Interview: 'District 9' Director Neill Blomkamp

Neill Blomkamp isn't a name that most moviegoers know yet, but in a matter of days that's going to change dramatically. After an overwhelmingly positive reception at this year's San Diego Comic-Con, Blomkamp's directorial debut District 9 arrives in theaters with a wave of critical acclaim (not to mention word of mouth) pushing it towards becoming the possible sleeper hit of the summer. Needless to say, it doesn't hurt that the film was nurtured through production by Peter Jackson, but given the depth and substance of its engaging, thought-provoking sci-fi subject matter, District 9 seems destined to be a place that many people will soon visit.

The film stars newcomer Sharlto Copley as a South African social worker who finds himself caught up in a battle between the alien refugees and the military who plans to relocate them. Cinematical spoke to Blomkamp in the days after Comic-Con to discuss its reception, its conception, and everything in between. In addition to talking about th the film's weighty themes, Blomkamp talked about its many technical challenges, and reflected on what about it seems to strike a chord with moviegoers.

Cinematical: Maybe just to get started you can talk about how you conceived the structure of this, in particular the idea of combining a loosely scripted structure with a lot of improvisation.
Neill Blomkamp: We very much had a script. The idea was to have a very clearly-written script and a clear idea of what the story was and the parameters that the story would happen within. Then, I got Sharlto Copley, who's my childhood friend, to be Wikus because on a scene by scene basis he would have the freedom to become this character, and I wouldn't box him in with any particular lines. So when you're directing it you have to be watching to make sure that you're sticking within those parameters and that even though he's making it his own and going all over the place that he is hitting those story beats and the overall curve of the film is still being maintained. But yeah, we absolutely had a script that we wrote in 2007 and then modified in 2008.

Cinematical: Gavin Hood graduated from doing a South African film, Tsotsi, to doing more mainstream Hollywood material in Wolverine. Why do you think it is that in the last couple of years, South African filmmakers have seemed to find an international or even just Western audience more readily than those from other cultures?

Blomkamp: If you just compare South Africans to the rest of the world, I think that white South Africans and especially English-speaking white South Africans are exactly the same as Brits or Australians or New Zealanders or Canadians or Americans. So it's very different than comparing them to a Middle Eastener, and I think that's why. I think that if you're an English-speaking white South African, as opposed to an Afrikaans South African, you automatically just live in a world that is very Western kind of world. At the same time, there is a very serious and racially-charged background in the country that South Africans come from, but their sensibilities, and I think, the fabric of their culture is incredibly close to America.

Cinematical: How difficult or easy was it to juggle the film's thematic elements and still maintain the sense of a compelling story?

Blomkamp: Well if you have a clear enough idea in your mind [and] if you can boil the essence of what the film is down in your mind to, even if it's an emotion that's in me or something I can relate to on a very basic level, because a lot of how I operate is all based on instinct. It's like I can't verbalize a lot of it, it just has to feel right, which I guess is how directors all sort of operate. So when you're going about the action sequences and the flow of the story, like when I was writing it with Terri [Tatchell], I kind of made sure that whatever that natural feeling that felt like I was getting to the essence of what this film was meant to be, if I felt that in the way that I was approaching the action, it meant that whatever the core ideas are, of which I have some in my head, it meant that I was getting close to it. And, if you just do action for the sake of action, and you don't reinforce what the basic emotional core of the film is, then it's meaningless. So at the end, it's really a story of redemption, and hopefully it should be about the guy who made wrong decisions in his life and been an indirect racist, is laying waste to this group that has been oppressing another group for a whole bunch of years. So hopefully it works on an emotional level first.

Cinematical: How important was it to show a degree of species solidarity – humans versus aliens – as perhaps an ironic counterpoint to ethnic segregation?

Blomkamp: I definitely think a lot of that is conscious. What I was faced with at the beginning of the film was trying to decide how overtly I go about trying to beat those themes and ideas over people's heads, or if they're there and they're more subtle and they just make up the fabric of the film. What I decided was that for my first film it would be smarter to have them there but not to hammer people to death with them and that it would be a little bit more ambiguous. It wouldn't be clear whether or not I actually had a message, but rather that all of these themes that interest me are being presented to the audience, and you can make up your own mind and you can view this hopefully in a somewhat honest environment. So if all of the humans see things from one point of view, then you will get to see them from another point of view; I mean, I tried to do that, but I don't know how well it works.

Blomkamp: It was interesting to see your film and Shane Acker's 9 presented at Comic-Con because they're both first-time directorial efforts shepherded to release by a more established filmmaker. During the 9 panel Tim Burton said his role was primarily to fight the battles with the studio so Shane could focus on the movie; is that at all how you would characterize your relationship with Peter Jackson as District 9's producer?

Blomkamp: Yeah, I think that's pretty close. His main thing that he kept saying to me was make the film you want to make, and he really pushed that. He was like, let us be the producers, let us worry about cash; you go out and make the film you want to make. So he didn't really have many battles to fight because contractually I think he had control over the film anyway, but having said that I think he was aware to make sure that decisions that were being made that were creative decisions were mine so that the film was me. But if I brought him into the edit room and showed him a scene or showed him the whole film, he would say, "I think you're losing the audience here," or "I think this is blurred – I don't understand what's going on there." So there was a lot of input from him that was, to just have a really experienced filmmaker around to sort of keep me on the rails and guide things a little bit.

Cinematical: Technically, if I understand correctly, you used very little performance capture in terms of bringing the prawns to life.

Blomkamp: Pretty much in any shot with an alien interacting with a human, which 99 percent is Christopher interacting with Wikus, there was Jason Cope, who was the actor who plays Christopher and who also plays all of the other aliens in the film. He was always on set in a lycra, light-reflective suit, and he would be interacting with Sharlto. It was not performance capture from a data-recording standpoint; like, there were no motion-capture cameras around. But once our live-action camera was tracked, the animators at Image Engine would sort of trace-animate the motion of Jason, almost literally like tracing him. That rotomation would become the essence of the performance of this digital creature, and then they would paint Jason out and put the digital one in, and you would have both performances and they would both be real and they would both be interacting with one another. It's just very difficult and very expensive to paint someone out of a moving-camera [image] and then replace them with something, but we factored that in.

Cinematical: Why do you think science fiction filmmakers are turning to a style that is more organic and handheld. Is it just the technological opportunities available? Because this shares a lot in common with movies like Children of Men that have a documentary-style feel to them rather than the locked-off, formal style of older ones.

Blomkamp: Well, it's a good question. I think filmmakers in general are, as the tools become more and more advanced, you're able to tell stories in a way that I think is more realistic. The technology just wasn't there up until pretty recently, and it takes a bit of time for the normal artistic way of approaching something to become a mainstream thing. So now that the technology is there, for me personally, and Children of Men is one of my favorite films of the last decade, so I think that people are starting to realize – or like I said, you can only make it a personal choice – but for me to see the fantastic placed in a real setting, it makes it more impactful than seeing those things in a magical, fantastical way. It just makes it less real, so I don't connect to it as much, so I think it's about connectivity and trying to make the audience feel that this is real and you're not messing with them, you're just putting them there.