Attack the Block director Joe Cornish loves creature flicks and gang movies. And it shows. And judging by initial audience reaction after the Attack the Block premiere at SXSW in Austin; genre fans will likely be eating Attack the Block up and licking their plates clean. I had the chance to sit down with Joe (albeit very briefly) to chat about our favorite creature flicks, inspirations and finding the positive side of being mugged on the streets of London. Check out my full chat with Attack the Block director Joe Cornish below.

Tell us about some of the films that inspired you to make Attack the Block.

It's a combination of my love of 80's monster movies like Critters, Gremlins, Polergeist, Terminator, Ghostbusters or E.T. I broadly describe them as monster movies, creature features maybe. And my love of gang movies: Outsiders, Rumble Fish, Streets of Fire, The Warriors.

I understand you've been working on the idea of Attack The Block for quite some time.

Yes, it's also partly inspired by the neighborhood where I live in South London. About 10 years ago I was mugged in kind of a pathetic way.

These kids surrounded me, they asked for my phone, I gave them my phone, the end. But it still freaked me out, because I love my area and it's the first bad thing to ever happen to me. And it made me want to talk to the kids who did it. And it made me think, "Man, you probably live near me. We're probably on the same level of Call of Duty! And probably listen to the same music, yet we're in this weird ritualized confrontation." It also made me fantasize; what if one of those movies I had enjoyed when I was a kid, if one of those things had happened at that moment? Sort of release and escape, a little alien landing and then I started looking for things that were almost science fictional. In Britian we have this thing we call hoodies, and housing projects featured in a lot of movies, often in a downbeat, depressing way. And I just started to see cinematic stuff and thought, "Man, those kids look like bandits or ninjas and they've got these strangely cinematic weapons, like these fireworks they chuck around."

Everything you're describing happens in the movie, so all of this is real?

It was, but it didn't all come to me at once. I had the idea of the meteor landing and of them beating it up, so I had a skeleton structure and then I went back and researched it because I'm a little bit less street than Prince Charles.

I find that hard to believe!

[Laughs.] Well, you're very kind. So I spent months talking to loads of kids and I had an illustrator friend draw frames from the story. I used the photography of an American photographer named Charlie White and I talked these kids through the story and I recorded everything they said. I went home and then I transcribed it as if I was translating a foreign language. I used all that material to shape the story. I asked them, "Where would you go if this happened, what would you use for a weapon?"

Can you talk a bit about designing the aliens?

It comes from the way the British Press demonizes these kids. They say they are feral, bestial, amoral, territorial, they care about nothing but kill or be killed. So my initial idea was, what if you take all those adjectives that people use to describe these kids and you make a creature out of those adjectives and pit it against the kids? Will you then see humanity in the kids? So from that I got bestial and I knew it was gonna be a quadruped, like an animal. I wanted it to be like a wolf or a gorilla, something brutish or strong and forceful. I wanted it to exist in a real world of physics so the audience can anticipate the kind of thing it might do. I always feel if a creature is overly supernatureal it's easier for an audience to second guess it and is less dramatic. For the visual look I knew we couldn't afford 3D; and I'm a big comic-book fan, so I pictured the whole film as 2D illustrated panels. And I started drawing this creature as jet black and thought it would be cool to make it a shadow kind of thing. I don't want to give too much away though.

Did you ever have any concerns on rating? PG-13 vs R?

Not really. It's interesting, I think the values of the MPAA are quite different than the values of the BBFC. The MPAA seems to be heavier on language. They're pretty liberal, they just don't like sexualized violence or instructional drug use, but that's pretty much it. I wasn't about to calibrate the film in terms of censorship. I think it'll get a 15 in the UK. I don't know what it will get in the U.S.!