Joe Cornish on The Kid Who Would Be King

Joe Cornish orders a Coke. It’s not his usual drink of choice, he confesses, but a day like this demands a heavy dose of energy that only a carbonated drink can provide. It has been almost eight years since his directorial debut Attack the Block became a cult hit across the globe, and his ambitions have only grown since then with his new film, The Kid Who Would Be King, offering a modern take on the legend of King Arthur.

Cornish has been asked one question a lot: 'What took you so long?' After Attack the Block, Cornish was quickly snapped up by Hollywood, and his name was attached to several films that he never quite saw to completion. “I love movies and I’m very seduced by the myth of Hollywood, so if J.J. Abrams wants to meet me to talk about Star Trek, I’m gonna go to that meeting,” Cornish says. “In fact, I’m going to go to a couple of meetings.”

Much of his time was taken up by the infamously tumultuous production of Ant-Man, which he wrote with Edgar Wright. He was also slated to write and direct a number of projects. There was Rust which he calls “beautiful” but he “could not make the script work”; he also worked on another film, Snow Crash, at the same time as Ant-Man. “It’s like a Paul Verhoeven movie, a crazy, dystopian, wild 80s action movie,” Cornish says. The studio eventually let go of the project but Cornish is still working on writing Snow Crash for TV with Scott Pilgrim writer Michael Bacall.

Cornish speaks about blockbuster filmmaking with equal amounts of admiration and resignation. “I guess I was nervous about doing a big franchise because I’d only made one film, and I didn’t think I had the experience under my belt to pull it off,” he confesses.

The Kid Who Would Be King is something of an anomaly, the kind of mid-budget filmmaking that has become a rarity. It’s also an original property, and Cornish credits his years of flirting with blockbusters for pushing him to take on such a risky endeavour. “I figured if people have the confidence in me to do something massive then I could do something semi-massive that I authored,” Cornish says.

As Cornish puts it, The Kid Who Would Be King is “an attempt to rewrite the legend” of King Arthur, transplanting the medieval story to contemporary London. In this iteration, a young boy pulls a sword out of a block of concrete in a building site, and becomes the reluctant hero in a quest to defeat the evil enchantress Morgana. All of the iconography is present: Excalibur, the round table, the Lady of the Lake – but the familiar tale is subverted to celebrate the ordinary. There’s a sense of accomplishment within the film, and it overthrows its Chosen One narrative to portray heroism as something that is earned, not inherited.

“In a lot of popular mythology, there’s this idea of hereditary privilege,” Cornish explains. “In Star Wars, Harry Potter, the King Arthur story, they’re all orphans who are brought up under normal circumstances and then suddenly discover they’re from this famous, powerful family. I thought that was a weird message to be telling kids. What you should really be saying to them is: it doesn’t matter what your background is or who your parents are. You should feel like you can achieve anything you want, depending on how hard you work and how good a person you are.”

The Kid Who Would Be King harkens back to an age of cinema populated by child protagonists, emulating the adventurous 80s classics that Cornish admired in his childhood. Cornish was struck by the original idea as a child when he saw E.T. and Excalibur in the same year – but The Kid Who Would Be King rids itself of the nostalgia of other 80s-inspired hits like Stranger Things or Bumblebee. Cornish “felt the absence of kids’ movies starring kids for kids”, and with this 21st century update, The Kid... attempts to revive that tradition.

He may only have two films under his belt, but Cornish’s oeuvre is marked by an empathetic approach, and an enduring optimism that sees the best in people. The protagonists are kids who are underestimated by everyone, but are willing to step up to the task when it demands them to. Attack the Block allows the often-villainised group of working-class teens to reign triumphant, and uses the backdrop of an alien invasion to explain why these kids resort to criminality. Hoping to resonate with young audiences, The Kid Who Would Be King is similarly sanguine about its hero, Alexander (Louis Ashbourne Serkis).

“This movie is a positive story about kids in a world that makes them feel a little insignificant – and it gives them power and allows them to win the day and change the world,” Cornish says. “I think it’s important when you’re young to feel you can make a difference. Otherwise, why bother trying?”

Cornish’s films are also made special by their preternatural ability of identifying our next stars. Attack the Block is led by a pre-Star Wars John Boyega, and The Kid Who Would Be King features a scene-stealing turn by Angus Imrie as a Merlin who ages like Benjamin Button. “You just have to be lucky enough to have the right film at the right time,” Cornish says. “I happen to have made two films with young casts so I’m finding those people before anybody else does.” Perhaps that trend will continue into his third film. “I think I’ve pigeonholed myself in the genre of kids with sword fighting fantastic creatures,” he jokes.

The mean streets of Hollywood have yet to make a jaded man out of Joe Cornish yet – and he is perfeclty content with where he is now. To finish our chat, we ask if he knows what he’s doing next. He’s unsure but he knows for certain that he will continue to make the movies he wants to make. “I just love trying to make films that people get a thrill from,” he says. “I want to try and write from the heart not the wallet.”

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The Kid Who Would Be King is released 15 Feb via 20th Century Fox