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
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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