Joe Cornish Discusses Move To Television With Ghost-Busting Series ‘Lockwood & Co.’ On Netflix

When there’s something strange in your London neighborhood, the Ghostbusters are an ocean away and can’t do much about it. You’d fare much better in this situation by picking up the phone and calling Anthony Lockwood and his talented team of spirit exterminators. Now that I think about it, “talented” might be an overstatement because the nascent agency founded by Mr. Lockwood is actually run by teenagers still finding their footing in the competitive business of paranormal fumigation.

If you haven’t yet guessed, I’m referring to the world of Lockwood & Co., Netflix’s new original series from creator Joe Cornish (the critically-acclaimed writer/director of Attack the Block and The Kid Who Would be King).

Premiering on the streamer tomorrow, the show takes place in an alternate reality where ghosts have become just as much of a nuisance as mice and other household pests. Well, not exactly. Imagine if a common rodent could kill a person just by touching them, and you understand the precarious nature of this universe.

These lethal apparitions refuse to leave the living alone, prompting the creation of an entire industry full of agencies — big and small — tasked with tackling the paranormal problem. With the first eight episodes dropping this week, I caught up with Mr. Cornish over Zoom to discuss the new project, which stars Ruby Stokes (Lucy Carlyle), Cameron Chapman (Anthony Lockwood), and Ali Hadji-Heshmati (George Karim) as a trio of inexperienced warriors waging a war against wayward souls.

Just to start off, tell me about the origins of the show…?

I first became aware of [the books] right after I made Attack the Block, when there was just one novel called The Screaming Staircase. We tried to option it, but it was snapped up by a big Hollywood studio, who then tried to develop it as a movie, but the movie never got made. Ten years later, there were five novels and the rights became available again.

Coincidentally, myself; Edgar Wright; our producer Naira Par; and another very close colleague of ours, Rachel Prior, had all formed a production company called Complete Fiction Pictures. We were looking for something to make a TV show out of and we thought these books would be absolutely perfect. So we picked up the phone to Jonathan Stroud, convinced him that we were the guys to bring his vision to TV, and struck the deal. And here we are now, 3-5 years later and the show’s about to drop.

What about the books really spoke to you?

They’re really brilliantly conceived. One of the things that I really like about them is how simple the premise is. I find a lot of fantasy TV series quite complicated and exhausting in their world-building. Lockwood & Co. is very straightforward. It’s a world plagued by ghosts, where young people can see the ghosts before adults. Therefore, these big ghost hunting agencies have been set up by adults employing children. Ghosts can kill you if they touch you and they can be repelled with metal and salt and water. That is kind of all you need to know to understand Lockwood & Co. You don’t have to have a huge history of orcs and elves, or dragons and royal families — you’re just dropped into this quite simple, but very compelling, situation that pits the young against the old and the living against the dead.

Did Jonathan have any specific input on the direction of the adaptation?

Jonathan was very trusting with us. He understands that books and moving images are a different medium. But he was very heavily involved. We showed him all of the scripts, he came to set a whole bunch, and he was thrilled to see all the stuff that he’d imagined coming to life. One of the things we really used him for was to consult on changes we made to check that he agreed with them. Character changes we made, changes in names. And also, if we had a world-building question, he would always answer them.

One of my obsessions, especially in a world where people are watching TV in 4K, it’s that the detail in the image is accurate. When somebody opens a newspaper, [I want] the text of the story they’re reading — even though you only see it for two seconds — [to be] correct. Because people can freeze frame that stuff and read those articles. I do that and if what I read is gibberish, I think, ‘Hmmm, these people haven’t really paid enough attention to the detail.’ So often, we would get Jonathan to write the page of the Fittes Manual or the text of the newspaper article.

What would you say are some of the biggest changes you’ve made from the source material?

There are some places in the book where Jonathan doesn’t go into too much detail. For instance, our lead character, Lucy Carlyle, her family life and backstory is told in a quite brief way in the book, and we’ve expanded that quite a bit. She has sisters in the book. In our show, we’ve boiled those childhood relationships down to her best friend Nori, who is actually named in the book, but we’ve expanded her character.

The character of George is quite different in the book. He’s like a blonde kid [in the novels] and the actor we found to play him, who just brilliantly encapsulates him, happens to be British-Iranian. So we’ve capitalized on that a little bit to make his character even better, we think. And again, Jonathan was closely involved in that. He helped us choose a new surname for him … Everything we’ve done has had Jonathan’s approval. We haven’t done that much and everything we’ve done is just to make to make it a little more contemporary, and hopefully, make it work on TV better.

I admittedly have not read the books yet, but it looks like you’re adapting the first two in the series. Is that correct to say?

Yeah, that’s right. The first season is the first two books. There are five books in the series, so there’s lots more story to come. The books get better and better and the world gets more and more threatening and more and more interesting. The characters go on really brilliant journeys. Yeah, so this is the first two books of five.

I want to talk about the opening titles for a moment because they do a great job of explaining this world without having to rely on dialogue…

Some of these streaming series come at you like a nervous person at a party who tells you their life story before you’re ready for it. Whereas the people I like to meet at parties just say something interesting and amusing that draws you in. So we want it to be like that; we wanted Lockwood & Co. to take you by the hand and lead you into this situation where these two young people are entering a haunted house, trying to discover a ghost, trying to figure out the reason why that person died, and trying to locate the source of that ghost (the object connected to that ghost).

And then by following them, by watching what they do, by listening to what they say, you learn who they are, you start to pick up a little bit about the methodologies of dealing with ghosts, and you start to slowly pick up the rules of the world. Then you come to a point where you think, ‘Okay, I’m intrigued. Now I need to know some of the basics.’

We put that information in the opening title sequence rather than crow-barring it into the mouths of characters. So we suggest you watch the opening titles on the first episode. Conveniently, they’re un-skippable on the first episode and then you can skip them on the subsequent episodes. So we used that little wrinkle in the Netflix methodology.

You come from the world of feature films. How big of a learning curve was there in switching to television?

It’s been no different. We’ve really treated this like we were making eight little movies. I saw no difference in the methodology, the production values, or the approach we took. It felt exactly the same. The difference for me has been [taking on the role of an] executive producer and being the de facto showrunner.

So working with other directors and then being in the position of helping to shape their material in the music and the VFX and the sound and editing to help make them as good as they can be. That’s been a really interesting experience, not being behind the camera, but then coming in afterwards to collaborate with them. It’s an interesting experience for somebody who’s a writer-director to be on the other side of the desk. In future, it’ll mean that I’m less angry when producers suggest changes that turn out that make my work better.

This show completely fits in with what you’ve done before — these Amblinesque adventures where young people face down the extraordinary. What about these kinds of stories is so appealing to you?

What I enjoyed as a young person, as a cinema-goer and TV-viewer in the ’70s and ‘80s when I was growing up, [was] seeing myself in these situations.

If you go to Marvel movies or DC movies, you’re seeing buffed-up grownups playing dress-up, which is fun. But for me, it’s more fun when I see myself. I was the same age as Elliott in E.T. Then I was the same age as all the Outsiders in [the 1983 film]. Then I had all those John Hughes movies. So I grew up watching characters the same age as me in these aspirational and escapist situations. That’s what I like doing. However, I’m very conscious I’ve made three things that involve young people fighting fantasy creatures with swords [laughs]. So maybe that’s enough of that now.

Lockwood & Co. looks absolutely fantastic. What did you want to achieve with the overall aesthetic in terms of how it was shot?

I worked with the DoP, who shot Attack the Block, Tom Townend. Attack the block was his first movie and then in the interim, he went off and made You Were Never Really Here with Lynne Ramsay. It was brilliant to work with him again. He has a really unique talent for making stuff look colorful and poppy and sort of delicious to the eye, but also atmospheric and scary. He’s brilliant shooting at night, making very legible and kind of phantasmagorical images at night.

We were trying to capture a particular atmosphere that reminded us both of our teenage years, a pre-digital age where there was tungsten light and people weren’t staring at their cell phones the whole time. Where there was printed magazines and analog media and boxy televisions and no double-glazing and creaky floorboards. That sort of ’70s and ‘80s world before everything became so rich and safe. I think he’s invoked that and I think he’s brilliant. That’s his achievement, not mine.

Looking at the production as a whole, are there any fun, behind-the-scenes anecdotes that stick out in your mind?

In the show, the characters live in this beautiful, ramshackle townhouse [that has] four floors, this big office, a training room, an armory room, a library, a sitting room, a huge kitchen, bedrooms, an attic. They live there with no parents, so it’s this kind of fantasy headquarters. We built it on stages in Ealing Studios.

It was so beautifully designed and furnished by Marcus Rowland, the production designer, and his team, that it sort of became [the actors’] house. We would occasionally lose them when it was time to shoot and we’d just find them in their respective bedrooms, asleep in their beds or hanging out, listening to music. So it was weird how the house became a real hangout for them. You have to be careful though, because sometimes you would open a door and expect there to be a staircase, and there would just be a three-story drop. So you couldn’t relax that much in that house.

Lockwood & Co. premieres on Netflix tomorrow — Friday, Jan. 27.