Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish - appearing soon in a dark alleyway near you.

Recently I interviewed Joe Cornish for SFX magazine, about his upcoming movie directing debut Attack the Block. It was a lovely interview, and Joe was very generous with his time chatting for over 40 minutes. Which meant there was a lot of good stuff I couldn’t quite squeeze into the article. Some of that material included a large digression we had about his friendship with fellow director Edgar Wright. So I thought I’d stick it on my blog as a sort of accompaniment to the SFX article (Which is in the shops now, issue 207!).  Click through to read about how Joe and Edgar became friends, how the Ant Man and Tintin projects came about, and how their friendship ultimately led to to the creation of Attack the Block…

Joe Cornish: “Spaced was on telly at the same time as the Adam and Joe Show and Edgar and I quickly realised we had mutual interests. So we got chatting, and ultimately became friends. We’d always said we’d work together on something, and before Shaun came out, Edgar was approached by Artisan (now Lionsgate), who at that time were very rich from the Blair Witch Project. They asked Edgar whether he was interested in any Marvel properties and he remembered Ant-Man strongly from his childhood. They said yes, so he approached me  and said: ‘Let’s write the treatment for Ant-Man together ’.  So we wrote a treatment for Artisan, weirdly. It was ages ago, like 2000 or something, Edgar might remember better than me (I asked Edgar, he said “We wrote one in 2001 / 2002???“). We just kept working on it over the years really. We’ve got a really good first draft that we’re pleased with and we’re working on the second draft right, literally, at the moment.”

“The exciting thing about Ant Man is he doesn’t come with a huge amount of preconceptions, I don’t think.  Obviously, hard core fans know a lot of detail, but even within the Marvel universe there’s many different takes on him.  He doesn’t have a particularly necessarily strict set of character rules.  I mean there are three or four completely different interpretations of him within Marvel. I don’t want to say too much about it because there’s an opportunity to surprise people and maybe be a bit cooler and more interesting than they expect. But it will be cool.”

“Peter Jackson contacted Edgar because they needed someone to do a revision on the Tintin draft. Edgar knew I was a big Tintin fanatic so he called me up. I think both Spielberg and Jackson read our Ant-Man draft.  But, you know, our involvement in that film is pretty fractional, so it would be wrong I think for either of us to claim much of the credit. Was it daunting working with Spielberg? I think the thing is, you have to forget who it is, because it’s about the work.  Obviously, you never really forget they are who they are, because the quality of what they are saying, but you just have to focus on the work.  To be honest, you could kind of guess what it’s like work with him,and that’s exactly what it’s like!”

So why did it take you so long to make your movie directing debut, Joe?

That’s a good question, I don’t know, I’m kind of glad I waited that long.  I mean, all the tiny little loose ends that we used to do in the Adam and Joe show were very much my attempt to stay interested and to try and play around with film language – I’ve always been more interested in film than I am in sketch comedy.  I’ll tell you what it was, it was actually learning how to write. I had a million ideas and I had a million ideas that were two-thirds finished, but I sort of got so obsessed with trying to learn proper screenplay structure, I went on Robert McKee courses and it just gave me writers block.  I became so desperate to get it right that I would just throw everything away. Actually, it took working on Ant Man with Edgar, he taught me or gave me the impetus to actually push through and, you know, actually fucking finish something.

And I’m glad I waited really because I ended up with, you know, an amazing screenwriting course from Edgar. Then I went through a little bit of involvement in Tintin and getting notes from Spielberg and Jackson about the level of my work was also pretty amazing.  And I think that gave me the confidence I needed, to be honest.”

Read the full article in issue 207 of SFX magazine, available in shops now! I’ll have more Attack the Block for you later this week!