Blomkamp's nightmarish District 9 is a fictionalized reflection of the real horrors of District 6, a Cape Town municipality that was designated for "whites only" by South Africa's apartheid government in 1966. Removal of the non-white population began two years later. A total of 60,000 people were forcibly relocated to the Cape Flats, apartheid's dusty and bleak dumping ground 16 miles away. Similarly, as Blomkamp's faux documentary-style film begins, Multi-National United is charged with the task of clearing District 9 and relocating the area's resident aliens to a new government-mandated camp.
In his debut feature, Blomkamp skillfully portrays the human/alien apartheid society of Johannesburg in a hyper-real way, which sets this film apart from the bulk of sci-fi canon. With District 9, the South African born writer, director and visual effects artist takes the aliens of his beloved fantasy genre out of their usual star wars environment and has them do battle with the mundane pencil-pushers responsible for compliance in a segregated society similar to that of Blomkamp's youth. However, District 9 may never have happened if it wasn't for a more traditional space-based sci-fi project that Blomkamp was slated to helm.
At one point a film version of the first person shooter Halo was set to be Blomkamp's first feature, but the project got shot down while still in development. Microsoft and 20th Century Fox had charged Peter "Lord of the Rings" Jackson with the task of bringing the computer game to the big screen. Jackson in turn called on Blomkamp, an award winning commercial director who was creating quite a stir in the advertising world thanks to his award-winning visual effects. Though a series of three shorts were released in 2007 (collectively known as Landfall), the film version of Halo ultimately imploded. Jackson and Blomkamp forged a bond thanks to the project however, and when their work on Halo came to an end they turned to a six minute movie Blomkamp had produced back in 2005 as inspiration for their next project. SuicideGirls chatted to Blomkamp on the phone to find out about the harsh realities behind District 9.
Nicole Powers: You were born in South Africa but live in Canada now - when did you make the move?
Neill Blomkamp: In 1997. I was almost 18.
NP: So you grew up with apartheid, and were there to witness its end.
NB: It's end was in '94 -- I guess I was 14.
NP: That must have been a very defining thing to have lived through.
NB: I think most of the influences in the film come from more of a subconscious level than a conscious one, I think it's more living through something and absorbing it by osmosis almost. Then, as an adult, by the time I was in Canada, realizing that all these very serious issues that come along with South Africa actually are a pretty big part of how I view the world and how my mind works.
NP: In what part of South Africa did you grow up?
NB: I lived in Joburg [Johannesburg]. I'm from the northern suburbs in Joburg. It's sort off a middle-class, white area.
NP: So your experience of apartheid in many respects would have been how you portray it in the film, in that you would have seen it on TV and in news reports but it wouldn't have been in your face or on your doorstep on a daily basis.
NB: Yeah, yeah, I think that's true. I mean the stuff that's in your face on a daily basis is just interacting with black South Africans - the interaction of two different races I think. But the actual police state, militaristic stuff definitely happened in a separate area to me, so there was a disconnect there that you would see on TV.
NP: The film shows the poor treatment of the aliens but you don't editorialize. You let the events unfold without taking a position, which in turn allows the viewer to. Was that intentional?
NB: Yes, that was completely intentional. Because I think when I started conceiving the film in 2007, I was making the mistake of it being too serious, and being too self-important and kind of ponderous. The tone was wrong. I figured out that that was not a smart thing to do for my first film, and that those topics were sort of too serious to tackle head on -- plus I didn't even want to make a film like that. I wanted to make something that could fit into more of a Hollywood framework in terms of people watching the movie. So once I figured that out I thought, OK, what I want to do is put all of these topics and issues that have had an affect on me and continue to have an affect on me, I want to put them into the film but I don't want to beat people over the head with them. I'd rather let them be woven into the fabric of the movie and then the audience can decide what they want.
NP: You talk about the genesis of District 9 being in 2007, but obviously it grew out of your 2005 short Alive In Joburg. Where did the initial inspiration for that come from?
NB: Well, I left Joburg in '97 and I would go back almost every year. Johannesburg became something that I was very interested in, just from a sociopolitical standpoint. It was one of the many topics that surround the issues of racism and violence and segregation and stuff, it's one of the cities that epitomizes that. I used to go back all the time and I got way more interested in it as time went on. And then, separately from that, I'm just a total science fiction nut. So one day, I realized that I wanted to do a short film that merged those two things. I just wanted to see science fiction in this setting because I found the setting very, very creatively fascinating, and so I just merged the two of them.
NP: Between the short and the feature you met up with Peter Jackson thanks to Halo.
NB: I worked on Halo solidly. I mean I moved down to New Zealand to work on Halo, and I worked on it day in day out for four or five months, and then it collapsed. The studios fought with one another and the film bottomed out, and within a day or two I was working on District 9. Obviously it didn't have a name at that point.
What happened was Pete said, "This is fallen over and we're sorry this has happened, and we like working with you and you know everybody down here," meaning his production team, and the artists and the whole infrastructure. So he was like, "Why don't you just keep all the momentum that you have going and just work with these artists on a new film, and we'd be happy to get that greenlit and I can be on board as a producer."
Then Fran Walsh [Peter Jackson's wife] said, "Why don't you take your short film," which was one of the reasons they hired me for Halo, "Why don't you turn that into a feature." I thought that was an awesome idea and the next day I was working on what would be District 9.
NP: The most noticeable re-tool from Alive In Joburg to District 9 is that in the short you had multiple ships. Why did you choose to make the switch and concentrate on a scenario with just one ship?
NB: Well, part of the process of turning it into this feature length thing, the first step was to very clearly figure out the whole world, this alternate reality that the film would be set inside of. Because I thought once the alternate reality was really nailed, once I knew exactly what it was, then it would be much easier to write a story set within that world. Once I figured out who the aliens were and where they came from, I liked the idea that it was one ship.
NP: And that does make for a nice segue into a sequel. Do you have that planned?
NB: It certainly isn't planned. If audiences like this movie then I would love to make a sequel.
NP: I walked out salivating for the sequel.
NB: Oh really? Cool. I don't know what it is.
NP: You kept the original actors from Alive In Joburg and brought them back for District 9. Was there any pressure for you to bring in Hollywood heavyweight names for the feature version?
NB: No. The whole experience with Peter being the producer has been like a really lucky, lucky thing for me because if I believed in it, he would believe in it. If I said I really didn't want to use any known actors, and he thought it was right for what the concept of the movie was, then he just stood behind me. All of these [things] that you would think I would have been forced to have done he just nullified instantly. Like it was always going to be set in Johannesburg instead of LA, it was always going to have no-name actors in it, it was always going to have thick South African accents, all these things that without his involvement I don't know how they would have happened. So no, there was never that pressure.
NP: Well it was the right decision for the believability given that it's done in a faux documentary style.
NB: Yeah, totally.
NP: What difficulties did working in South Africa present?
NB: In terms of infrastructure, the crew was actually very good. Most of them came up from Cape Town because Cape Town has a very established commercial industry. They shoot a lot of European commercials in Cape Town. So the crew was pretty efficient and hands on and cool.
I'd have to say the most irritating thing about shooting in South Africa was anything that relied on any kind of institution, like the different government departments. All of the stuff that I wanted to include in the movie, like I wanted to use the Army, and they would string us along for six months and then pull out right before we were about to start shooting. I wanted as much police involvement as possible, because all these things make South Africa South Africa. Then the police would string us along and then bail: "You're not allowed to use us, you're not even allowed to use our logo."
That just kept happening, all these massive things that we were trying to get assistance with, get help with, and no one came through -- like not one thing. So that was incredibly frustrating. Of course, I know when the movie comes out in South Africa people in South Africa will totally like it, and it'll do well...I think they just haven't had enough films made there to have a political infrastructure that can deal with it.
That annoyed the hell out of me. And then we shot in a really impoverished area of Soweto called Tshiawelo and that experience was both really grueling and also totally amazing at the same time. It was the most abrasive, horrendous environment I've ever been in in my life. We were in there every single day in the worst environment you can imagine. But everyone on the crew realized that those in Tshiawelo have to live there. This is where they live. We just had a month there and we were having trouble.
NP: That's the camp where we see the aliens living.
NB: Yeah.
NP: But that's actually where real humans are living.
NB: Yeah, Exactly. The only life imitating art, or art imitating life thing that happened with the film is that where we filmed District 9, Tshiawelo, which has all the shacks that you see in the movie, the government had made a lot of the residents of Tshiawelo eligible for government subsidized housing. Not everyone, but a whole bunch of people that were living in the shacks were moved out by the government and moved into these small, cheap houses that the government was trying to provide for people. A whole bunch of them I think were not eligible, or their time hadn't come, but they were being moved anyway because the government had some other plan for that area. So we inherited this area. We were allowed to take it over and use it because the government was going to destroy it, and then I think at the end of the film we gave the materials back. All the corrugated iron, the shacks were stripped down and reused in some of the other impoverished areas.
NP: This isn't like any other alien film, which is what is so exciting about it. It's real in both in terms of the story and the style you chose to tell it in. But do you think in a real world situation we'd actually allow aliens not only to live -- but to breed -- alongside us for 28 years? Don't you think there'd just be some kind of "accident" or manufactured incident to cover their annihilation?
NB: It's a really interesting question. I mean it's those kind of questions that are the reason the film exists, because I love thinking about that kind of thing. It depends on the circumstances, and it depends on how much attention is on them, but yeah, I agree, humans may not be very into the idea of some other race breeding at a higher rate than we are. It's interesting stuff. I wish some situation in reality would present itself so I could see the outcome.
NP: 'Cause the sad thing is, as grim as your film is, in many respects it felt to me like that would be the best case scenario for how we'd treat aliens who needed to settle on earth.
NB: Yeah [laughs]. I know. Yeah, it's probably pretty true.
NP: Now that District 9 is coming out, and because of the buzz around it, are you guys hoping that Halo may finally move forward?
NB: I don't know. I certainly never made District 9 to try and get Halo resurrected again. I don't even know what I would do if they offered it to me. I may say no actually. I don't know how Pete feels fully about it as well, whether he would do it or not. It's just a weird feeling when you work on something for that long and put so much effort in, and then have it bottom out over some kind of weird politics. It's hard to get back on that horse.
NP: Do you feel burnt out by it?
NB: No, no. I'm not creatively burnt out on it at all. I love the world of Halo. Creatively I could go back to it in a second. It's more a question of why would I go back to it given how they treated the situation and how they treated me. I'd rather work on something else I think.
NP: Do you have that something else in mind?
NB: Yeah. I have one thing that I'm working at the moment that when I get back to Vancouver I'm going to start writing, which is my own new sci-fi film. I hope that's my next one.
District 9 opens in theaters nationwide on August 14.
baudot said:
bob said:
I hated it...
What, no comment on the endless stormtrooper effect? The bad guys couldn't hit with a single shot out of thousands versus an unarmored target, or one carrying a partial body shield that wasn't covering his head.
For all that, I had no problem putting those complaints on hold and enjoying the effects ride.
I took it to be both.
As for it being "selectively stupid," it was an 11-minute piece transformed into a full-length movie, and despite it not being the HALO movie, it was still very much a "video game movie." It was two-dimensional, it was heavy-handed, and I very much liked it.
Bob raises some good points, but there are easy narrative explanations for most of them. The only reason to feel insulted by this film is if the viewer limited themselves by expecting too much from this movie. I was neither disappointed nor surprised by anything I saw in this project. This is because I full realized going in that it was by the guy who was supposed to direct HALO but then Peter Jackson said "hey, since HALO fell through, why don't you make that short film you made into a full-length?"
I think one of the best things about it was the South African accents. That and the awesome weapon effects.