Capone Sits Down With DISTRICT 9 Director/Co-Writer Neill Blomkamp!!

Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here, with some very serious advice about whether or not you should read the following interview. First off, there are spoilers. It's almost impossible for there not to be, since those of who who haven't seen the Peter Jackson-produced DISTRICT 9, have no idea what it's really about, and that's exactly how it should stay. After the screening of the film we did in Chicago last week, the number-one comment people made to me (aside from telling me how much it kicked ass) was that the film was not at all what they'd expected based on the trailers. That is a deliberate thing by everyone involved in the making of this film about aliens living in the slums of Johannesburg, South Africa. Director Neill Blomkamp's history is that of a maker of some great short films, most of which are science fiction in nature, including "Alive in Joberg," which served as the jumping off point for DISTRICT 9. He even made a short film based on the video game HALO, which Jackson had hired Blomkamp to direct a feature version of a couple years back before Fox unceremoniously pulled the plug on it. I spoke to Blomkamp (as well as DISTRICT 9 star Sharlto Copley, which you find HERE) the day after the now-legendary world premiere screening of DISTRICT 9 at Comic-Con. Granted, this kind of film was almost designed to get a great response at an event like Comic-Con, especially with Peter Jackson on hand to introduce both the film and the Blomkamp and Copley to the world. But based on subsequent reaction from both critics and preview audiences, DISTRICT 9 seems poised to be a huge step in the history of relatively inexpensive (the film cost only $30 million to make), independently produced, hardcore, R-rated science fiction. The film is a glorious achievement in social commentary, originality, special effects, and balls-out, celebratory violence. Before we get to the interview, I should add that it was really interesting to meet up with these Blomkamp and Copley again in Chicago last week, only two weeks after their whirlwind Comic-Con debut. Chicago was the first stop of their official promotional tour, which meant it was their first Q&A in front of an audience. They'd had time to process what happened to them at Comic-Con, and how they literally went from virtual unknowns to the belles of the ball with one screening. As I mentioned, this interview took place at Comic-Con, but during their Chicago Q&A, the one thing they had the most to say about was their dizzying experience in San Diego. Anyway, enjoy Neill Blomkamp, and don't forget to check out my discussion with Sharlto Copley.
Capone: Hey man. Neill Blomkamp: Hello. Capone: So the two obvious questions that I had were, first, what happened to the interrogation scene that you guys have built the whole teaser trailer around? I was waiting for that moment in the film. NB: Well, the answer to that is because… We shot a lot of improv-based stuff. We had a very clear script and we had all of the scenes and in certain cases we had dialog written. It was a full-on script, and then once sort of the parameters that were set within the script had been met, we had the ability to seriously get into improv, which was always the goal from the beginning. And in some cases entire scenes were improved, and that would be one of them and you know, I think our shooting ratio was probably far greater than most films, which meant editing was really a laborious process. Capone: You are actually forming the secondary material story in the editing room. [Laughs] NB: Right, because like I said, the script was pretty much locked down, but it just meant that we had additional stuff that we had filmed and then shitloads of different types of performances and different takes, hundreds of different takes. When you are in the editing room and you have got your story that you are fallowing and then you have all of this additional stuff, like remember when the guys have the little insect rodents on the ground that he’s talking about where they cut it? Capone: Sure. NB: That will be an example of a totally improved thing, right. There are many things like that throughout the film, some of them stay in the edit and then some of them just don’t work, so the interrogation just didn’t work. Capone: It works in the trailer. That’s one hell of a trailer! The other question that I had, just based on the end of the film is, what happens in three years? [Both Laugh] NB: I’m wondering myself, yeah! Shit, I don’t know… Capone: I don’t think there was a single person there last night who didn’t want to know. NB: Yeah. There’s a lot of different ways it can go. When we were writing it, we went down some of the roads that were pretty hilarious and some of them were really cool, because it can really go in a lot of different ways, but ultimately I just haven’t thought about where it’s going to end up. I thought so hard about creating the world of DISTRICT 9 and trying to make it feel authentic and real that all of the effort I think went into that, firstly finding that story, because first it was creating a world and you have got this three-dimensional, multi-faceted alternate universe, so you have to find a story within that, because what’s the point of view? Is it the human’s point of view or the alien’s point of view? Whose point of view is it? Once I nailed that down and then started to flesh the story out, that was difficult enough, so any thoughts about what he’s going to do when he comes back is going to be…[waves his had indicating something to be discussed far in the future]. Capone: Is the idea that you will show us that, or is it just going to be left hanging? NB: You mean in the future? Capone: Yeah, like I guess I’m asking about a sequel. NB: It’s very interesting, because throughout the whole process of making the film, I think I was just so embedded in it that it truly hadn’t occurred to me, but within the last month it has now started to come up, and I have started to think about revisiting that whole environment. I always judge everything based on my gut reaction, like I always base things on like “How do I feel about that on an emotional core creative level?” If I think about DISTRICT 9 creatively again, I feel very positive about it, like I feel like that’s a world I would love to go back into, but I feel the same way about a few other ideas, too. Capone: It would be a very different film too, with whatever direction you chose to go and it wouldn’t be this. NB: Actually when I started thinking about it, there was one version of the story that we had originally written which would work, but kind of feels the same, but I don’t know, that’s all years away. Capone: I’m sure people have already asked you about a sequel, and if they haven’t, they will. Tell me about some of the rules that you adhered to. You mentioned grounding it in reality and that’s key to the success of this film. That’s the thing that kind of floored me about the whole thing. The more I thought about it, the more it impressed me. Tell me about some of the rules you adhered to to make sure you were grounded in reality. There is humor there, but not ridiculousness… NB: Not too much. You are right, the first protocol for the entire film was that I wanted to make a science fiction film that felt as grounded as possible, but also it was in South Africa. That was the most important thing for me that it was in Johannesburg. So, it felt like I wanted to make a film that had a lot of the science fiction ingredients that I grew up loving, but placed in the environment that I grew up in and I hadn’t really seen that before, that I can think of. When that was the goal, then it needed to be “OK how do we go about making this feel as real as possible,” but some of the… I don’t want to use the word “cliché,” but some of the sort of construct of genre movies, the framework and how the audience perceives them means that to a certain extent, you have to distill things down. You have to some sort of three-act flow, and there are rules that you have to adhere to within a storytelling context. And if you are not careful, you can dumb things down. You can make things feel inauthentic by doing that, if that makes any sense. For example, a documentary is pure realism and a documentary about DISTRICT 9 would be fucking awesome But no one would go see it, except maybe a select few people would go and see it, right? That was the number one thing in my mind, “How do you make something feel as real as possible, but isn’t going to disappoint people,” because this is my first film, I can’t go and fuck it up and have no one watch it, even if I love it. So, the most difficult thing by far for me wasn’t so much creating a world and making that feel real, I felt like I could do that. It was how do you tell a story that is compelling, but in a realistic science-fiction environment and that scared the shit out of me. And then the technical stuff within making it feel real, I think one of the things is making sure that the visual effects are not put up on a pedestal, that you don’t kind of say “Here’s a million dollars worth of effects!” Capone: And shine the spotlight on it, yeah. NB: Yeah, and then move on to something else. It’s more that you just kind of catch them and go off them, or they are over exposed. In certain cases a lot of those shots had been run through a VHS machine, which is hilarious. I told the effects guys, because we only did that after they delivered all of the finals. “I ran your shit through a VHS machine!” It works, though, because then it’s like “Fuck, that feels kind of real.” I think it’s just having both a complete respect for visual effects and a process for making them feel real and then at the same time disregarding them. Capone: One of the things that have bugged me about the way films portray alien races--and I think there's even a little bit of it in the footage we saw from AVATAR yesterday--that all of the aliens look exactly the same, but yours have different colorings, subtle variations in their features--beyond the little bits of clothing they might be wearing. NB: And they paint shit on themselves, too. Capone: That’s what I thought. There are visual cues that make it very clear that, like humans, two don’t look the same, and you have differentiated them to a degree. I love that. NB: That’s cool. I’m glad you noticed that, yeah. We spent quite a lot of time doing that. I always looked at them like Magpies, like they would get interested in something and then they would collect whatever it was or sometimes they would put it on themselves. Like Paul, which is the human given name to him, the character who is the friend of the lead alien, the yellow waspy guy, he’s got spark plugs that are screwed into his shell, if you look at him and into his head, so it’s like he just has an interest in those. And it’s kind of funny if you think of them on that animalistic level, then a lot of creative ideas can kind of come out of that. Capone: Yeah. When HALO didn’t happen, whose idea was it to take this particular short and make it into a feature. When you all were thinking, “Okay, we can do something brand new or we can expand on a previous work,” who brought up expanding the short? NB: It was actually Fran [Walsh]. I was standing in their kitchen and they said, “Let’s just make something else. We can get another film off of the ground for you, since this son of a bitch imploded.” I was hyper keen on that, because I knew what everybody had done in New Zealand, with Weta and everybody else on the crew, and I also knew how the environment with Pete would work and how I would be kind of shielded and especially if it was my idea, then it would be even better. So I think my mind was going down the road of something new and it was actually Fran who said “Why don’t you take your short film and turn it into a film,” and that was the best idea. I was like “yes,” so from there we started working on it. Capone: This film, in the best possible way, made me really angry at humanity. This is a great story of injustice, and obviously you wanted to represent South Africa and Johannesburg, but audiences outside of that nation are going to see the parallels… NB: I like the idea of audiences outsides of there seeing Joburg, I love that. I see what you mean though. Capone: The best science fiction is overtly political at times. NB: The private military contractors… Capone: Yeah and the bureaucratic angle to it. But there's not getting around that it does seem like a statement about a different kind of apartheid. NB: It is. It totally is. Capone: Not like you are hiding that or anything. NB: No, I’m not. It’s a story about xenophobia and most people in North America don’t know this, but within a week of us rolling the cameras on the film, Johannesburg woke up to the impoverished residents of the slum areas, lynching and setting fire to all of the illegal Zimbabwean immigrants. It was a mass murder, serious mob stuff and that happened the day we started filming, so now all of a sudden… Before that point, xenophobia in South Africa was highly interesting to me, and I grew up there, and there is no question that’s what the fabric of the film is, but that within a week of us filming was now, within South Africa, I was making a film now about something that was far more serious than what I had initially gone about doing, so it wont make any difference to the rest of the world. But to South Africa, I just hope that they don’t feel like I have started stomping around with gun boots on something that is much more serious than I'd intended. I was hyper aware of the fact that I needed to make a film that would allow me to make other films, so I had to make something that had the political stuff that I find fascinating and the stuff that I grew up with, but not ram it down people’s throats, and I think DISTRICT 9 does that. I think it has the fabric and the framework and the interesting stuff there and it poses questions, but it doesn’t beat you over the head with it, and then the foreground story is a personal story. Capone: Yeah. Let’s talk about your lead actor. How did you decide on Sharlto? What made you think this director friend of yours could act? NB: Did you like him in the film? Capone: I loved him in the film. I almost wish I hadn’t seen him before the film, because I wanted to believe that’s what he looked like with the hair and all--the ultimate bureaucrat. NB: That is the ultimate bureaucrat. I knew…Sharlto [Copley] is a little bit older than me, so when I was in High School, he was just out of high school and he and another friend of mine were the closest thing to the film industry in South Africa that I was connected to, and I don’t think he’s ever really wanted to be an actor. If anything, he’s more of a Sacha Baron Cohen kind of guy, like if you unleashed him with a Borat… If you just said “Be this character” and just unleashed him in the public, he would be as good as him, literally, and I knew that, but he has never acted in anything, so this is one of the things that makes Pete Jackson producing it so awesome is that I said “Look, can I use my high school friend?” He was like “OK.” He did well, right? Capone: Yeah, he was fantastic without a doubt. Neill, it was great to meet you. Good luck man! Thanks. NB: Thank you. Cheers!
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