Zemeckis and now Jackson/Blomkamp. Could Edgar Wright/Joe Cornish be the next producer/director collaboration?
Joe Cornish: Man, I hope so. I keep saying to Edgar, Edgar’s Shaun of the Dead, I couldn’t have made my film without Shaun of the Dead and he was very much the pioneer. That movie was the first film, even to attempt to do genre in the U.K. is really difficult, to get people to give you the money to do it, because we don’t do it. The King’s Speech is a terrific film but there are precedents and it’s quite a safe pitch in many ways. It’s not easy to make a good film, whatever you’re making a film about, but to raise the capital probably a little bit easier.
Edgar Wright: I think it’s difficult to make British genre films as well because also we have to compete with Hollywood product. That’s the biggest thing. What happened in the ‘80s and ‘90s, genre films kind of went away in the U.K. and part of the reason for that is because British cinema became famous for Oscar winners like Chariots of Fire. So there’s a model for that kind of cinema but we lost the genre model. I took on more of a godfather role in this. Jim Wilson and Nira Park who are the producers on set every day, I was busy doing Scott Pilgrim but I would come in cold at key points at every stage. I think Joe first mentioned this script to me 10 years ago. Then started writing it after we wrote our first script together three years ago.
Joe Cornish: I recommend it to everybody. I’ve been really lucky to be friends with Edgar but if you could surround yourself with other filmmakers, there’s nothing like it. Film is like a crowd thing. You’re going to watch it with a crowd, it’s got to play with a crowd so to expose it to other people is the best thing. I was really lucky to have Edgar around.
CraveOnline: Who you surround yourself is important in anything. You probably want to be around people who do things, rather than just talk about it.
Joe Cornish: Yeah, that hands on experience is really key.
Edgar Wright: I think as well, because we would talk about it a lot, and this is even before me working on it in an official capacity like Joe was talking about it, I think anybody’s first film, there’s always going to be some hurdles. Even if you’re going to hit those potholes, I kept trying to impart what problems I went through with my first film and what maybe he could do to avoid them, or just be aware of them. I actually watched it last night as an audience member for the first time. It’s the first time I’ve actually watched it without giving you notes
Joe Cornish: That’s another cool thing about seeing it here, out of Britain. When you finish a film as director, you know every frame, every sound, every line, every take you didn’t use, what’s a set, what’s not a set. Whenever you look at a shot, you remember the problems of the day, you remember the issue. So there’s always this swarm of bees in your head when the audience is only seeing one bee. To take it out of the UK and see it here helps to clear that fog. It’s just cool seeing it through the eyes of someone who knows nothing about it.
CraveOnline: What’s your philosophy on action, versus the modern trend of shaky handheld?
Joe Cornish: I thought about this a lot to the extent that I was really worried. I had this weird paranoid theory. I thought: is the contemporary generation so used to having camcorders that they don’t believe something that’s not shot handheld? I was really paranoid and still until it showed last night, I still thought maybe people are going to think this is old school and dated because what Greengrass did and what those documentary makers did has transformed action cinema. Personally, I love James Cameron. My favorite action film is Terminator 2 and Terminator 1. I just think it’s extraordinary and for me it has the same energy and I think it has a sense of geography and kinetics and cleanness. You know where everything is. You know the direction everything’s traveling. Die Hard as well. I get the sense I know the layout of those water ducts in Terminator 2. I get the sense I know the layout of the Nakatomi Plaza. I know where the reception is, where the limo driver is. I feel like I can walk into that building, even though you can’t, you just have that sense in your head and you lose that with shakeycam. You gain other things. You gain a kind of immediacy and a rawness, but I don't think it’s the be all and end all and I miss the old way. I wanted to try the old way. Plus you know what? The bottom line is I like composing shots. I like setting people in the frame, I like composition. I don’t see how you can really do that.
Edgar Wright: It’s also a good thing to do in a low budget film as well because I think both me and Joe are both fans of John Carpenter and Walter Hill. In their early films where they don’t have a big budget, the thing that really comes across is the economy of the visual storytelling. On a low budget, some big idea setups that really play, I think that’s what you did.
Joe Cornish: Halloween which I watched, you’re really there, aren’t you, in Halloween? You’re there, you’re at her shoulder. That ain’t shakeycam. That’s steadicam.
Edgar Wright: Panaglide even.
CraveOnline: But whether shaky or steady, style is style. You can do handheld with a more calculated style than just run and gun.
Edgar Wright: I think it works a different way. I think what Paul Greengrass does is a leftover, an expansion, I think French Connection was the first major film to do that where William Friedkin wouldn’t tell the operator what was happening, so he would find what was happening and then it felt like a news report. I think that’s the way Greengrass works. He actually sets up a situation and then shoots it without telling the camera operators what’s going to happen and just let’s the actors [go.] It’s different ways. Actually, using Greengrass as an example is a bad one because I think what we’re talking about more is the people that rip him off. I think he does it really well and then there’s a bunch of other people who’ve done a mediocre action film and gone woooaaaahhh.
CraveOnline: But you could use handheld and collaborate with the operator.
Edgar Wright: It’s just different approaches, really, isn’t it? What I think’s really impressive about what Joe did is what I miss from some of those films that I used to love growing up. I think about this, especially the John Carpenter films, they have a pace. There’s a very moody kind of slow burn nature to them that I love and I wonder whether modern audiences would go for it. When Joe was first telling me about the idea, he was very clear on how the coverage was going to be. You pretty much said in terms of studying Spielberg and Cameron, in terms of their shooting style.
Joe Cornish: The interesting thing is those guys use handheld as well and I used handheld, but I used it for the dramatic scenes. I actually watched quite a bit of Larry Clark to try and look at how he covered teenagers just talking. Under those circumstances I would not tell the kids who the camera was being pointed at. I’d say look, you might be in close-up, you might not so everybody give your all because if I catch you and I put you in the film and you’re no good, you’ll regret it forever. I think it’s different strokes for different folks and I wouldn’t want to disparage. As Edgar said, there are loads of terrific shakycam movies, it just seems to have become the norm and I think whenever anything becomes the norm, it’s always interesting to give the other direction a shot.
CraveOnline: What is the progress of Ant Man?
Edgar Wright: We’re actually writing it in L.A., sort of about 48 hours ago. Here’s the thing. Our treatment for Ant Man dates back to 2001, I think after the second series of Spaced, maybe 2002 I asked Joe to come and write it with me. The treatment was the first thing we’d ever done together. Before I was friends with Joe, I’ve been friends with Joe for 12 years, but I’d already been a fan of his because in the UK, he’d had an award winning TV show.
Joe Cornish: It won one award. The radio show has won more.
Edgar Wright: Winning one award means that you can always say award winning, so I’m happy to drop that.
Joe Cornish: If you win more than one award, do you have to say Awards winning?
Edgar Wright: Let me be your publicist and just drop in the award winning, it doesn’t matter what.
Joe Cornish: Sounds like a very emotional romantic song. Let Me Be Your Publicist. That’s one of Barbra Streisand’s unreleased. You are the publicist beneath my wings.
Edgar Wright: [Singing] “Did you ever know…?” To answer your question, what’s funny is our treatment for Ant Man has existed longer than Marvel Studios itself. It was actually when Shaun of the Dead came out, they weren’t even aware that we’d written a treatment and then I made them aware of it. We actually finished the first draft of that in 2007 and then we both went off and made separate films.
Joe Cornish: For Artisan, right? They had all the rights.
Edgar Wright: At the time, maybe. I wasn’t entirely clear on what the rights issues were. Then Kevin didn’t see it until two years later. Anyway, the short of the story is that we both went off to make other films. We wrote a draft in 2007 which is before we worked on Tintin for a couple of drafts and we went off and made films. Joe went to make Attack the Block and I made Scott Pilgrim so we’re both respectively coming out of those two projects and cranking on again.
CraveOnline: Are you still as excited about it or is it now just about finishing it?
Edgar Wright: No, it’s good. It’s tough sometimes to come back. The thing is hopefully you’ll get better because of it. I think that’s the good thing is that you’re thinking of so many ideas.
Joe Cornish: It’s a two pronged answer where we know we can improve the draft we did because I think we’ve both learned a lot since we finished it, but personally I’m hugely excited. I love the fact that he’s not an A-list character in the Marvel universe and I think things you don’t expect to be good that are good are more fun. I think that people can discover things that feel like a discovery for an audience are more fun I think.
CraveOnline: We’ve heard Edgar talk about it. Joe, what do you love about Ant Man?
Joe Cornish: Well, I don’t want to give too much away about what we’re doing it by answering that, but I refer the honorable gentleman to the answer I gave earlier as they say in British parliament.
Edgar Wright: Also we’re well aware that in every interview where we even mention it, it’s funny because it always makes me laugh. Literally for five years, there’ll be “Breaking: Edgar still working on Ant Man!” The update is there is no update.
Joe Cornish: In a nutshell what I love about it is that people think he’s not as good as the other heroes. That’s it. That’s what for me is exciting about it and that’s kind of liberating because it doesn’t come with the level of expectation that some of the major league Marvel characters have but for us that is an opportunity.
Edgar Wright: Your short answer kept on going.
Joe Cornish: It toddled and now it’s gone to sleep.
CraveOnline: Edgar, when will you get started on A Worlds End with Simon Pegg?
Edgar Wright: Not to hijack the Attack the Block talk, but soon.
CraveOnline: It’s just we’re interested in all your work.
Edgar Wright: You know, whenever that happens, the important thing actually, and if anything watching Joe’s film last night made me feel like whenever I watch Shaun of the Dead or see it with an audience is it’s kind of a thrill to do something with your home country or home town. We were just talking about that, whether that was interesting.
Joe Cornish: It’s fun for things to come out of the blue though. What I was talking about Raiders before, it is fun for stuff to come out of the blue. It’s very tough to do because obviously one wants to be generous and tell people as much as you can and everyone’s flattered that anyone would even ask the question. But at the same time it sometimes diminishes movies a bit if you’ve watched and monitored their development incrementally, there’s often not much left to be revealed. That’s how we feel about Ant Man a bit.
Edgar Wright: We have to kind of clam up because in some cases you end up talking about it more than you end up doing it. Especially when you’ve done a press tour for a film like Hot Fuzz or Scott Pilgrim, by the end of the tour you’re kind of sick of talking about the next problem. You start to think I’m going to do something top secret that nobody knows about. Not to say that said, you always get excited about the ideas again but sometimes it’s really tough talking about the next thing because you realize that you should clam up.
CraveOnline: How does it feel to be the hot ticket of SXSW?
Joe Cornish: Cool.
