Neill Blomkamp’s debut feature has captivated audiences before it’s even out. Their marketing plays up the segregation o alien visitors, with bus stops for humans only and such. In the film, a government official working in an alien ghetto becomes contaminated and must team up with an alien to fight his corrupt government. Produced by Peter Jackson, District 9 is sci-fi action with something to say.
Crave Online: How did you come up with an original sci-fi idea?
Neill Blomkamp: And also just placing the science-fiction story in a slightly unusual environment. I mean, aliens arriving on earth isn't particularly unique, but the idea of science-fiction in a slightly unique setting where they arrive here, it was really appealing to me so that's true. In terms of what I like about the story is I like the simplicity of a character. He really has one of the most serious arcs of a character that I've seen in a while, like starting here and ending 180 degrees from where he began. Sharlto's character is my favorite part about the actual narrative story.
Crave Online: Did you know from the get go what you wanted the aliens to look like?
Neill Blomkamp: I knew that I wanted them to be insect-like but that was only after a lot of design and experimentation. There’s one thing about the film which is that their society and the way that the aliens operate on earth is dictated by this kind of pyramid hive structure that they have. So if they are more like a termite hive and you remove the top of their society, they’re different to us biologically in that they have no sense of guidance. They’re like drones, so they’re actually a different biological society. I really liked that idea because it’s just a cool science fiction kind of idea. So the idea is they arrive on earth and the operational ends of their society have died off. So that is by nature very insect-like or ant-like. Once I started picking up on that, I really wanted to stick with the idea of them being insect-like but also obviously, because of the nature of the film, you have to sort of empathize with the alien characters. That threw a whole other spanner into the works because now all of a sudden, they have to be alien but then you have to empathize with them so they need that human psychology of the face that we can recognize or that we can at least extract the emotions from. They probably have to be anthropomorphic. They can’t be like a dog shape or a cow shape. So that’s how the design came about but it wasn’t easy. It was quite a long process. I also was trying to be aware of what I thought would work well in the visual effects realm with a kind of limited budget, which is typically like hard surface stuff. You can put dirt on it and it reflects light well.
Crave Online: Were there any other concepts or ideas?
Neill Blomkamp: I don't think so; I think everything we came up with was pretty much designed to work within the sort of perimeter that we had said. But that doesn't mean that we weren't thinking about big ideas. Everything felt attainable, I think because the film, even though the scope and the ideas are big, they're kind of presented in not an epic way. It's kind of a smaller contained story with an epic background. So I think if you deal with it that way then most ideas actually become achievable. I guess a whole story on the mothership probably wouldn't be achievable with our budget. Everything was on the table, everything. It was just whatever the best story is.
Crave Online: How much input have you had in the marketing campaign?
Neill Blomkamp: Well the marketing campaign, it's definitely Sony whose come up with a campaign. Most of the stuff that you were talking about was just about the segregated signs and the “No Non-Humans Allowed” kind of vibe, and I think Pete and I both just liked that and it really touched on the essence of the film which is about segregation. I felt like something, like for me that I would respond to well if I saw that on a bus stop it would really interest me, I'd want to know what that was about so yeah, I think it's their creative mind and us signing off on ideas that are cool and us giving input in certain places, but it's mostly them.
Crave Online: What are you saying with the racial subtext in the film?
Neill Blomkamp: Well, first of all, when I started making the film, when we started conceiving the very idea of how District 9 would grow out of Joburg, I think for the first few months I was thinking of a film that probably was too serious and took itself too seriously. It had some of my thinking with those topics. There was too much of me in it. I pretty quickly started realizing that the smartest thing to do, especially with my first film and the fact that I have to grow a lot as a filmmaker before I do anything serious is just make something that’s accessible and more of a ride, that’s more fun. I actually wrote “satire” on like four pieces of paper and stuck them up on my wall to remind me that satire is the way to go with this film. When that happened, everything about it just kind of loosened up and became more enjoyable because from a satirical standpoint, it becomes sort of a not as serious, more creative environment to be in, especially as a first time director. So having said that, I grew up in South Africa during Apartheid and I very actively wanted to make a film that had science fiction placed in that African setting, specifically that South African setting. There’s no question that there’s many, many, many elements of Apartheid and segregation and now xenophobia in South Africa that have made their way into the film but they provide the sort of foundation that the film rests on top of. It’s like a framework that’s there and it provides a very strange alternate reality because there’s aliens involved, but it doesn’t beat you over the head. So if you see the film, it’s like I’m not trying to force those kind of soapbox beliefs of mine onto you. I’m simply saying this is all stuff that affected me when I was a kid and I put science fiction into it. Now you can take from it what you want within a sort of satirical, dark humor kind of backdrop.
