ATTACK THE BLOCK REUNION
NOW A DECADE OLD, ATTACK THE BLOCK HAS BECOME A SCI-FI COMEDY CLASSIC. ALL THE MORE IMPRESSIVE SINCE ITS DIRECTOR AND FIVE STARS HAD BARELY STEPPED ON A FILM SET BEFORE. WE REUNITE THEM TO REMINISCE ABOUT SAVING SOUTH LONDON FROM SPACE-GOLLUMS
Ten years on from their debut, Joe Cornish, John Boyega and the rest of the young cast of the London-set sci-fi classic reunite. Allow it.
“LONG TIME, BROS! LONG TIME!”
WHEN EMPIRE GATHERS the five stars and director of Attack The Block for an hour-long Zoom call across three time-zones — marking ten years since the release of a landmark sci-fiaction-comedy that had the audacity to pit aliens against a teenage street gang from a South London council estate — the first ten minutes of the call are just pure nostalgia. After the above salutation from Alex Esmail, it’s a happy, noisy torrent of catch-ups, in-jokes, Zoom high-jinks (“Is it more dramatic if I turn my camera on and off?” asks Joe Cornish, the aforementioned director), and comments on how long some people’s hair has got. When they last saw each other, they were kids; now one of them, Franz Drameh, has kids.
They’ve come a long way. For nearly all of the gang — John Boyega (who played gang leader Moses in the film), Esmail (fireworks-loving joker Pest), Drameh (pizza delivery boy Dennis), Leeon Jones (cool-headed swot Jerome) and Simon Howard (Biggz, who spends much of the film in a skip) — it was their first experience of ever being on a film set. Most were straight out of school or college; some grew up a stone’s throw away from the estate where filming took place. A lot has changed in the decade since. Boyega, of course, became a lightsaber-wielding A-lister (he’s Zooming in from Atlanta, where he’s filming They Cloned Tyrone with Jamie Foxx). Drameh, who’s in Vancouver, became a DC superhero in Legends Of Tomorrow. Cornish collaborated with Spielberg and made a follow-up, Arthurian adventure The Kid Who Would Be King. Esmail is now a chef.
But for all of them, Attack The Block still looms large. Despite its humble beginnings, it has become a much-loved British film, with its nifty cinematography (making a brutalist block of flats look like a spaceship), iconic alien design, and razor-sharp script that’s as funny as it is subtly political. Plus, of course, those five lively performances as friends defending their turf from intergalactic invaders.
So, a decade after they discovered a species hitherto unknown to science (and kicked its head in), all are ready to re-live their big adventure. Believe.
“YOU HAVE SCI-FI FILMS, BUT THEY’RE NEVER IN THE HOOD” How long is it since you were all together?
John Boyega: I think it was the [2012] Empire Awards, you know.
Alex Esmail: Crazy, man. Ten years, boys. Leeon Jones: It’s mad.
Joe Cornish: It’s really more than ten years, isn’t it, because I think we filmed over the Christmas of 2009 to 2010. We took all of 2010 to do post-production. And then the release was delayed until May 2011. Which means we would have met each other and auditioned in 2009, which is officially a hundred years ago.
When Attack The Block arrived, where were you all at in your lives?
Jones: For me, it was right after secondary school. I had to drop out of college because they didn’t allow me to [star in the film]. They weren’t really that supportive. Later on, down the line, they asked me to do pictures for the [college brochure]!
Simon Howard: [Casting director] Lucy Pardee, she came into my college lesson. We was doing drama, and she told us all to do a couple of monologues. Afterwards she said to me, “I think you’re really good.” She paved the way for me. And then it was the audition process after that.
Cornish: Franz, out of everybody in this group, you were the only person who had ever been in a film or TV show before, correct?
Franz Drameh: Yeah, I’d done a couple things before that. I think I did my first thing when
I was about seven. I did one TV series called Parents Of The Band, when I was, like, 13.
Cornish: I think that’s your best work so far, to be honest.
Drameh: Still waiting for my Academy nomination for that.
Esmail: I was basically the same as Simon. Lucy Pardee came into my drama lesson, and asked me to go to an open audition. My college didn’t really support me either. I wasn’t doing coursework, I was learning lines!
Boyega: I was on my first ever job on stage, and at the same time I was going to college. My college was actually quite supportive. My tutors were actors in real life.
Cornish: You were with Identity [School Of Acting] back then?
Boyega: Yeah, I’d just signed to Identity. I’d got my first little gig on stage, basically as a stand-in, in a small cast in three plays at the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn.
Cornish: I came to see you. You were very good. It was called Category B.
Boyega: You saw me in Category B? Oh, you didn’t see me in Seize The Day. That’s where
I had one line. And that, I would say, is my greatest achievement.
Jones: I found it through Lucy Pardee as well, actually. Shout out to Lucy, because she was a lovely woman who helped us. Big love for her.
Cornish: Lucy was just nominated for a BAFTA, for that movie Rocks. It’s good.
How was the audition process — do you remember your first one?
Esmail: It was an open audition. There was ten of us. It was completely improvised.
Cornish: Was I there at that point?
Esmail: No, I think I met you at my third or fourth audition.
Drameh: I remember one audition, which really tripped us up. Luke Treadaway, who plays Brewis in the film, has an identical twin brother [Harry, also an actor]. They both came in on the same day. And it just tripped us all out. One had a beard and one didn’t. It was well confusing. We were like... “Did you just grow a beard?”
Cornish: John, do you remember when you got offered the role?
Boyega: I really don’t, you know. I just remember the audition before the final one, I think that’s when it felt quite warm.
Howard: I started seeing John in, like, every single audition, with different people. I was thinking, “Hold on, this guy has definitely smashed some kind of role.”
What did everyone make of the script when you first read it?
Cornish: Shall I switch my sound and camera off?[laughter]
Boyega: I actually quite loved the script. I just thought that the language needed a bit of tweaking. We were not that hard with the slang. We actually got a moment during the rehearsal process to tweak the lines to better suit what was the slang of that time — even now, it’s changed again. But it was especially different to a lot of the scripts a lot of us were reading. I’m sure Franz can speak to this as well — the scripts that were floating around at that time, there was nothing as imaginative, there was nothing that brought sci-fi into such a grounded environment. I’d never read anything like this, and it got me excited.
Drameh: It was a breath of fresh air. I can definitely attest to that. At the time, especially for young Black actors in the UK, everything was extremely stereotyped. The nice thing with Attack The Block was that it was a story about these kids from the hood that was very nuanced. It had deeper underlying messages. It was just something that, as John said, we hadn’t seen before.
Jones: For me, it was the sci-fi element. It’s a London film and normally what you get with that is the same old films and it can get quite boring. It was like the first of its kind.
Drameh: We got to see ourselves represented in a genre that we never get to see ourselves represented in, basically. You have your sci-fi films, you have your action films, but they’re never in the hood.
Boyega: I’m so happy them aliens didn’t land near Big Ben. [Laughter] Aliens know about rental property rates.
“THE CHEMISTRY, IT WAS PAST 100 PER CENT’’ Can you all remember your first day of shooting?
Cornish: We didn’t use the first day. I was a first-time director, so I fucked it up. It was basically unusable. It wasn’t bad, the angles just weren’t very good. [laughter] But was it what you all expected? Franz, you knew what it was like to be on a film set, but for the other four of you — do you remember how you felt, when you faced the reality of how you actually make a film?
Howard: Yeah, I had only done theatre before, so this was like my first step into the film industry. It was all new.
Jones: It was a big shock. I was like, “Wow.” I’d only studied media before. Doing this was like work experience. What I didn’t realise was that with filming, there’s a lot of repetition. Also, because we were all mad competitive, we were