Meet the new kids on the block

The teenage stars of Attack the Block, a new sci-fi movie by Joe Cornish being praised for its authentic depiction of youth culture on a London estate, talk slang, crime and modern policing I’m surrounded by chanting teenagers. Five of them, eyeballing me and repeating: “Blood, blood, blood.” “Cuz, cuz, cuz.” “Trust, trust, trust.” It’s quite unnerving, a bit Lord of the Flies . “Bruv, bruv, bruv.” “Oi, oi, oi.” “Y’get me? Y’get me? Y’get me?” They stop, point made. “See?” says one of them. “You see how it can be overplayed?” They are the young stars of Attack the Block , a new sci-fi film directed by Joe Cornish that pits a gang of south London estate kids against gorilla-like aliens that invade their tower block. Cornish’s film, out on 11 May, is part monster flick, part study of youth culture and it’s very good. Today, sitting around a hotel lounge in central London, the young actors are doing impressions of other recent “hood culture” films, films that have made a pantomime of street patois through overuse, with a “blood” or a “bruv” or a “cuz” inserted into every sentence in a bid for currency. “The colloquial language ,” says Franz Drameh, mocking the term, “but pushed way too much. You watch these films and think, OK, it’s cool, we get it… blood .” The other four snicker. Close friends after months together filming last year, they do a lot of snickering. Attack the Block won the audience award at the SXSW festival in Texas in March, and elsewhere early reviews have been equally positive, largely due to the collective charisma of these five unusual leads, their believability as 15- and 16-year-old London miscreants. If, like me, you’ve come to dread the depiction of “yooves” on screen (dubious about Noel Clarke’s overwrought Kidulthood kids, all those suspiciously Rada-ish hoodlums from episodes of Casualty and The Bill ) then Cornish’s film should come as a great relief. Its stars give hugely credible performances, drawing on their own lives in inner-city London. Slang is ever-present in the dialogue but never cringeing. And the five don’t dress like post-apocalyptic bikers or whatever it is a far-removed costume designer has decided estate kids wear. They dress like estate kids. The film is set entirely on a walkways-and-corridors estate in Lambeth, south London, and begins with a slow pan over Oval tube station (surely a first: no Woody Allen-ish establishing shots of the Gherkin or the Eye here). The actors were encouraged to veto clothes or phrases they deemed too inauthentic for the setting. They tell a story, overlapping each other: “What was that word they wanted us to use? Leek? Eek? I think it was eek. It was meant to mean a snitch. Someone didn’t write it down properly when they researched it.” So “eek” was scrubbed from the script, and “leek” too, for good measure. Franz Drameh, the chattiest and the most polite, is 18 and has acted before (he was in Hereafter with Matt Damon last year). Three others are newcomers, plucked from school workshops and drama groups around London. Leeon Jones is 17, the shyest. Simon Howard, 18, displays a verve to match his great fan of hair, and the most disarming way with his diction (“liked” is “lacked”, “mountains” are “mountings”). Alex Esmail, long haired and 17, sits apart a bit and doesn’t smile much. Then there’s John Boyega, the eldest at 19, the leader of the gang on screen and, from what I can tell, in real life as well. He waits for the others to finish speaking before he does and at one point silences the room completely by referring to Malcolm Gladwell in the middle of a discussion about action figures. It takes five minutes for the group to settle, at first, after a spell trying to open Coke bottles with their belt buckles. (“Man,” says Drameh, “that’s stressful.”) A scene of near hysteria descends, after they’ve been talking about a shared love of manga cartoons and computer games, when I float a question: which would they prefer – an Attack the Block computer game being made or Attack the Block manga? “Woah! Computer game.” “Computer game, straight up.” “I’m gonna get my computer game.” In the excitement, one of them starts to sing in a high falsetto voice. Attack the Block ‘s director, Joe Cornish, is one half of Adam and Joe, the irreverent comics and spoof experts, hosts of a popular radio show on BBC 6 Music. Cornish’s stock in trade is satirical observation, and though Attack the Block is not an outright comedy he uses his good eye and ear to record and film some deliciously plausible reactions by a bunch of careless teens to alien invasion. Running out of credit on a mobile is almost as major a concern as being eaten by a gorilla-like monster. When things get really tough, the boys’ instinct is to lock themselves up for a calming session on the Xbox. “When you watch so-called hood-related stuff,” says Howard, “you always know what it’s going to be. Gangs beefing gangs. Someone gets robbed, someone gets beaten up. Happy days. Attack the Block is different.” It is different – all those aliens, for a start, and a great sense of genre affection that gives it a fond, reference-sprinkled Shaun of the Dead feel. ( Shaun ‘s Nick Frost has a supporting role and Edgar Wright produces, too.) The concept of “inner city versus outer space” came to Cornish when he was mugged, seven years ago. He wondered: what would happen if aliens landed now ? His film starts with a mugging, the gang threatening a female neighbour with a knife and taking her jewellery. It happens matter of factly, part of an evening’s activity for the boys, and it gives the following story a very unusual flavour. Once aliens invade, the boys become our heroes, but they’re quite unrepentant about the earlier crime, and often quite unlikable. Compare with another alien encounter film. Shortly after the release of ET , Steven Spielberg suggested, sweetly, that the kids he’d portrayed were pretty clued up. His young characters were ready to cope with extraterrestrial confrontation because they’d spent hours watching TV serials and playing Space Invaders. “The years of childhood have been subject to a kind of inflation,” said Spielberg, in open wonder that the youth of today – this was 1982 – were so wise and cynical. Oh, to watch Attack the Block with him. The Block kids do not meet extraterrestrial encounter with a charm offensive, a la ET , offering treats from the chocolate cupboard and a Sesame Street marathon. Instead, they kill the first arrival with a baseball bat because it has shown them disrespect. They do not speak in terms of cooing wonder. Instead: “What is that, cuz?” “That’s a alien!” “We crazy kicked that.” They drag the corpse away to stash it, in case there’s money to be made by selling it. Cornish makes a particularly close study of the clash between the gang (bored, riled, with confused ideas about territory) and a middle-class nurse, Sam, played by Jodie Whittaker. She is the neighbour they mug in the opening scene and afterwards she reports them to the police. Even when the sci-fi action kicks in, and the group are thrown together as comrades, neither Sam nor the gang is able to forgive the other over the mugging. To the boys, Sam snitching to the police was as bad as pulling out a knife. It’s a subplot that gives the film great strength and grounds it in reality even as the surface action (fireworks used as missiles, Super Soakers turned into flamethrowers) gets sillier. I ask if the boys have ever been involved in a mugging. Friends have, says Howard. “There’s a difference between living somewhere,” says Boyega, “and being part of somewhere. There’s loads going on in Peckham [where he lives] that I’m not involved in because I’m doing my other thing. But I still know the world, what goes

Posted by on May 7, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.