Why Lockwood & Co.'s Joe Cornish Prefers Putting Swords In His Movies Instead Of Guns [Exclusive]

Guns are a staple of the action genre, but writer and director Joe Cornish would rather put a different weapon in the hands of his characters: swords! The showrunner of the new Netflix series "Lockwood & Co." recently sat down with /Film's Jack Giroux to chat about the ghostly adventure series based on Jonathan Stroud's book series of the same name, and he explained why so many of his projects involve young people carrying swords. (It's not just a British thing, though that definitely plays a role.) 

In "Lockwood & Co," which begins streaming on Netflix on January 27, a trio of teens — Anthony Lockwood (Cameron Chapman), George Karim (Ali Hadji-Heshmati), and Lucy Carlyle (Ruby Stokes) — team up to take on supernatural troublemakers, working as paranormal investigators in a ghost-infested world. This isn't Cornish's first rodeo with stories about teens teaming up against unearthly forces, however, as he also directed "Attack the Block" and "The Kid Who Would be King." If the series does well and doesn't fall victim to the Netflix single-season curse, there are eight novels worth of source material to draw from, so Cornish could be directing swordfights with the supernatural for years to come. Good thing he really likes swords!  

Cornish pointed out that there were reasons behind all three of his big projects having young folks fighting fantastic foes with swords: in "Attack the Block," one of the characters has a decorative samurai sword on his bedroom wall; in "The Kid Who Would Be King," they find Excalibur and copy it; and in "Lockwood & Co.," the swords are in the source material, as Stroud describes them being one of the effective methods for fighting ghosts. (My guess, having not read the books, is that it has something to do with the cold iron the swords are made of, which is extremely useful against fairies and other magical creatures in folklore.) Thankfully for Cornish, he has a little bit of experience with swords and sword-fighting from his school years. As he told /Film:

"I trained in fencing when I was at school. That was my sport, fencing. I wasn't very good at it. The teacher used to call me lazy. He was a retired Russian Olympic coach who used to teach us fencing."

While he goes on to say that he should have been good, according to his teacher, because of his long legs, a fencing career just wasn't in the cards for Cornish. That's all the better for all of us, honestly, because this way we get to see his movies and TV shows instead. That's a win-win. Fencing is cool and all, but "Attack the Block" is way cooler. 

Cornish may not have been that great of a fencer, but his experience left him with a life-long appreciation for swords and sword-fighting:

"I just love swords. I think they're kind of lethal, but there's also something romantic and stylish about them. You need skill to use them in a way you don't when you just point a gun and shoot somebody. Plus, I'm from London, we don't have that many guns. Luckily, we don't have that many swords either, but it feels like an elegant way to do combat. It feels okay to put a sword in the hand of a kid in a way that it feels a little bit weird to put a gun in the hand of a kid."

While gunfights can be stylish (John Woo, anyone?), Cornish has a great point about the elegance in many kinds of sword fighting and an even better point about kids with swords being more palatable than kids with guns. The former has a long and fun cinematic history with examples like Disney's "The Sword in the Stone" and the "Chronicles of Narnia" series, while the latter is an all-too-real nightmare for some of us. Cornish wants to give us the fun kind of nightmares with "Lockwood & Co.," not the soul-scarring kind, so his being drawn to swords instead of firearms makes all of the sense in the world.