That part is Chenault, the beautiful, rebellious socialite in Bruce Robinson’s The Rum Diary. A Hunter S. Thompson adaptation set in late 1950’s Puerto Rico, the film’s backdrop is the slow American corporate encroachment on the island, which Depp’s drunken journalist becomes a part of when Chenault’s boyfriend, crooked property developer Sanderson (played by Arron Eckhart), recruits him to write some articles promoting his latest venture.

Heard was obviously attracted to the strength of her character, not to mention the glamour of the film’s setting. But what also emerges from a long conversation is a fierce ambition that having starred in films like Drive Angry would make seem unlikely. Indeed, there is a sense that she is not really used to having to answer real questions, and she seems almost relieved when one comes her way. Her ambitions to also work behind the camera quickly come to the fore.

What attracted you to The Rum Diary?

Amber Heard: I did not think about it for too long, let’s put it that way! It was a beautiful story, written by one of my favourite authors, told by Bruce Robinson – who’s a genius, in my opinion, opposite Johnny Depp. I didn’t have a long list of cons. I also liked my character. I liked Chenault. I liked that she looks like this archetype of a leading lady, this 1950s housewife-in-the-making, the kind of iconic symbol of a woman at that time, this commodity or something that represents the elite status or what the elite status strives to obtain. She represents all these things very well on the surface but yet is not that underneath – she’s flawed and vulnerable and fiercely independent and rebellious and I relate to a lot of those qualities.

Bruce Robinson talks about your character as being a metaphor for the American Dream.

AH: On the surface she looks like she epitomises not only the American Dream but the class system, or the elite class that owns that dream. We’re seduced by it too in the audience, in the beginning of the movie, by the cars and the beautiful music and the women and the beaches and the parties. Chenault is very much a part of that system at the beginning. She’s just like those items, those commodities, those things that represent a certain system. She represents that on the surface but is not that on the inside. She’s the kind of girl that will sneak out of a party and go skinny dipping by herself in the ocean. I kind of liked that about my character. She’s a rebel, she just doesn’t look like it.

Do you think that’s what attracts Depp’s character to her?

AH: Every moment that we meet Chenault in her element, she’s rebelling in some way. She is struggling to free herself from Sanderson’s grasp in the nightclub because she wants to go dance with the locals, she’s escaping a party to go skinny-dipping in the middle of the ocean at night. She’s very much rebelling against the system but the cage is gilded, her handcuffs are like very nice gold bracelets and I don’t think she realises. I think that she, with the audience, takes a journey that is from one lifestyle to the other. She falls for the antithesis of that, which is Johnny Depp and his world, his madness.

Are you aware that Bruce says you had the part as soon as you walked in the room?

AH: Damn that Bruce Robinson! I swear. I’m plotting some sort of revenge for that, because it was such a gruelling process they put me through. It was many auditions, it was not the most relaxing of circumstances, to walk into a room with Johnny Depp and Bruce Robinson. But I’m charmed, I’m charmed, of course. It’s sweet.

How was Bruce Robinson as a director?

AH: He’s very laid back, and I think it comes from a confidence that he knows what he wants to create. He’s an artist, and I think true artists know where their strengths lie and they know where their weaknesses take them and I think he allows other artists to do their thing. At the end of the day he knows what he wants and will work around the various personalities that are his paint.

Had you seen Withnail & I?

Oh, yes! I saw Withnail & I a long time ago, long before I heard of this movie and I remember when they said Bruce Robinson…I thought to myself there could be nobody better to make this movie, and I think I was right.

The films has a very a stylised look doesn’t it?

AH: This movie and my performance, it was meant to be very stylised, much in the way that the classics were done, the To Have And Have Nots or the Casablancas. It was meant to feel like some sort of vision or some sort of otherworldly encounter. I love period pieces, I love things that have a vintage feel to them, just because there’s a certain texture to them that we just don’t have anymore. I think I’ve been stuck in the 50s or 60s for a while now! It’s a style, and I think we’ve lost a certain appreciation for style.

How do you think the film compares to the novel?

AH: I think what makes this movie so great is that it didn’t set out to change the book, it didn’t set out to compete with the book, it just meant to augment an already wonderful perspective on life. And I’ve made movies that were adaptations before and I’ve been frustrated by the process because, you know that old axiom ‘It’s never as good as the book’ – it’s often true because nothing competes with your own imagination. I feel like Bruce did so well because he didn’t try and compete with the book, he didn’t try and set any new rules – there’s an innocence and a sweetness to the book and I think he did that while still protecting the absurdity of the subject matter.

What about Johnny Depp?

AH: Anything I could have expected, he just far surpasses. He’s wonderful to work with. Everybody on set respects him and likes him and it’s because he brings so much to work with him. He’s such a wonderful presence, people are drawn to him in a way that I’ve really never seen before. Perhaps that’s why he is the movie star that he is. He’s a true character actor, trapped in a leading man’s body and I respect that.

Shooting in Puerto Rico must have been quite an experience.

AH: Puerto Rico is very much a character in our story. It provided the impetus for Hunter S. Thompson to write this novel in the first place. There’s this duality to Puerto Rico that very much encompasses the struggle that our book sets out to expose. Puerto Rico has two flags, and two anthems, and two songs, and two classes, and two kinds of people. There’s a duality, just in and of itself, just being half America, half not. It’s a weird place and that lends itself perfectly to the struggle in our story between art and commerce.

Do you have any kind of method of preparing for roles?

It’s a funny thing to me – I think the moment I decide to take on any sort of specific set of rules or guidelines or methods when approaching something as organic as acting is, it would be a struggle for me to try and commit to a set of rules, in any sense. Sometimes certain tricks work and other times you have to let all of that go. That’s kind of my job, being prepared for anything.

Do you find it hard that Hollywood rarely offers strong, interesting roles for women like this?

AH: It’s damn near impossible, because the parts aren’t there. We categorise women in one of two ways and if you’re seen as beautiful or sexy then your only options in terms of character descriptions are beautiful, sexy, cute – and that’s it, actually. And that affords you a certain amount of opportunity but that opportunity ultimately leads to a spark, never a flame. In the other category there’s so much more to do – you can be seen as witty, intelligent, independent, you can be seen as a bitch, you can be seen as vulnerable, you can be seen as smart….yet you cannot be beautiful or sexy. And because we compartmentalise women and our female characters in that way, it’s incredibly limiting.

So you would like to be both?

AH: Charlize Theron in Monster and Halle Berry in Monster’s Ball… both had to take all sex appeal away from their characters in order to be respected and seen in a serious light, and that’s frustrating. Although I would love the opportunity to gain some weight [laughs], part of me is frustrated by the fact that I would have to do that in order to be taken seriously. Why can’t I just be taken seriously?

Have you considered working behind the camera to create those roles for yourself?

AH: Yes. I’m developing something right now that I don’t know if I even will be acting in! It would be wonderful to see this movie come to life, but it will be my third movie to have produced. I think that’s the only way to get these good parts for women is to just make them yourself, I guess. We still make up like one, maybe two percent of the directors and until we make up a bigger or a more significant majority or proportion of the film-makers, or until we have a larger stake, then we won’t accomplish that representation.

The Rum Diary is out now.

The observation may be clichéd, but it is also important, as his most famous creation looms large in the conversation surrounding his return to direction after 17 years, and not just because journalists can’t seem to resist asking him questions about it. Indeed Withnail, after all this time, seems to grip on his own character, with Robison candidly detailing how he was based on several of his friends, as well as himself, after wrapping up an interview to promote his return to direction.

Wild youth and substance abuse are important themes in Robinson’s sparse output, and his new film, Hunter S. Thompson adaptation The Rum Diary, sees him coming out of a self-imposed exile at the behest of Johnny Depp, and exploring some surprisingly similar ground. Set in 1950s Puerto Rico, it sees Depp’s Kent (effectively a stand in for Thompson) take a writing job on the island, and soon finds himself being undone by his unhealthy thirst. Becoming involved in Arron Eckhart’s shady real estate deal, he also begins to chase Amber Heard’s demure, rebellious socialite. What emerges is a fiercely entertaining if uneven pleasure, containing Robison’s trademark dialogue as well as a host of colourful supporting characters and a romanticised, beautifully captured Puerto Rico.

How were you were tempted back to Hollywood?

Bruce Robinson: Not Hollywood at all, but by Johnny. I had no aspirations to be a film director ever again in my life, and that’s absolutely true. I made a promise to myself that I’d never do it again, and kept the promise for 17 years! Then I was on vacation in Spain and I got a phone call and it was Depp. It was quite surprising, I don’t know how he found me. “Oh, it’s Johnny here, have you read The Rum Diary?”, and I said no, and he replied “Well I’m getting a copy to you tomorrow”. And then The Rum Diary turns up and then he says “Do you want to write it?” Well, I’m a screenwriter, so I said “Yeah, sure, I’ll have a go at it”, and I did. And then he called me up and he said “Well now you’re going to direct it” and there was a bit of a friction over that.

It’s almost facetious to say it but here’s the world’s number one film star, bullying me saying “You’ve got to do this” and I mean it’s extraordinarily flattering, firstly, and secondly it was very difficult to say no to someone of his stature inside the industry. I did say no in the beginning, but he was so confident about it and kept on about it, so I thought “Well, it’s not my chops on the screen, the risk isn’t mine, because if I f*ck this up, so what?”

How did you feel about making changes to the source material? You combined two characters from the book into one in the film, for instance.

BR: There’s a lot of Hunter S. Thompson disciples carping about the movie in the States. The reality is that there’s an enormous difference between a book and a movie. If you’re so in love with the book take the f*cking book into the cinema. There are two lead characters, and that might work in a novel but when you’ve got one big film star it doesn’t work. So there was Yeamon and there was Kemp, and I realised that Hunter S. Thompson had split himself down the middle into two separate characters, and as soon as I realised that, retrospectively it seems very obvious, but it wasn’t at the time. So I threw one of them overboard, and all the Thompson fans are freaking out, you know.

The film is being touted as a tribute to Thompson. Do you see it that way?

BR: I only met him once. I sat in a hotel room for two hours and we never said a word to each other. How much of a tribute is making Great Expectations to Charles Dickens? How much of a tribute is making Hamlet to Shakespeare? It’s not a tribute at all. It’s a piece of work that Hunter Thompson created and I’ve adapted for the screen. I think that there is a corporate perception, certainly in America, that this is about a sort of guy getting stoned, drunk and drugged in a hotel room and it isn’t. It’s a bit of a butterfly this one, I think.

Johnny Depp is playing a version of Hunter S. Thompson that is quite different from that in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

BR: Well, we obviously discussed that before we started shooting and it was very apparent to me that it would have been a different kind of negative comparison. Terry Gilliam is a friend of mine, he’s an extremely talented man. I didn’t want to remake that [Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas], what would be the point? Plus, in the period this film was set in, Hunter Thompson was a very handsome young man. He used to model clothes to get money in Puerto Rico. So my interest was pre-Gonzo.

That leads on nicely to the central theme of the story, which is Kent’s struggle to find the voice that would later become the Hunter S. Thompson style…

It’s a key line in the film for me where he says “I don’t know how to write like me” and that’s the great problem that anyone who writes. A writer I don’t enjoy, Bernard Shaw, said “When you start writing like yourself, you’ve got a style”. I wrote for years until I thought “Christ, that sounds like me”. And so that was the side of it I wanted to look at. Thompson wrote this book with a fictitious character, of course based on himself, and it’s got nothing to do with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. This was actually written 15 years before. You don’t need Johnny with a false bald head and shorts and machine gunning everybody. I didn’t want to write that. It’s the only thing I find tedious about the criticism is this constant comparison between this and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I suppose it was inevitable, but it’s very frustrating to me.

But there is one scene of ‘Fear and Loathing’ style drug use in the film, when they try LSD for the first time.

BR: It was the beginning of the CIA experimenting with LSD, and I thought it was a novel way to use this drug in the film. They don’t even know how to take it. “You take it in the eye?” So that’s the way they did it in the film. But yeah, that is a slight precursor to Fear and Loathing and Las Vegas but I can’t even remember why I wrote the bloody scene now. It’s an extremely difficult thing to do on film I think, to show the subjective state of inebriation.

How much of Thompson’s dialogue is actually in the film?

BR: There was a review that my son showed me on the internet of some American reviewer, who really hated the movie. He said ‘The only thing that saves this movie is Hunter Thompson’s scintillating dialogue’, and there’s only two lines of his in it! [laughs] So I thought ‘Oh wow okay, I’ll take that as an inverted compliment’.

How do you feel about the film having opened badly in America?

BR: You can’t say the film’s bombed in America because no-one’s been! That’s kind of the tragedy. A film bombs if you open on $25 million on the first weekend and the next weekend it takes eight and six, that’s a bomb. But this film was extraordinary, just nobody turned up. It’s very weird. But then again, you see, it’s a little film, and my stuff doesn’t appeal on a broad front anyway. It’s got nothing to do with me: my job is try and make the film. It hasn’t got anything to say other than “I hope you laugh” and “I hope you’re sucked in and find it a bit glamorous and amusing”. That’s all it was meant to do.

How did you come to cast Amanda Heard?

BR: When Amber came in, this vision came through the door. I thought, “God! Who the f*ck is that?!” and she got the part there and then. Hunter Thompson’s lifelong writing obsession was this American Dream, what is the dream? Is it a real thing or is it not? I wanted a dream girl, every boy’s dream girl, Doris Day, Marilyn Monroe rolled into one type-of-stuff. So Amber walks in, and she got the part instantly. I didn’t tell her, we brought her back, tested her, and all the rest of it. Thereafter, whenever she was coming back I would always go and loiter in the office that had about a dozen guys all working in it, to look at them looking at her to see if it worked, and it did work. Amazing presence. I have this feeling with actors that they can’t be in front or behind of it, they’ve got to stick to the celluloid. And she just stuck to the celluloid.

Did you cut anything out of the film that you hated to lose, particularly?

BR: The film could probably profit from another 10 minutes taken out of it frankly. But it’s all about balance. Sometimes the problem with cutting is that it throws something else out of kilter. The Amber Heard scene where she does her dance with the black guy, that was cut down. It was so tense, and I really regret taking half of that scene out. It was just you grinding your teeth, you know, what’s going to happen to this girl? There was a lot of stuff hit the deck, you know, and has to.

What is the strongest aspect of the film for you?

BR: I have absolutely nothing but admiration for the quality of the actors in this film. Any mistakes, obviously, are mine, narrative mistakes or whatever, but nobody can say they’re not f*cking great actors these people. They’re as good as it gets, I think. It was an absolute joy to make and I’d do it again with them. I’m not so sure I’d do it again with anyone else, but I’d do it again with them.

So this doesn’t mean that you’ll be returning to directing on a regular basis then?

BR: Oh no, no. No it doesn’t. I have converted a novel I wrote into a screenplay, which I may well do. But it’s a tiny little English film, you know, a couple of million quid. I’ve been working for fourteen years on the same book, about the Whitechapel murderer, which is a kind of obsessive passion of mine. It’ll take me another two years to finish that. The thing about directing is you take a great film-maker like Ridley Scott. He does movie after movie after movie, this one’s a dog, that one’s not bad, that’s brilliant, but my stuff can’t be like that because it’s kind of esoteric, so if I make something and I f*ck it up, I’m persona non gratis, which truly doesn’t bother me.

Are you surprised how well Withnail & I has held up?

BR: It’s amazing isn’t it? Totally by accident and not design it doesn’t seem to age, does it? That wasn’t my intention, I didn’t think ‘Oh I’m gonna make a film that won’t age’ but I saw it with my son, and I hadn’t seen it literally for ten years, and it’s still the same Richard E in that long coat, and fresh! Anyway, you definitely laughed [at the Rum Diary] did you?

Yes, definitely.

BR: Thank f*ck for that.

The Rum Diary is out now.

Focusing on the aftermath of the event, it is an emotionally overwhelming account of a woman forced to live with the burden of something for which she is not responsible, haunted by memories of moments from their relationship that she now feels have foreshadowed Kevin’s appalling crime.

Based on Lionel Shriver’s best-selling book, the film is also a return to cinema for Lynne Ramsay, the Scottish director rightly lauded for her early films Ratcatcher (1999) and Morvern Caller (2002). This is Ramsay’s first feature film in nearly a decade, having previously been attached to the adaptation of the The Lovely Bones eventually directed by Peter Jackson, and her return has received rave notices on the eve of its UK release.

Featuring a phenomenal performance from Tilda Swinton as Eva, it also boasts a remarkable turn from young actor Ezra Miller as Kevin. But in many ways Ramsay is the film’s star, building an incredible level of atmosphere with a meticulous use of sound, colour and production design that serves to create a world convincingly skewed by trauma. Ramsay and Miller sat down in a London hotel room a few hours ahead of We Need To Talk About Kevin’s London Film Festival premiere this week to discuss the process of putting such a beloved and challenging story on screen.

We Need To Talk About Kevin is fascinating in the way if refracts everything through the psyche of Eva, played by Tilda Swinton. How did you set about doing that?

Lynne Ramsay: Well I guess it was the starting point of the script. The book is in letters, and I thought about it like a filmmaker. I thought “Okay, well, this is Eva’s here and now, and this is what she goes through every day, running the gauntlet. She’s chosen to stay in this area where everybody is aware of what her son has done, almost as a punishment.” I thought about all the things running through her mind, the weight of guilt and responsibility; that she has to relive this constant nightmare and piece together and look back at things, and look at her own flaws as well. So that was the starting point.

So it’s fair to say that the film isn’t a straight adaptation?

LR: It’s a real jigsaw puzzle piece. It’s a very wordy novel, and you couldn’t do a translation, or an exact adaptation. I don’t think that would have worked. There are still quite a lot of things they have in common. There are lots of parts of it [the book] that are very much in it. Maybe not the long, long dialogue scenes, but it was really about finding an interpretation that felt it kept the real essence of what is was about, so I was more concerned with the mother-son relationship than an atrocity. I took that angle, and the angle of always staying within her perspective.

That perspective is designed to make you question whether she is imagining things, isn’t it?

LR: Well, I liked the notion in the novel as well of ‘How do we know what she’s seen is real?’ There are points where you might shift a little bit. You can see him as black and white but maybe you don’t, and playing with those kinds of ideas was really fascinating.

What is it like playing a character that may by the figment of somebody else’s imagination?

Ezra Miller: it was interesting, and you’re right it was almost like playing a dream figure within the context of memory. In the end it was sort of helpful because it focuses the performance, in that Kevin’s actions as perceived by Eva are those played towards Eva, so in that sense I got to involve myself in the show that Kevin is putting on, this specific performance that he is putting on for the singular audience member, his mother.

Is that more or less challenging than other acting roles? It must give you slightly less freedom in some sense.

EM: I feel like there are different types of challenges that will always be found for an actor within every different type of role. This held very specific challenges; challenges to my heart and challenges to my own psyche! But I don’t know if I’d say it was more or less challenging than any other role. It’s just challenging in very specific, scary ways.

Another fascinating thing about the film is how it uses very stylised production design, colour and sound to create atmosphere, rather than relying on dialogue.

LR:I didn’t want it to be at arms length or to create a sense of removal. I wanted it to let you in and I wanted to retain the black humour of the novel as well. Although some people don’t know whether to laugh or not! The sound design was very much in there from the beginning, although it developed a bit. Colours came into it, as I was using sensory techniques to bring you into different locations, instead of expositional ones, and there’s an economy in that as well. Also it sets certain things up that come back and are subliminal, especially sound. Sound does that much more effectively than picture actually.

The emotional intensity of the film must have been very hard to create straight away. Did you have time to develop that on set?

LR: There was no room to play around on set. We had 30 days to shoot, so there’s absolutely no room. Everything was very structured, planned, and because I was cutting and cutting and we didn’t have a lot of money to make it, it was a very tight shoot. You had to be very clever about what you did, and keep an economy while still keeping the audience there.

We Need To Talk About Kevin is out today.

Losing an arm, she returned to the water less than one month later to pursue, and realise, her goal of becoming a professional surfer. Having already co-written a bestselling book based on her experiences, Soul Surfer stars Anna Sophia Robb (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) as Bethany, and Hollywood stars Dennis Quaid and Helen Hunt as her supportive parents, in an inspirational story underpinned with Hamilton’s Christian faith. The film has already been a huge hit overseas, grossing $43 million at the US box office. In person, Hamilton is a firm believer in the power of her own story, and remarkably bubbly and well adjusted considering the horrific accident that she has suffered.

FAN THE FIRE: How long has it taken for Soul Surfer taken to get made?

BETHANY HAMILTON: Well the idea has been there since the documentary [2007’s Heart of a Soul Surfer] and my manager is the guy, because if it wasn’t for him it wouldn’t have happened. He was persistent, and we kept pitching it. It wasn’t really coming together, and then 2 years ago we made Sean McNamara, the director of the film. I instantly loved him, because he was just a really honest, good guy, and he wanted to make an honest, good film.

FTF: How did you feel about Anna Sophia Bobb playing you?

BH: How she ended up getting the role was that I had seen her in several films, like Bridge to Terabithia and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factor, and a couple of others, and really enjoyed her and thought she could be right for the part. So we suggested her and she ended up getting the part. She came out to Hawaii and me surf coach and I taught her how to surf, and just got her comfortable in the ocean and helped make it look like she knew what she was doing on a surfboard. We’ve become really good friends, and I think getting to know me helped her play the role batter.

FTF: So does that mean you’ve had a lot of creative control, besides it being about you and being based on the book you wrote on your experiences?

BH: My brothers were working on set every day. We all have the same voice, and we think similarly, so if any one of us was always on set to give advice. We were involved every single day, even with writing the script.

FTF: You did a lot of the actual surfing in the movie too didn’t you?

BH: I did a lot of the stunt surfing, all the stuff after Bethany loses her arm is me!

FTF: Is there anything in particular you wanted to be included that didn’t make it?

BH: Not really, we really did get everything that really matters to us into the film. Overall I was really happy with how the film turned out, because you never know what’s going to happen when you combine Hollywood and a true story. Surfing is a really hard thing to portray, and then there’s my faith, so the odds of it turning out good are kind of low! But my family and I are so thrilled with the finished film.

FTF: How close does a biopic need to be to the reality of what happened?

BH: What I’ve learned through this is that making movies isn’t about making things exactly the same, but capturing the emotions and struggles, and also the good stuff we went through and putting that on screen.

FTF: Is there anything in the film that is fictional then?

BH: The only things that weren’t true were the boy friend character, but I like what he brought to the film because it shows that somebody is going to love me. A lot of girls believe lies that aren’t true, and so I think it’s cool to be able to encourage girls in that. The arch rival, she’s an added character, but in real life you have that, I didn’t mind that. All the other scenes are based on something.

FTF: In the film you’re not portrayed as being afraid to get back in the water after the attack. Is that really how it happened?

BH: I was more scared of losing surfing than sharks, because shark attacks are so rare. It’s not like every surfer out there is thinking ‘Oh God I’m going to be attacked by a shark today!’ People that drive cars don’t think ‘Oh God am I going to get in an accident 2 blocks from now?’

FTF: There was a documentary before the feature film. How does it compare?

BH: The documentary is more faith-based and detailed, I would say, They have their differences. This is a Hollywood feature film , so it’s different but more people will see it. You get to grow with Bethany, you see her growing up and her talent for surfing.

FTF: Faith is a very important part of that story isn’t it?

BH: My faith in God has been there since before I can remember, and it’s something that’s even more important to me that surfing. It’s not necessarily the same for other people, and I don’t try to push it on them, but I can see how God has taken my life and turned it into something beautiful that it might not have been if I didn’t trust in him.

FTF: What impact has all this had on your life?

BH: Well the book did really well and the movie has done much better than we expected, in the US at least! It definitely changes your life when you have that kind of stuff happen, and it’s been cool to see how it’s impacting people of all different ages, and the different stories about what people have gone through and how it’s encouraged them.

FTF: Will we be sitting here in five years time talking about the film based on the next chapter of your life?

BH: Definitely not!

Soul Surfer is out tomorrow.

Based on the book by James Sallis, this supremely cool, unexpected take on the 1970s crime thriller stars Ryan Gosling as a character known only as Driver. A Hollywood stuntman moonlighting as a getaway driver for LA’s criminal underworld, Gosling’s character is cool and unruffled to the point of impenetrability, at least until he falls for his neighbour Irene (Carey Mulligan), a devotion that leads him to try and help her husband escape the wrath of the mob, with disastrous results. Its central character is surrounded by a handful of bravura supporting turns from the likes of Ron Perlman and particularly Albert Brooks, whose performance as a blade wielding mob boss is already attracting Oscar talk.

Drive is so successful because of the way it rebuilds familiar elements into something fresh. Unlike Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof it recalls classic influences – like early Michael Mann and Walter Hill’s The Driver – without resorting to pastiche. Going places stylistically and thematically that remain constantly surprising, it is often shocking in its brutal violence. It is a natural progression for Nicholas Winding Refn, the Danish director who from the brutal criminality of the Pusher trilogy to the Norse horror-fantasy of Valhalla Rising has made a habit of creating fierce, distinctive takes on genre films.

Refn’s inventive biopic Bronson featured a breakout performance from rising star Tom Hardy. But while Drive may similarly propel Gosling onto the A-List, Refn is similarly making the step up. Winner of the best director prize at Cannes for Drive earlier this year, the film has put Refn in a position to develop further Hollywood projects with Gosling, including a big-budget remake of the 1970s science-fiction classic Logan’s Run. But one senses that this fascinating, off-kilter director is unlikely to change his personal, very unusual approach to cinema anytime soon.

FAN THE FIRE: Drive was a project that you developed very closely with Ryan Gosling, wasn’t it?

NICHOLAS WINDING REFN: Well I think that the way it all started was that Ryan called me up and asked if I wanted to do a movie with him. We met and it was a very interesting meeting because it led to us realising that we could actually work together. We had very telekinetic behaviour together. The idea of doing movie about a stuntman was interesting, and I had an idea about a guy who drives around at night listening to pop music, and those aspects evolved until we could actually make the movie Drive. So once you have that emotional connection with a leading actor, it becomes very easy to communicate in much the same way as you conjure alter egos, and the film becomes very much a collaboration between the two of us going down this road. Also because I shoot my films in chronological order it continues to build, and change and alter itself all the way through.

FTF: One of the unexpected pleasures of Drive is its soundtrack, which is full of early 80s pop plus the likes of Kavinsky as opposed to the more cold, gritty sounds that you would expect from a film in this genre. What was the process behind that?

NWR: Well I wanted that Europop feel, which was very feminine and from the early 80s, to contrast with the masculinity of the stunt-world, this car-world. I had this idea of Kraftwerk, and I would listen to Kraftwerk a lot because it gives me ideas as I don’t do drugs anymore. I’m fetishistic person, so I essentially make up images that I would like to see in a movie, and that’s also one of the reasons why I shoot in chronological order, so that it constantly evolves within me to what it ends up being. I chose some of these pop songs, one of them being Kavinsky, because it was a great way to define the movie I felt. And then Cliff Martinez, the composer, emulated the sound of these songs with his actual score for the movie.

FTF: How important were the classic 1970s genre films that Drive instantly recalls, films like Walter Hill’s The Driver?

No, I used a lot Grimms’ Fairy Tales was my main source for looking at was really important to me. But I believe that Sallis had seen The Driver and that it inspired him to write the novel. So there’s an indirect influence, and I’m a huge admirer of Walter Hill, it kind of went hand in hand in the end.

FTF: The film has a very tactile feel in the way it captures the feel of driving around LA, and in the physicality of the violence, which is again almost fetishistic isn’t it?

NWR: Well I don’t analyse my own stuff because I’ve always afraid that if I analyse it I will find faults and get obsessive, and I’ll start changing it and it will become something completely different from what it should be. I learn to make films purely on instinct, so I can always say it’s all about what I would like to see, and I can leave the rest to the experts.

FTF: The film features moments of calm, and even tenderness, that are broken suddenly by explosive violence. It’s very jolting at times. Was that important?

NWR: It’s not that it was important, it was a natural evolution. It was a great way to play myself through Ryan.

FTF: The film is filled with incredible turns from its supporting actors doesn’t it?

NWR: Supporting casts are equally as important as the lead because they are the ones who support the lead, and if they are not good it brings everything down. What’s good about Ryan [Gosling] is that as an actor he’s so understanding of the other actors and what they need to help them, and we were part of their process as well so it was very collaborative from everybody involved, and it became almost like a community. We were almost always staying at my house in LA, and that was where it was created out of. We even cut the movie at my house.

FTF: That is especially the case with Albert Brooks, who plays completely against type as a knife wielding criminal boss. Ron Perlman, Christina Hendricks and Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston are also fantastic. How did they all end up working on the film?

NWR: Albert Brooks I always wanted, so I went for him right away, and he was interested. I met with him and he was a very specific man, and that’s when I came up with his whole knife fetish. So again it was a collaboration between me and Albert. Ron Perlman put in a call and asked if he could be in the movie. So did Christina Hendricks and Carey Mulligan. Bryan Cranston I had to really pursue, because Brian with Breaking Bad has a lot of choices. I would have to do some extra wooing but I was able to get him onto the movie, and again I said ‘what would you like to do with this character,’ really creating him from scratch. If you’ve got good actors, use them. Take advantage of their need and their willingness to be a part of it. That’s what directing is all about, inspiring everybody else to give their best.

Drive is out in the UK tomorrow

A tale of tiny people living in the bowls of a country house, and the friendship that its flighty teenage daughter Arrietty makes with a sickly, full sized human boy that comes to stay, is full of the themes of the need for youth to explore magical worlds and build friendships away from the watchful eyes of their parents that were such a huge part of the Studio’s earlier films. Based on the famous English children’s novels The Borrowers by Mary Norton, it is also a lighter, more bucolic tale from a Studio famous for creating dark, cannibalistic monsters made out of shadows, and turning naïve parents into hogs.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Arrietty marks the first big Studio Ghibli release not directly overseen by the Studio’s famous founder, a fact about which Arrietty’s director, Hiromasa Yonebayashi, seems to be acutely aware. “Mr. Miyazaki wrote the screenplay and drew several image boards but he was not involved in the actual animation production at all” he says, before dismissing the idea that the master could be anything other than a constant influence for the film. “Mr. Hayao Miyazaki is the mastermind behind this project,” he says. “He had wanted to adapt The Borrowers himself some 40 years ago”.

Yonebayashi, one of Studio Ghibli’s chief animators and a key presence behind the success of almost all of their recently successful films, displays the sort of mannered deference that comes with being the keys to the family car for the first time, and as a response is a testament to the fact that Miyazaki has trusted Yonebayashi with a prized project. It is not, one suspects, an honour that is bestowed on many, but this suggestion is met another deferential, diplomatic reply. “I am sorry to say that before Mr. Miyazaki asked me to direct this film, I have never read the original novels.”

Not that you would notice: The Borrowers, in its simplicity, is a story ripe for adaptation. Based on the idea of tiny people who live hidden in the bowels of human houses, ‘borrowing’ items from their human counterparts, it offers the opportunity to create a world in which normal household object become huge obstacles to be scaled, and the tiniest crumb of food is enough to live on for a week. Arrietty’s strong suit is the creative way it plays with this idea, making doorways out of plug sockets, using dollhouse furniture as the real thing, and rendering the outdoors as something wild and terrifying. It was an incredible amount of work for what remains a small core team of animators. “How the water droplets were animated, the sound effects and photography, much effort was put in by our staff to create the world of the Borrowers,” says Yonebayashi.

However guarded the conversation may be, one can’t escape the suspicion that the Studio Ghibli team have had a great deal of fun creating this endlessly inventive world which they have made entirely their own. It is, Yonebayashi says, a film that looks at things we take for granted in a new way. “From the eyes of the Borrowers, they can by all means notice the smallest details”, he says. “Small prickles around the leaves, bumps on a brick’s surface… I believed that if we also pay attention and care to include such details, then a world that no ordinary person has ever seen can be visualized.” No amount of passion, though, can make Yonebayashi reveal his next project. “At this time there is nothing planned.” Considering the charming world that he is just helped create, let us hope not.

In her onscreen roles, from Nazi hunting cinéphile in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds to musical virtuoso in Le Concert, the 28-year-old Parisian actress has always had a cool, demure air. Accounts of the moment when Gerard Depardieu asked her if she wanted to be an actress after he spotted her visiting a film set aged sixteen seem to portray her reaction as involving nothing so much as an insouciant shrug. But far from possessing the clichéd Gallic cool that story suggests, in person Laurent has an almost childlike brand of animated enthusiasm, as well as a sure understanding of why she makes movies. As far as twenty minute interviews go, she’s relaxed, fun and passionate, flitting between heartfelt opinions on what makes great cinema and, more often than not, cracking jokes.

Dressed simply but sveltely in black, and with her blonde hair tied in a ponytail, Laurent is in a playful mood. When she is asked why she decided to take a role in Beginners, the new film by illustrator and filmmaker Mike Mills that she is in London to promote, she leans over and whispers “I don’t know” before breaking into a fit of giggles. But what might seem flippant soon gives way to the fierce engagement that has seen her recently move into direction. “I loved the script, and I loved the story”, she says, dispensing with her initial jokiness. “And I wanted to be part of an American independent movie.”

That last phrase is a loaded one, recalling as it does the sorts of ‘American indie’ films that have seemed to stagnate recently. Content to ape the geekish whimsy of leading lights such as Wes Anderson with little understanding of the emotional intelligence that made films like Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums so fresh, the past few years has witnessed a near unending slew of gimmicky, uninspired depictions of implausibly eccentric outcasts. Mike Mills’ directorial debut Thumbsucker, which featured a medicated teenager with the most babyish of habits, is a prime example, and Mills has taken six years to make his follow up, using the intervening years to return to the illustration and music videos that made his name.

Beginners sees depressed illustrator Oliver (Ewan McGregor) fall for Anna (Laurent), an enigmatic and implausibly beautiful French actress living in an LA hotel. Featuring Oliver’s childish doodles, a first meeting that comes whilst its leads are dressed as Sigmund Freud and Charlie Chaplin, and a telepathic dog, it could easily be the sort of insufferably kooky love story that has become all too familiar. Yet unexpectedly Beginners is something of a triumph, and in its portrayal of Oliver’s father Hal (a wonderful Christopher Plummer), features possibly the most sensitive portrayal of homosexuality ever put onscreen by a straight director. Mills’ has confessed that this storyline, in which Hal announces his homosexuality following his wife’s death, is fiercely autobiographical, and it is the sheer emotional authenticity of its characters that allows the film to transcend the initially twee. The relationship between father and son acts as a counterpoint to Beginner’s central love story as, following Hal’s death, Oliver struggles to emulate his father’s happiness.

“Even when you read the script you could feel that it had a special angle” Laurent says, nodding at the suggestion that Beginners could easily have been wearisomely familiar. “It was not caricature, and I think it makes the difference. You could feel that it would be right, in a simple way, and that’s one of the most difficult things to do. I think it’s easier to make big scenes”, she says, holding her arms wide to illustrate the point, and making a blockbuster sound effect. The giggling comes back, before she gets serious again. “It’s really something to see through the characters and to talk about a fragile subject.”

That subject is people trying to accept the possibility of love, and how Hal’s late blooming happiness marks Oliver and Anna out as beginners in matters of the heart. “I think love is timing,” says Laurent. “They just meet at the wrong moment. She’s funny and light, and he needs that. He needs to fall in love with someone fresh, but it’s too soon. Anna is too obsessed with her career, she’s lost, and I think especially because she’s French [a point only added when Laurent was cast] there is the element of her being so far away from home.” She rejects the suggestion, though, that Anna’s lonely existence is like her own. “I don’t feel close to Anna. I can understand all the hotels and the unhappy stories of actresses but I don’t feel like this. It’s kind of a challenge because she’s so different, so complicated. She’s scared to be in love, and that’s interesting because I don’t know those feelings.” Indeed, it is Laurent’s sensitive portrayal of vulnerability beneath all the enigmatic cool that helps make her onscreen relationship with McGregor a convincing two-hander.

Mills’ decision to film Beginners in two distinct parts, and in chronological order, helped create a convincing emotional intimacy. “He started shooting Christopher and Ewan for two weeks. They had a break, and then I arrived in LA” she says, describing the shoot. “It was special because he did everything in order, so Ewan had just lost his dad. For him it was exactly like the script, and he was talking to me about Christopher. I think it was great to do it like that. For me it was like a documentary.” Ultimately, she says, “it’s the most real movie I’ve ever made”.

Narrated by Oliver, Beginners features montages of photographs taken at different points in its characters’ lives, and a dog that silently communicates with Oliver via onscreen subtitles. When Anna and Oliver meet (that Freud and Chaplin scene), she is unable to speak due to laryngitis, and communicates with him by writing on a notepad. The imaginative, non-verbal ways in which Mills expresses his characters’ emotions shows him bringing the playfulness of his music video and art careers to bear on the film, signalling his growth as a director. “It’s exactly the cinema I want to do,” Laurent says. “It’s not too real, and the imagination for me is the purpose of being a director, that you can put pictures in, and decide that the dog is going to speak. It’s cinema, its movies. I love that, and I was inspired when I was working with Mike. I’m crazy about the movie.”

Laurent obviously loves the film, and she certainly comes across as an actor taking roles that excite her. But it is also true that Beginners is indicative of her rising stock in Hollywood following Tarantino’s plucking her from the French art house scene for Inglourious Basterds, and it is not surprising that a currently under-wraps studio film with “an amazing cast” is on the cards. Also coming up is a World War Two film directed by Billy August (Les Miserables) in which she plays a Portuguese Resistance fighter which, she says referring back to Inglourious Basterds, means “I’m going to kill Nazis, again!”

Mostly though, Laurent seems to want to talk about what makes a good director rather than a successful actress, hardly surprising considering that she has recently made her directorial debut with Les Adoptés, adapted from her own script. “I wanted to copy him!” she bellows when asked if Mills had been an inspiration. “I wanted to be as nice as he is with the crew, to be as generous, to be a good human being. People want to be great when they have a great captain on the boat. He wears suits every day, because he says ‘I love my crew so I have to be at my best.’ I loved him so much for that.”

Tarantino represented filmmaking on an entirely different scale, but proved no less inspirational. “He had maybe 300 people [on set] and watching him was amazing,” she says, describing the atmosphere on the set of Inglourious Basterds. “Before one scene he would ask everybody to be on set, and he said what he was going to do during the day. He was like that after two months, not just the first day. He would be like “Okay guys, ready? Today we are going to shoot this fucking amazing scene!” And everybody screamed “Yeah!” Laurent is animatedly throwing her hands in the air, imitating Tarantino’s American accent, and like him she found her own method of creating a bond with the crew on her own film. “I did a video clip,” she laughs. “We put on a Notorious B.I.G. song and we had everybody in front of the camera. We were dancing on set at 9am. It was crazy.”

As well as promising what might be one of the year’s must-see movie outtakes, it is a recollection that leads her onto a serious point. “I made another movie after this, before mine, and the director was not like that. He was not a mean person but there was no communication, and it was a boring set. Everybody wanted to go home. What’s the point in making movies if it’s not fun?” It is a good place to finish and, you suspect, just about sums her up. A handshake, a knowing smile, and she is gone.

Beginners is out July 22nd

His latest film, more than 5 years in the making, is a documentary retelling the story of the life and tragic death of Ayrton Senna, the three time Formula One World Champion. An extraordinarily complex character, Senna makes for riveting viewing, made all the more bracing for Kapadia’s bold decision to create the film entirely from archive footage. Retelling the story in the present tense, Senna works as a drama or thriller as much as a documentary, and the film has been attracting rave reviews. It also won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.

FAN THE FIRE: What first attracted you to Ayrton Senna as the subject of a film?

ASIF KAPADIA: I’m a sport fan. I used to watch racing, and I remember staying up late at night to listen to the climaxes of the races, so I had seen enough to know that period and know that era. But I wouldn’t have said in any way that I was an authority on Formula One, and I wasn’t the biggest Senna fan. It was really five or six years ago when the producer, got in touch with me. I’m a drama director, and I’ve never done a documentary before, so straight away I thought it was an interesting idea. At the time I was making a film in the North Pole, so it was one of those things where you say: “God, anything to get me out of the cold!”

FTF: So it was the sport, rather than Senna, that sold you on the idea?

AK: Formula 1 is fast, it’s exciting, it’s dangerous. The difficulty was always going to be how do you make it emotional? People driving in a giant cigarette packet for two hours round in circles: how do you make anyone care about that? That was my worry. Then when you spend more time with Senna, you think, ‘Actually, we’re going to be alright. This guy is good. This guy is amazing at what he does, and how he does it is also very visceral. You know, he’s drama.

FTF: So you knew very little about him when you took the film on?

AK: The worry is that you make a film about a person, and as you go along you like it less and less, and you’re faking it. But actually he is amazing, and I was quite glad to not know that much about him. I feel like I’ve been on this big journey that I want a lot of non-Formula One fans to go on. He does transcend the sport and I can see why he has so many children named after him, and why people really love him. But then what’s been interesting is taking the film to the US, where they don’t watch Formula One. They don’t know how it ends, so, it’s really amazing. There’s this moment where they go: “something’s about to happen”.

FTF: Did you know how it was going to be structured when you started?

AK: When I came onto the project there was an outline, a 20-page document which dealt with the golden age – the Mansell, Senna, Piquet and Prost period. Essentially what happened during the development was bit by bit we said: “We can’t do it… we can’t have this many characters. We can’t have that many great races. It’s just going to get a bit boring for the non-fans.” The script, the editing, the interviews, the research, was all happening at the same time. What Manish [Pandey, the film’s writer] was able to do was to look at a sequence and say: “We’re not showing this part of his character.” Then I’d say: “OK, well what race shows that? What scene can we find?” Then we’d send our researchers off in Japan, in Rio, in Sao Paolo, in France, in Italy, and we’d go into Bernie Ecclestone’s archive to find a scene that visualised what Manish felt we had to show.

FTF: You’ve made a documentary that only uses contemporary footage, keeping the audience in the moment . When did you decide to do that?

AK: There’s not a frame in there that I’ve shot. The challenge was to be stupid enough or brave enough to not shoot anything. When We Were Kings, Man on Wire, Touching the Void – they all have talking heads. Working Title haven’t made a doc, Universal haven’t made a doc, the producer hadn’t made a doc, the writer hadn’t made a film, and I’ve never made a doc! We were all new to it, and I was a lone voice. I’d say to everyone ‘I think we can make this entirely without interviews’ and everyone would say, ‘Everyone wants to do that, no-one pulls it off’. The only way to show it was to go and cut the film. I’d show them stuff and finish with that final lap, and even if they didn’t know anything about Senna, they’re watching and they think ‘He’s going to crash, isn’t he?’ And people would start crying. I just thought, ‘I know there’s something special here’. I knew it was all there, from very early on. The issue was always ‘how much time do we have to cut it down?’ That was always our battle. Every day we’d go in and say ‘What can we lose?’ The first cut was seven hours, we were like £5 million over budget, and I was accused of doing everything I could to get fired! But everyone laughed in the right places and everyone was crying by the end and you knew it worked. So we’d go away for another few weeks and cut it down, down, down, without losing the heart and the gut of it.

FTF: Will a longer cut surface?

AK: I’m asked this a lot. I have a dream that one day, if the film does well enough – and that’s the bottom line with movies, obviously – then maybe there will be a way that we can somehow go back and talk to Bernie again to have permission to show a longer version on DVD.

FTF: Do you have any particular favourites that you were most sorry to lose?

AK: There’s a very famous scene where he’s driving a car in qualifying and there’s an accident in front of him. There’s this terrible accident and he [Senna] jumped out of the car and went to help him, nearly getting run over. It’s just unbelievable. I’ve seen so many hours of footage and in his era no one stops. But as we know from the film Senna is the guy who would go and see what it looks like to be in a terrible accident and then look at the state of the car and then look at the road, and try and figure out how it happened, whether it was something on the track. Basically he needed to understand to be able to deal with it – and then he’d get in the car and go even faster!

FTF: There are lots of other moments that reveal sides to his character that haven’t been seen before.

AK: The drivers briefings are great character scenes. They show us what Senna was really like. I’ve seen so many and he would be the only guy who spoke up, he would be the only one fighting for other drivers, minutes before he’s about to race for the world championship.

FTF: It’s actually more like a drama than a documentary in many ways, isn’t it?

AK: Yeah! I’m a drama director and I wanted to make a drama. Like a good fiction film you set it up, you have the middle and then you have the payoff, and there were so many scenes like that. I think dramas and documentaries aren’t that different: when I’m doing a drama I’m trying to make things feel as believable and real as possible. The real guy is so interesting, so why would you want to get anyone to play them? I’ll just have to find a creative way to tell the story.

FTF: One key scene is the 1991 Brazilian Grand Prix, where Senna wins his first race on home soil. He’s so desperate to win he drives the entire race in sixth gear after his car breaks down. It nearly cripples him.

AK: It’s my favourite moment and the most emotional bit for me. Brazil was a character [in the film]. The first time he wins in Brazil is a really big deal, but I don’t think people knew that story. My favourite bit is the podium. When you understand what he’s been through in that race, to win at home and what it means to the crowd… and then that struggle to lift the trophy. He’s not going to quit, he’s not a quitter, he doesn’t give up. That little moment on the podium almost sums him up.

FTF: You seemed to have had lots of co-operation regarding footage and from the family, why do you think that is?

AK: It’s Senna. He has a special aura and presence. Obviously there’s the tragic element to the story, but there’s something else – it’s something magical. People would call us and say “We hear you’re making a film about Senna… how can we help?” That doesn’t happen with people. The film’s composer [Antonio Pinto] is a case in point – he rang us and said “I want to do this film! What can I do?”. We don’t have a contract, and it was consistently like that. I’d get emails and calls all over the world. That fondness for him has just grown stronger and stronger over the years. That’s why we were able to make this film – because there is something so special about Senna.

FTF: What was it like showing the film to his family?

AK: They’re all still in mourning. It’s really tough interviewing people: you realise ‘I’m not making a drama, these are real people’. There’s a moment when I was cutting the funeral, and I’m looking at his mother trying to pick which bit of the shot to use. Ethically, morally, I’m in a place that I’ve never been in before. We put on a screening for about 15 members of the family, and it was just unbearable. Even when he was winning there were sobs in the room. The lights come up and you look around and everyone’s in floods of teams. But then Viviane [Senna’s mother] stood up and hugged us all and just went “You got it right”.

FTF: Some people aren’t portrayed too kindly in the film, especially Alain Prost, Senna’s teammate and fiercest rival. How has that gone down?

AK: I didn’t want to talk about it in hindsight. You are two who are the best at what you do, and you happen to be in the same team. You’re the first rivals, you have to do whatever you can psychologically to beat each other. And I’m just going to show what was going on at the time. It’s just the nature of what it was and why he was so special. We were making it from Senna’s point of view.

FTF: You make his spiritual side a very big part of the film as well.

AK: That’s part of the whole Brazilian thing. The religion, his spirituality, is a key part of his character. It’s amazing how many people respond to that, people who are not religious at all. But it’s the way he speaks, the way he eloquently uses that and the way it was used against him by certain people. He’d give an English press conference and it would be pretty bland, then he gives a 45-minute interview in Portuguese and he’d be amazing. He’s saying one thing to the English guys, who didn’t like him talking about God, who would pick on him, and then he’d say something else to his home fans. We want the film to work as if you walk out and feel a bit Brazilian at the end. It was a very important character trait, and the spiritual element is almost the way he drove. It was an out of body experience. Of course the tragedy his journey is such that for me his accident is an act of God. It’s a freak accident, so that is a part of his life and his death.

FTF: There is a moment where he answers a question about his faith by saying that just because he is religious doesn’t mean he is immortal. It takes on eerie significance shortly afterwards. Is that a turning point in the film?

AK: ‘Just because I believe in God doesn’t mean I’m immortal, doesn’t mean I think I can’t hurt myself’. It’s a brilliant answer. It’s where the change happens in a way because danger comes into the film. Something starts to happen at that period and you realise ‘this is really dangerous, what you guys do for a living’.

As he sidles into a suite at the Soho Hotel for what must be the umpteenth interview about his megahit-in-waiting Attack The Block, his mood can best be described as ‘chipper’.  Bringing the same wry yet wide-eyed presence that he has long given to British audiences on both television and radio as one half of the indomitable Adam & Joe, he is a character able to flit between social commentary and fan boy enthusiasm. As an interviewee, he’s insightful, and a lot of fun.

A hit at SXSW, and due for a huge release in the UK, Attack The Block already has the whiff of sensation about it. “The idea comes from my love of 80s monster movies like ET, Gremlins, Critters and Tremors, all the stuff I loved growing up,” Cornish says of his directorial debut, which pits a group of hooded teenagers against an alien invasion of a Brixton tower block. “Also gang movies that I loved when I was a teenager, like The Warriors, Streets of Fire and Rumblefish. I had never seen a film like that happening in the area where I grew up.  Britain was quite good at doing realism and at doing fantasy, but seldom fused the two together.”

Attack The Block does just that. Beginning with the mugging of a nurse by a gang of ‘hoodies’, it turns expectations on their head by making those teenagers the heroes, forcing them to team up with their victim to defend their homes against an invasion by huge, hulking monsters. As well as being a lot of fun, it’s also a markedly assured debut feature, especially as most of the film’s teenage cast had never worked on a movie. Cornish explains how he just learned to go with it.  “As a first time director you are the least experienced person onset, but you’re expected to be in charge. It took me a few days to understand that, but once I got on top of it having those actors was fantastic, because they were just as enthusiastic and as passionate as I was. Every experience was new for them as it was for me, and it felt like a big adventure.”

When you watch a film it’s often easy to tell whether it must have been fun onset, and Attack The Block has that feeling in spades. “I’m a huge fan of 80s movies,” says John Boyega, who stepped up from theatre work to play Moses, the film’s lead. “I can’t believe that an urban film from Britain pays homage to those kinds of films.” Of the endlessly affable presence of Nick Frost, star of Sean of the Dead and probably Attack the Block’s most recognisable cast member, he simply says; “We had a wild time.” The feeling from the more experienced cast members seems to have been mutual. “You’d be a right miserable git not to!” says Jodie Whittaker, when asked if she had fun making the film. “They brought an energy that was really fresh and lacked a sense of vanity. It felt like you were back at high school, and Joe was the same. He’s a 42-year-old child. He’s just brilliant to be around”.  Cornish’s childlike enthusiasm wasn’t the only thing to impress. “It was so unique to be part of six people’s debuts, and it’s really special to be a part of something that stands alone in British cinema.”

In keeping with the cinematic inspirations for Attack The Block, one of the most striking aspects of the film is a lack of CGI. “I often feel there’s an iPhone app for digital creatures,” says Cornish. “They often look the same, and I was excited to try and do what they used to do in the 80s, when a special effect would either be a puppet or a model and you got the sense that somebody had made it. I also wanted something on set with the actors, so that when they’re attacked they’re really attacked.” The result is refreshingly analogue, with the cast being chased by gigantic beasts, played by men in suits and sporting luminous fangs. “It was a big wolf, gorilla looking thing,” says Leeon Jones, who plays Jerome. “They were scary. When they are jumping on people they were really doing it.”

Another element that helps create the throwback feel is the phenomenal soundtrack from Steven Price and Basement Jaxx, who weave a percussive, synthy undercurrent to the action. “The soundtrack is massively important,” says Cornish, obviously animated by the question. “I’ve read that Tarantino doesn’t use them because he doesn’t want someone to affect the tone of his work. But experiencing it firsthand it’s incredibly powerful. I felt amazingly luck that we got Steve, who composed on Lord of the Rings, and Basement Jaxx, who are a Brixton based and whose first gig was at the foot of the road where we shot the opening sequence. South London is usually seen as downbeat, but I wanted to make an upbeat film and there’s something very upbeat in everything they do, a sort of smile in their music. The pitch was that John Carpenter and John Williams had gone round to Roots Manuva’s house and got very high! I think they nailed it.”

Attack The Block is by turns frightening and funny, with a subtext about the myths surrounding teenage gangs. “We tried to take some of the words they use to describe these gangs, like feral, amoral, vicious; and make those clichés into an actual creature,” says Cornish. “In some films you get the victimisation of characters who are children, and who come from situations where they don’t have the advantages that you or I might. Personally I’m uncomfortable with the way they are presented, so I wanted to redress that balance by pitting them against actual monsters.” Nick Frost agrees. “There is a social commentary, which is a brave thing to do in a horror-comedy,” he says. “It’s got this element of talking about the society we live in, where people are demonised just because they wear hooded shirts. But what Joe is saying is that they’re just kids, and they get frightened.”

That commitment to the reality of these characters extended to language and accents, on which Cornish spent many months achieving authenticity. “I went to loads of youth clubs and youth groups around South London,” says Cornish. “I talked to hundreds of kids in groups about the story and listened to everything they said, and went home and transcribed it time and time again until I thought I had enough of a grip on it to write it myself.” He then tried it out on the cast. “They were able to contribute and adjust,” he says. “My background is in lo-fi production so I’m used to doing everything myself, and it was a process of learning how much talent there was around me and how much other people could contribute.” It’s a trick he learned from a master, having recently worked on the script for Steven Spielberg’s upcoming Tintin adaptation. “It’s amazing to see how collaborative Spielberg is,” he says. “He’s completely open to suggestions from anyone, and that lifts everything you do because you want to get the best out of everybody around you.”

“We came in and finished up the final draft and we put in our own little ideas and character traits,” says Franz Drameh, who plays Dennis.  Frost is more forthcoming about his input.  “Everybody got a say on what they thought of their language in the script, if they could feel themselves saying it and if it worked and resonated with their character. Me, Joe and Luke Treadaway spent an afternoon writing four little scenes for Luke and me to do. It’s always nice when you get to do that. Like when I did Paul, there’s such an evolution from the first draft, and if I’m not involved somehow I don’t want to do it.”

The effort paid off, as Attack The Block has more of an ear for urban speech than any recent mainstream British film. Talking to the younger cast, you can sense that it speaks to where they come from. “I haven’t received a script before that’s been so on point,” says Drameh, one of the film’s few experienced actors. “I watched a lot of The Wire,” says Boyega, “and I asked questions around my estate trying to get the essence of the character. Some of us have lived in South London all our lives, but there’s a difference between living there and being part of the madness that goes on. It’s about the boys as human beings, and to get that you had to have this South London swagger.”

The authenticity of the film has led to suggestions that American audiences might require subtitles, an idea that to Cornish misses the point entirely. “It was important that it is accessible to anybody,” he says. “We simplified it a bit, and made sure we had a limited glossary that we used, designed to teach you through context. If it works you’re going to have old people like me using it!”  Frost is even less forgiving to the idea. “I think it would be stupid, but that’s not to say it wouldn’t happen. I think that presupposes that American audiences can’t be bothered, but they are smart and savvy and as hungry for culture as we are. I think it would be a terrible shame”. Luke Treadaway agrees. “We have The Wire coming over here and we understand it. A Clockwork Orange has its own lexicon but by the end of the film you understand. If you don’t know what getting merked is the first time you will by the third time.”

Accents are just part of Attack The Block’s wider subtext. Treadaway plays Brewis, an upper middle class buffoon who enters the block to buy ‘jazz herbs’. Hilarious when attempting gang speak, he is also there for a bigger reason, and is partly based on Cornish himself. “Kids like that do perpetuate the dealing of drugs. The demand for that stuff and the method of distribution is stitched into this socio-economic subculture, and it does take a lot of young people down with it,” he says. “I was as guilty as anybody in my twenties when I would go to these estates and you would get withering looks from neighbours, who would know why I was there. I would feel ashamed, and rightly so, because actions have consequence. But there are still aliens running around to lighten the mood!”

Indeed, the film is never weighed down in social commentary. “It rang true, but it didn’t seem to weigh it down with gritty ‘realness’,” says Treadaway of the balance the film achieves between authenticity and comedy. The result in the end is something charming and enjoyable, if not entirely successful. But even when it doesn’t work Attack The Block is never less than utterly endearing, and it is thrilling to see a British film being so ambitious. It announces the arrival of a filmmaker with huge potential, as well as some promising performers.

“I think there are some genuine future stars amongst that cast,” says Cornish. “They are a testament to the message of the film: that they are brilliant kids capable of amazing things”. So, it seems, is he. Cornish is reluctant to discuss his future, but certainly won’t be rushing into the next project. “I’ve waited this long to do this so I’m not going to go and do something rash.  I’m aware of all the time, care and attention that we put into this film, and I wouldn’t want to rush into anything.” It’s clear, though, that the world is at his feet. Frost puts it simply;  “I think he can do whatever he wants. He’s proved himself. The sky’s the limit.”

Attack The Block is out now in the UK