Joe Cornish: "I bullied my way in front of the camera, but in truth I was always much happier behind it”

In 2001, Joe Cornish, then best known as the lanky half of cult late night TV double act Adam and Joe, was mugged by a gang of inner city youths near his home in Stockwell, South London. Where other celebs might have taken this as their cue to join London’s media set in one of the less down-at-heel areas of town – trendy Islington or fashionable Notting Hill, perhaps – Cornish found the incident inspirational. “I was struck by how cinematic the kids looked – they were like ninjas or cowboys or bandits in the Wild West,” Cornish tells me in that precise, sardonic voice that’s so familiar from his 6Music radio show. “And I thought their vehicles were very science fictional – they were on mopeds and little bikes. Even the weapons that the kids in that area mess around with, the fireworks and the samurai swords that they import and then sharpen, are so cinematic.” It got him to thinking: “Everyone has been making these depressing sociological dramas when, actually, all around them was all the equipment you need for an action adventure film.”

Attack the Block, Cornish’s eagerly awaited directorial debut, grew from this decade old epiphany. Set in and around a tower block close to where the crime took place, it begins with a similar bout of petty larceny. In this case, a trainee nurse Sam (Jodie Whittaker) is jacked at knife point by a gang of hoodies. This scene, straight out of a Daily Mail reader’s worst nightmare, is soon interrupted, however, when a white hot meteoroid crash lands beside them, delivering an alien creature from its smoking wreckage. The kids proceed to do to the extraterrestrial what they would do to any unfamiliar face that appeared on their patch: they kick the living shit out of it.

When I meet Cornish in a swanky Soho hotel, just a few miles north of his Stockwell stomping grounds, the comedian, himself wearing a chunky, darkly coloured hoodie despite the unusually clement April weather (perhaps in honour of Attack the Block’s anti-heroes?) talks about his film with a steely intensity. I ask him why it’s taken ten years to get from idea to screen. “I was just waiting till I was ready, I guess. My life is littered with abandoned first acts. It took writing with Edgar Wright [the film's executive producer and Cornish’s writing partner on the forthcoming Steven Spielberg motion capture epic Tintin] on Ant-Man to give me a hands-on screenwriting course. Not from the ground up, hopefully, but it gave me the courage and confidence to work something through from beginning to end.”

With Attack the Block Cornish joins a new wave of British film-makers – Gareth Edwards (Monsters), Duncan Jones (Moon, Source Code), and Wright – who, having been weaned on Star Wars and Spielberg, are unwilling to follow our national cinema traditions of gangster films, bonnets and kitchen sink dramas. But Cornish’s debut seems like an even more daring development in British production than the work of his contemporaries. Where Wright’s first two features were satirical romps, and Jones and Edwards chose to set their sci-fi pictures outside the UK, Attack the Block is both muscular and set on his home turf; for once it’s not America that the aliens choose to invade.

That’s not to say Attack the Block isn’t funny – much humour is mined from the Stockwell youths’ matter-of-fact reaction to the alien attack and their singular urban patois. But what might surprise audiences is that this radio jester and toy movie-spoof creator has crafted, with considerable panache, a lean, mean action film that’s reminiscent of Walter Hill or early James Cameron. While Wright started this British genre movie renaissance with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (who also has a small role in Attack the Block) using Prince records to see off Shaun of the Dead’s zombies, Cornish’s gang of tearaways don’t dick around, using baseball bats, kitchen knives and Super Soakers filled with petrol to take on the alien horde. Duncan Jones took inspiration from Alien and Silent Running to create his space station in Moon, but Cornish has found something as other worldly and futuristic on his doorstep: the modernist estate architecture of inner city London, which through the lens of cinematographer Tom Townend (also making his feature film debut) look like dilapidated spacecrafts.

The film is also boldly political in its choice of hoodies as heroes. “I just wanted to show a bit of empathy to a milieu that’s usually, in quite an unimaginative way, painted as monstrous and inhumane, and I feel really strongly that that’s not the case.” Cornish, although he's lived in that area of London all his life (during the 1981 Brixton riots he recalls “playing Superman II with his Playmobil figures”), can’t claim to be part of the culture depicted in Attack the Block. “During the day I was ferried out to various posh little schools, so it was never really my world, but I do love that area of London. The bottom line is, depending on the circumstances into which you’re born you have to struggle to a greater or lesser extent. It’s easier for some people in some situations to make the wrong choices.”

There’s a palpable sense that Cornish is a man making absolutely the right choice in his move to movie-making. “It’s what I’ve always wanted to do, the comedy thing was a happy accident. Adam [Buxton, Joe’s TV and radio comedy partner] is certainly more of an evolved and professional comedian. When he got offered Take Over TV I was brought in as his director friend to help put it together. It only became a double act because I was such an ego maniac that I bullied my way in front of the camera, but in truth I was always much happier behind it.”

For a while there it seemed that British comedy double acts were contractually obliged to create some of the worst British cinema imaginable – see Morons from Outer Space (Smith and Jones), Alien Autopsy (Ant and Dec) and Lesbian Vampire Killers (Corden and Horne) – but Cornish, breaking out on his own, has created an urgent, blistering, and hugely entertaining debut.

Does this mark the end of Song Wars and Text the Nation? Cornish assures me that is not the case; but if it were, it would be a fair sacrifice.