I listened to a really interesting interview with Joe Cornish, director of Attack the Block. He was on Brett Goldstein's podcast Films to Be Buried With. He was talking about genre films in the UK and he had some quite encouraging things to say, considering genre films tend to be where my interests lie.
He said:
"There is an appetite for genre filmmaking, particularly in the UK. The trouble is that in the UK you're never going to have the same budget for that type of film as you would in Hollywood. But if you can come up with a visually appealing and affordable genre film, there is a thirst for it, especially in the UK."
Most of my films are darkly comedic twists on other genres. I think the reason that this is a style that I have grown comfortable with is because I grew up watching Hollywood. When I first started making films, it was things like Spider-Man, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Indiana Jones that I was trying to emulate. These are all huge budget Hollywood genre films, but that's where my interests lay. Over the years I realised that perhaps I wasn't going to be able to make that kind of film on my budget. I became focused on social dramas and things that I could shoot. However, my love of genre films never went away.
So in many ways, my style as a filmmaker is simply taking genres and iconography always associated with Hollywood, and giving them a low budget, British twist. Seemingly this tends to mean making everything a little bit depressing! For example, in 2019 I directed the short film Hostages. It was a crime comedy which had been written by the extremely talented Arthur Johnson. It was essentially a snappy, witty conversation between two young criminals in a diner. However, it felt too Tarantino and too Hollywood for me. We don't really have diners like that to the same extent in Scotland. So, matching the character's desperation, I thought it would be funnier to move the conversation from a diner and do it in the freezing cold outside a burger van in a dingy, barren area.
I find it very encouraging that Joe Cornish seems to think there is a market for British genre films, because I was very worried that there wouldn't be. Most people around me just seem to be making social dramas, and there's nothing wrong with that; I love a good social drama as much as the next person. But aliens are also fun.
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