<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  Where did you come up with the idea to do a movie about a bunch of hoodlum kids and the aliens attacking their building? JOE CORNISH: It was a combination of three things. I was mugged in my area where I grew up that I dearly love, and it was the first bad thing that had ever happened to me. So that was where the idea for the inciting incident came. And then I have a love of gang moviesRumblefish, Outsiders, Streets of Fire, The Warriors. The third thing would be that I&amp;#039;m a massive fan of 80&amp;#039;s monster and adventure movies. When I was a kid I was seeing them in my local cinemas and like all children do, [and] was projecting them onto the environment that I knew. So I think the mugging burst open a little pocket of my childhood brain as a therapeutic escape, and I started to think how it would have changed things if something fantastical had interrupted that event. That was the germ of it. And I just started to think, wow, this could be a cool opportunity to make an escapist fantasy film in an environment where you&amp;#039;ve previously seen quite serious dramas. I want to get kind of nerdy, and talk about science and design. You have your female alien, and male aliens, which have these rows of nasty, glowing teeth. Did any real animals inform the design of the creatures? CORNISH: That&amp;#039;s a good question, because no one&amp;#039;s asked it before and I don&amp;#039;t have a stock answer. In a way, I don&amp;#039;t want to talk too much about the design of the creatures, because it would be lovely for people to experience them as they&amp;#039;re revealed to the characters. But it was very important to me that they were bestial, that they were quadrupeds, because I wanted the audience to have a sense of what they could do, and therefore put themselves in the minds of the characters subconsciously. For me, if a creature in a movie is sort of supernatural and doesn&amp;#039;t relate to real physics, it makes it less excitingit&amp;#039;s less predictable. If it can do anything at any time, the audience can&amp;#039;t really anticipate. I didn&amp;#039;t want it to be able to run upside down on walls, or morph through tiny gap. The idea was to take all the adjectives that people use to describe those kids in the British mediabestial, feral, territorial, amoral, selfish, inhumanand turn all those adjectives into a creature, set them against the kids and bring out the kids&amp;#039; humanity.   The mouth is a little bit like the Sarlacc pit in Return of the Jedi.   EDGAR WRIGHT: A disco Sarlacc pit.   CORNISH: If the Sarlacc pit had a Jamiroquai track playing as it digested you over the course of a thousand years. The ultimate hell. I&amp;#039;m not dissing JamiroquaiI just think that after being played on a loop for 1000 years, then it might start grating. Not even Jamiroquais that funky.       At the end there&amp;#039;s some science that explains how the aliens got here and why they&amp;#039;re pursuing these kids on the block. Did you look at animal biology at all for that? CORNISH: I work with a chap called Terry Notary, who is a brilliant creature guy. He did the movement school for Tim Burton&amp;#039;s Planet of the Apes, he did the Viperwolves in Avatar, he was the movement coach for the Silver Surfer, he was Rob Schnieder&amp;#039;s quadruped instructor coach forwhat was that movie?  WRIGHT: The Animal! He&amp;#039;s the only man to have worked on Avatar and The Animal.   CORNISH: Terry brought a certain amount of stuff he already knew and I brought character stuff that was in my head. [But] weirdly, some of the research we&amp;#039;d done for Antman, about pheromones and pheromone trails, I hijacked and stuck in this. Because there&amp;#039;s actually no motivation [for the kids] to go up the block. I had to trap them, I had to give them a reasonable motivation to go in the block, and then make it very clear they were trapped. So the pheromone helped me do that.  Your first alien looks very different from the others that come after, which I thought was very smart because the males and females of species can be different. The females are a little bit plainer, for instance.  CORNISH: That&amp;#039;s absolutely right. I looked at peacocks and peahens. There are lots of birds that have very different plumage, have a very different look. And in fact, we had a bit of crisis of confidence about that: Will the audience connect the little one with the big ones enough? So it&amp;#039;s cool that you picked up on that, because that would absolutely be my justification for that. I did use the peacock/peahen example when I was talking to designers about it, but I was never super-confident that the audience would pick that up. We live in a world of JJ Abrams, who is famously secretive about his projects and especially his creatures. You, on the other hand, were very upfront with your aliens. Did you ever worry that you were maybe showing too much? CORNISH: I definitely thought about that a lot, and I definitely wanted to show them a bit more.   WRIGHT: In a way, if the monsters work, you have great money shots with them. It&amp;#039;s almost become the vogue in more recent things to be flashy and not see things, which is usually people&amp;#039;s crisis of confidence. But I think the great thing about Attack the Block is that the monsters really work, and when you show that shot of them all together, it&amp;#039;s fantastic.   CORNISH: In some 80&amp;#039;s films, they would withhold the monster, withhold it, withhold it, withhold it, and always in the last act it wouldBLAHHH (pantomimes tentacles)and it would be rubber. So I was aware of that being a trope that didn&amp;#039;t work. If you&amp;#039;re going to withhold, you better deliver in the last shot, otherwise your climax becomes laughable.   I kind of figured that if I could pull it offputting them in the frame, certainly in the second half of the movie[it] would just feel fresher. Gremlins, Critters, Tremors, Starship Troopers: there comes a point when they just show the monster. And even in Aliens, actually, you do see quite a few of those creatures, and you get the full reveal at the end, when she fights the creature. It goes a little too far at the end of Alien 3. But Aliens strikes a very good balance, because by the end we all knew the design of that suit, you were totally familiar with it, but it didn&amp;#039;t stop it from being scary because it&amp;#039;s about the human characters and the sense of jeopardy.   But until yesterday, I had no idea whether that would work. So I&amp;#039;m pleased they&amp;#039;re not totally laughable. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/a6555/gangsters-and-aliens-fight-it-out-in-attack-the-block/>