Interviews
Comic-Con ’11 [Interview] ‘Attack the Block’ Star John Boyega!
He was the 17-year-old kid plucked from obscurity to carry Joe Cornish’s ghetto alien invasion flick Attack The Block (review). A year older and a little wiser, rising star John Boyega talked all thing Attack The Block with Bloody Disgusting at Comic-Con over the weekend.
Attack The Block follows a teen gang in South London as they try to defend their block from an alien invasion. Written and directed by Joe Cornish, with Edgar Wright (Scott Pilgrim, Hot Fuzz, Shaun Of The Dead) onboard as executive producer, the genre flick is shaping up to be one of the indie hits of the year. Applauded by critics and audiences alike, Boyega has emerged as one of the film’s breakout stars for his stoic portrayal of gang leader Moses. Below, he talks horror, Hollywood and the pressure to be Bruce Willis.
On the horror and sci-fi genres: “I was a fan of the sci-fi stuff, I like the early Halloween films, they creeped me out. I like the fact that this guy’s a normal human being but he still doesn’t die. I think that’s incredible. I watched E.T and all that, but they weren’t made in my time. My time was Transformers 1 and 3. We’d get that through Channel 5 late at night when you’d come home from church and watch a lil’ bit of Goonies or or The Warriors. It was cool the film was going in that kind of root because urban films back in the UK, you don’t have that sci-fi film with epic shots and orchestral music and scenes where I basically live and walk past everyday. I’m just so happy to be a part of that movement and it’s the first that’s ever done that. It’s going to set the bar for other kinds of genres, it’s great to be a part of it.”
On the audition process: “At the time I was doing my first job as a professional actor on stage in North London. Joe, Nira Park, the producer, and Nina Gold, the casting director, came to see me and I was on stage for 10 minutes. After that it was just recall after recall, it was crazy. I’m came back more that six times and then I got the part. Then Mr Cornish told me I had the part after the first audition, he just wanted to see my chemistry with the others.”
On the urban dialogue: “He (Joe Cornish) wanted to give it a heightened, sci-fi feel. But then at the same time, when kids their age get scared they say the dumbest stuff, like “it’s too much madness for one text.” We had a lot freedom and we worked closely with Joe. It’s the closest urban script I’ve ever read. I’m from South London, but when I’m with my boys and the energy . . . there’s something you just cant explain. It was fun to have that sort of script.”
On Nick Frost: “We call him Uncle Nick. Nick is like your all year round Santa Claus, you know?”
On how his parents view him after the role: “My mum sees me in a different light, she thinks I’m an action superhero. So therefore whenever she hears something creaking downstairs in the kitchen she’s like ‘John, you get it. Do something like you did in the film.’ Dad thinks I’m incredibly cool, but he still wants me to get to the level of Bruce Willis because he’s a big Bruce Willis fan. I asked him the other day, I said ‘dad, do you respect me more than Bruce Willis?’ and he said ‘yeah . . .no.”
On his fellow teenage co-stars: “It’s great, we’ve all kind of shared our first films together and are working on our own films now. The first person I met was Alex Esmail who plays Pest and he was so talkative. He was like yap yap yap yap and he was eating this bacon sandwich or something and then we went into the auditions and responded to each other really well. At one stage we were all in there, the same cast today, and we didn’t know we’d got the roles and we were all like ‘what if we got the roles? That would be sick, wouldn’t it?’ It was fantastic bonding and now we’re just the best of friends.”
On the stunts: “It was crazy. We had stunt doubles for some parts, but most of the stuff we did it ourselves. We did a bike riding course through witches cones, trained with stunt co-coordinators on the dirt bikes, it was mad. On the DVD extras you’re going to see me doing a lot of roly-poly’s on the floor and my BMX going in one direction, me in the other. It was amazing. I knew I was going to run in slow motion with the vest (at the end) so I can’t lie to you, I wasn’t like that before. I went straight to the gym and cried pumping weights. It was such a great experience, we just had such a blast.”
On Edgar Wright: “He’s just like Batman, I don’t think that’s him – it’s just a mask. That’s not who he is, he’s Bruce Wayne. Edgar was fantastic. Although we didn’t get to see him much on set, we knew very much about what he was doing and how his actions were affecting the film because obviously Joe and Edgar have been friends for a long time now and Joe looks up to Edgar and is very inspired by his work. It was very important that Edgar and Joe had that kind of relationship and it pushed Edgar to make the film the best it could be in its own ilk away from Hot Fuzz and Shaun Of The Dead and helping Joe get to a good place where he could say I’ve made my own movie and it’s a Joe Cornish movie, but with that magic and wisdom from Edgar Wright.”
On breaking into Hollywood: “I’m an audience member as much as an actor. I would love to do something of the same ilk but a different character. I’m very much into creating other people so that when you watch me on screen and see me in real life, you can say those are two totally different people. That’s the magic of acting. I just got signed by CAA management and the scripts that I’ve been getting have been very, very interesting in terms of people not giving me the same old. The way they want to go is of epic proportions, let me just say that. I may be leading some sort of army again.”
On actors that inspire him: “I love actors who are doing the work and I believe in actors who are creating roles as an audience member. We owe the audience a service and a lot of actors forget that when they reach stardom. (I admire) The actors who haven’t forgotten that like Denzel Washington, Will Smith, Andrew Garfield, Tom Hardy, who are all working at creating different personalities instead of being one actor in just different circumstances. Those actors inspire me and I remember walking through downstairs and I saw Andrew Garfield in the lobby in the Spiderman suit and I felt so proud – I haven’t even met the guy.”
Interviews
Paul Tremblay on Fighting AI with Horror in New Novel ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’
Paul Tremblay didn’t start his writing career believing he’d be battling machines over the sanctity of his job, but like so many writers of his generation, the battle found him. In the years since Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural networks started gaining traction as an advertised shortcut to creativity, Tremblay has been active in lawsuits to prevent the use of his works in training AI models, and he’s found that, with each new project, he has to consider the possibility that some LLM, somewhere, is going to latch on to what he’s creating.
“Now I feel like I’m thinking about, ‘Man, how am I going to write things that would be really hard or impossible for an AI to replicate?’,” Tremblay told me, speaking by Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Maybe some of that is ego. I’m sure every writer thinks, ‘Oh, an AI could never write what I write.’ Yes, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the thought process.”
While that’s something Tremblay might consider with any new work at this point in his career, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, and many other novels and short stories tackled it in a more direct way with his latest book. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and the quirky humor of the Coen Brothers, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is Tremblay’s attempt at a sci-fi-horror mash-up that’s both darkly funny and existentially nightmarish. It’s also, in his own words, a screed against the movement by AI companies to supplant human artists.
“I didn’t want to make it too didactic, but no, I playfully described this book as an anti-AI screed,” he said. “This book, in particular, was driven by anger and frustration, for sure. Not every book is going to be driven that way.“
Despite the emotions that fueled it, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep does not read like a screed. Instead, wielding offbeat humor and tech concepts that feel both lived-in and frighteningly tactile, the book lays out tandem narratives all building to the same conclusion, each of them exploring our relationship to machine learning in a different way. One of these narratives belongs to Julia, a former gaming streamer looking for a new challenge in life, who gets a call from a California tech company with an interesting offer.
Paul Tremblay in documentary series “First Word on Horror”
The company has, it seems, implanted some new technology in a brain-dead middle-aged man which will, in theory, allow them to pilot the man’s body through a rudimentary, still-developing system of controls. Julia, with her gaming background, would be the pilot, in her own way just as much a test subject as the human vegetable she’s controlling.
Julia is a Gen Z streamer with an omnivorous pop culture appetite, inspired by Tremblay’s own adult children, who riffs on The Big Lebowski constantly and calls her strange new meat puppet “Bernie” in reference to Weekend at Bernie’s. Her wide frame of reference, and her interest in art and stories far beyond video games, is in part informed by Tremblay’s own experiences with Gen Z, and in part a response to AI companies who scrape art and culture as a means of consuming it for reference without really experiencing a story.
“I know that one of the arguments that OpenAI and other tech companies are trying to make is like, ‘Hey, you writers, you artists, you take pop culture, you take your influences, and you create something. That’s just the same thing that the bots are doing.’ And it’s just not,” Tremblay said. “I wanted to have Julia have her outlook informed by all this pop culture, and I wanted to make that feel really human as a way to show how inhuman the AI is.”
The other side of the story belongs to “Bernie,” who’s addressed in his point-of-view chapters as “You.” In these chapters, the technology in Bernie’s body starts to flicker images through his seemingly dead brain, delivering half-remembered imagery and perspective in a nod to the “hallucinations” of an AI model groping for understanding it can never reach. These chapters in particular show off Tremblay’s flair for formalist shake-ups, and echo the kind of hyperstimulated writing that Dick and Ellison made so influential.
“I think it was more just the general Philip K. Dick feeling of ‘The world is so strange,'” Tremblay said. “He’s a lot funnier, I think, than maybe a lot of people credit him. That’s definitely what I was thinking of when writing the book.“
Bernie’s chapters embody the strangeness of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, presenting imagery that’s at times puzzling, at times eerily filmic, and always unnerving. They also mirror Julia’s own journey in fascinating ways as the odd couple – the Gen Z gamer and the middle-aged vegetable – traverse the United States, and the tech in Bernie’s body wakes up to the possibilities of using his flesh for its own purposes. It’s a compelling narrative technique, but it presented some new writing challenges for Tremblay.
“I quickly realized I couldn’t write this book the same way I have in the past,” he said. “By that, I mean all my other novels I had written in the order in which it was presented, even things that are nonlinear, which is most of them. I knew I couldn’t do that in this book. It’s not a spoiler, but hopefully the readers figure out pretty early that the Bernie chapters are a little bit of a preview of the next chapter from Julia, what’s actually happening with Julia. It’s all refracted from him.”
Mary Roach’s Stiff
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep began with a simple image, inspired by Tremblay’s reading of Mary Roach‘s book chronicling the history of our treatment of corpses, Stiff. As he read, Tremblay imagined a body sitting on an airplane, remote-controlled by someone else. At the time, it was a “silly what-if” concept, filed away in his head. Years later, when he became an author suing a tech company to keep AI from scraping his work for ideas, it started to feel frighteningly plausible, taking the “silly what-if” into the territory of a high-concept horror show about what happens when we try to exploit and commodify uniquely human aspects of consciousness.
“It stuck with me,” Tremblay said of that what-if imagery. “And then a few years later, when I was a part of the case suing OpenAI on behalf of writers, that what-if suddenly didn’t seem as silly. The more I learned about how that corporation operates and without really any sort of ethical thought to anything, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play with that. That’s actually happening.”
So, what if someone actually in favor of generative AI picks up Tremblay’s self-described “anti-AI screed?” He hopes that, at the very least, he’s made the ride enjoyable in a distinctly human way that might begin to reshape the conversation.
“I think that was another reason why I wanted to have the humor,” Tremblay said. “If people are reading this book who aren’t on the side of like, ‘Hey, LLMs taking authors’ books is bad,’ maybe if they read something that’s cut with some humor, that maybe they’ll be more easily swayed.”
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is now in bookstores everywhere.
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