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[[1L]] september 2009 EMPIRE www.empireonline.com EMPIRE september 2009 [[2R]]

D i r e c t i n g t h e h a lo

m o v i e w a s s u p p o s e D

t o s e n D N e i l l B l o m k a m p

i n t o t h e h o l ly w o o D

s t r at o s p h e r e — u n t i l

s t u D i o s q u a b b l i n g s u n k

i t. n o w h e ’ s t r y i n g f o r

t h e s l e e p e r s m a s h

o f t h e s u m m e r w i t h

d i s t r i c t 9 , v i a t h e

h e l p o f p e t e r J a c k s o n

a n D a l i e n s

w o r d s N i c k d e s e m l y e N

be i N g B u d d i e s w i t h p e t e r J a c k s o N c o m e s w i t h a f e w p e r k s . y o u ’ l l g e t t o B r o w s e h i s v a s t

collection of World War I weapons and biplanes. If you ask nicely, he might let you hold one of his Oscars. And if you’re ever in the locality of Masterton, north of Wellington, you might just get a chance to stay in the geekiest spare room on Earth: Bilbo’s Hobbit hole from The Lord Of The Rings, which now nestles in the garden of Jackson’s mansion.

“You know the six-star hotels in Dubai? Imagine a Shire version of that,” marvels Neill Blomkamp, first-time feature filmmaker and current Jackson protégé. “Pete just invited us up there one day. I didn’t really know what to expect. He’s got this underground passage — 100 metres or something — that leads out to a Hobbit village. I stayed in the little rooms with the circular doors and everything. It was pretty

“About your TV licence, sir...”

Multi-National United apparatchik

Wikus (Sharlto Copley) harasses the

E. T. slum-dwellers of District 9.

Director Neill Blomkamp

promises “a lot of crazy

technology”. Like this cannon

with built-in bottle-opener.

overwhelming.” And on top of that, your host might let you play with aliens and spaceships. But more on that shortly.

Flash back a couple of decades and Blomkamp, now 29, was breathing far less rarefied air. Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, he grew up during the ugly apartheid years when black citizens were forced into segregated zones, or ‘bantustans’. As a white child, he rarely ventured into these mysterious areas. Instead, he’d sit at home and tinker with the mechanical knick-knacks his dad, an engineer in the mining industry, brought home from work. A fixation that led him to futuristic, meticulously designed movies like Alien and RoboCop, which in turn inspired him to create short films that gave his dusty hometown a sci-fi makeover. “It always felt like there was a real soul to the worlds Neill created,” says long-time friend Sharlto Copley, who gave Blomkamp a job at his effects house, Deadtime, when he was 16. “It was always more about the emotion than

the design, from the first pieces he made.” Word quickly spread as the South African

wunderkind moved into the world of commercials — remember that Citroën one with the dancing car? — reaching the ear of Sir Ridley Scott, who was so impressed he signed Blomkamp to his production company, RSA. And when, in 2005, Peter Jackson decided to produce a live-action adaptation of hit video-game series Halo, Blomkamp was the newbie he picked to head it up, over a host of more experienced directors.

“With Halo, we wanted to find somebody new and godfather them through the process, rather than turn to an established person,” Jackson tells Empire, sipping a mug of tea at 7.30am on what he terms a “dark and stormy winter morning” in New Zealand. “Mary Parent, the Universal executive, called us one day and said she thought she’d found somebody really terrific. And it was Neill. She sent a DVD down with some of his commercials and short

films, and we thought it was great. So Mary jumped on a plane with Neill, flew him down, we met with him, and he basically stayed here. He didn’t get to go home again!”

The internet quivered with excitement. Bungie Studios’ Halo series, which pits genetically modified space-commando Master Chief against alien alliance the Covenant, is what’s known in the gaming industry as an ‘AAA’, a multi-format behemoth with a rabid fanbase. Blomkamp’s a Halo nut, Jackson an avid gamer himself (he tells us he and Guillermo del Toro are currently obsessed with Call Of Duty: World At War’s zombie-Nazi level, possibly the reason The Hobbit’s taking so long). With the latter overseeing the script and the former feverishly working with Weta on creature maquettes, vehicle designs and fantastical environments, surely it would be the first video-game adaptation to deliver the same thrills as its pixelly counterpart — a thundering, interplanetary war epic that would plant Blomkamp near the top of the Tinseltown leaderboard.

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Here: Wikus gets in trouble with some of Johannesburg’s more sinister citizens. Left (top to bottom): Weta’s District 9 concept art deliberately evoked the apartheid era. Okay, not the whopping great spaceship so much.

RELEasEd: September 4dIREctoR: Neill BlomkampstaRRIng: Sharlto Copley, Jason Cope, Robert HobbsthE PLot: Aliens have come to Earth, specifically South Africa. There they are quarantined and exploited by government agents. A corporate suit, Wikus, comes into contact with the aliens’ bio-weaponry and undergoes a strange transformation. Seeking refuge among the extra-terrestrials, he sparks a stand-off between the two worlds.BasEd on: Alive In Joburg, Blomkamp’s 2005 short that was shot guerrilla-style.

b r i e f i n g

Except it wouldn’t, and it didn’t. Four all-consuming months into pre-production, the debuting director’s dream turned to ashes.

“Because Halo was shared between Universal and Fox, the two studios started to squabble with each other,” sighs Jackson. “There was a sort of Biggus Dickus thing going on about who was going to control the project, who had the rights, who was paying for this or that. And slowly, over the course of three or four weeks, the whole thing just withered and died. It was heartbreaking. Fran (Walsh, his wife and filmmaking partner) and I felt terrible — this was Neill’s first feature and his first experience of this world...”

Blomkamp is less forthcoming about the farrago, but quietly declares, “If Halo ever comes back, it won’t be with me. I love that universe and feel I could have made a really good film, but with the politics and everything else attached, I don’t want anything to do with it.”

bu t e v e N a s t h e e f f e c t s w i z a r d p r e p a r e d t o B o o k h i s f l i g h t B a c k t o v a N c o u v e r , h i s h o m e

since 1997, salvation arrived — in the form of that DVD Mary Parent had mailed to New Zealand all those months ago. “It was Fran who came up with the idea,” says Jackson. “One of Neill’s shorts that we’d seen was called Alive In Joburg. I was out at a meeting and when I came back she was on the sofa with Neill, watching it again. She said, ‘How about we do a film based on this concept?’ And I said, ‘Okay, cool.’”

Alive In Joburg posits this question: what if an alien spaceship arrived on Earth, and its passengers greeted not with Kodály Method hand-signs and a lovely bit of John Williams synth, but shackles and an order to remain in ghettos? The six-minute short (available to watch on YouTube) is a stunning piece of work considering its tiny budget and the fact Blomkamp created the effects on his own in under two weeks. Key to its impact is the style and setting: a handheld camera, seemingly wielded by a documentary crew, venturing into the volatile streets of Johannesburg, capturing glimpses of aliens cowering in decrepit shanty-shacks. “It came from the fact I was a science-fiction geek growing up in Joburg,” explains

Blomkamp. “It’s a city with extreme wealth and extreme poverty. But it was only when I moved to Canada that I became fascinated with where I’d grown up, weirdly enough. I began to realise that I wanted to see the Western sci-fi I liked, but in this African setting. We always see sci-fi in LA or New York, so what does it look like when you put it in this new context?”

Well, it looks like District 9. The feature-length expansion of Alive In Joburg retains the short’s jittery vibe and promises to be that rarest of things: a smart summer sci-fi film, devoid of product placement, jive-talking robots and Vin Diesel’s sweaty pate. “It’s unique to Neill,” says Jackson. “A great mix of his life experience, witnessing the apartheid era in its final days, and this genre fantasy. When I made Bad Taste, my own experience didn’t stretch very far — the aliens were killing humans to make fast food, but apart from that it wasn’t too profound! Although District 9, even though it has this metaphor behind it, is

designed with tongue firmly in cheek.”These visitors from beyond the stars might

not be hankering for a man-burger, but they’re still, on the surface at least, creepy little buggers. It was quickly decided not to go the man-in-suit route, given Blomkamp’s VFX bent and the fact he wanted them to have freakishly inhuman proportions. Once the call was made to paint

them in later with CGI, the director gave his brief to effects house Image Engine: imbue them with the grace and grooming regime of a particularly unsanitary pygmy hippo.

“They slobber a lot, spit a lot, things like that,” says effects supervisor Dan Kaufman. “The tentacles on their faces have a mucusy secretion that drools down. There’s a lot of

aspects of them that are repulsive.” Jackson adds, “They’re high-tech — certainly more high-tech than Bad Taste’s aliens — but they look sort of like a cross between an insect and a prawn. The Afrikaners in the story actually call them ‘prawns’ as a derogatory nickname.”

Given their appearance, it’s hardly surprising that they’re treated with disdain by their human hosts, not least the employees of Multi-National United, a shadowy corporation that’s been created to control — read, exploit — them. District 9’s lead character is Wikus van der Merwe, an MNU inspector who has to deal with the aliens on a day-to-day basis. When it came to casting, Blomkamp made two bold decisions: he would a) ask his actors to entirely improvise their dialogue (a first for a summer sci-fi flick) and b) give the role of Wikus to the old friend who gave him his first job, Sharlto Copley.

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[[1L]] september 2009 EMPIRE www.empireonline.com EMPIRE september 2009 [[2R]]

›› District 9 is released on September 4 and will be reviewed in the next issue.

w h a t t h r e a t d o m o v i e a l i e N s p r e s e N t t o e a r t h ?

To capture the explosive action that ensues when MNU deploys its military might against Wikus and his new allies, Blomkamp returned to the impoverished South African slums where he’d made Alive In Joberg. Shooting over the summer of 2008, they were able to re-hire many of the people who’d worked on that short, this time providing them with fatter pay-slips, but it was to prove an exhausting experience for all.

“The shoot was the most difficult part. In fact, it was a nightmare,” recalls Blomkamp.

“There were days when I was just like, ‘My God, I’m fucking beat!’” For Copley, who often had to act against fresh air for scenes involving aliens, the hardships were compounded by the fact he had to scrabble around real landfills for weeks on end. “I remember a behind-the-scenes feature on Body Of Lies in which they had to clear trash away before one of the actors would lie down for a scene in a rubbish dump,” he laughs. “Well, I was climbing in the trash all the time for this film, man. Nails and broken glass everywhere.

We stayed in that environment for a very long time. It was filthy, a real challenge for everyone.”

The fact his old school buddy was wielding the megaphone only seems to have added to Copley’s woe. “Neill has certainly tested my commitment! Let’s just say that I’ve come to learn about an item in wardrobe called a modesty pack, or jewel bag. I had to wear one on my very first day, for a scene in the bath which has since been cut. I’m not sure it was ever going to be in the film — Neill may have just wanted to see if I would do it!”

Even without the syringe-littered sets and barely-clothed leading men, District 9 is not your average Hollywood movie. With little of the weight of expectation that came with Halo — plus the fact that Jackson, not the studio, has creative control — it has been able to roll along under the radar, shaping up into something that promises to be a totally original sci-fi experience. A crafty viral marketing campaign has seen online blogs written in the aliens’ language, as well as faux-MNU banners draped across bus stops and cinema lobbies (“Picking Up Non-Humans Is Forbidden... Report It Now!”). And the movie has refreshingly been rated R for ’80s-style extreme violence — as former gorehound Jackson explains with relish, “We went in aiming to be nice and graphic with the blood and guts. There were no constraints; it gets pretty crazy.”

Despite its lack of brand recognition and high count of unknown faces speaking funny, Jackson and Blomkamp are confident District 9 delivers enough mega-octane action to pull in audiences, especially in a ten-minute show- stopper (brought to life by Iron Man’s Embassy FX) where Wikus straps himself into a giant alien exo-suit to face down MNU’s intimidation forces. “The suit’s designed to look as mean as possible and create a primordial response. So it’s pretty cool,” says the director. “But you’re going to see a lot of crazy technology.”

And if this does prove to be the sleeper hit of the season, how will Blomkamp celebrate his success? New car? Big house? Army of lusty concubines? Nope. “I want to buy a radio-controlled helicopter,” he muses. “A state-of-the-art, gas-turbine RC chopper. Maybe even a whole fleet of them — that would be excellent.” nick@empiremagazine.com

E. t. (e. t.: the extra-terrestrial)placid, but healing powers could destroy the pharmaceutical industry. may also present potentially severe problems for telecommunications companies.

clover (cloverfield)hazardous to inner-city areas. possibly just a clumsy tourist who will hang out and then bugger off once it’s squashed all major New york city landmarks.

Puck (close encounters of the third kind)presents no threat beyond accidental mid-air collisions with its mothership. musical stylings can, however, become a bit repetitive.

Xenomorphs (alien)extremely dangerous. can be controlled with predators. pit them against each other and they’ll fight to the point when nobody really cares anymore.

the tenctonese (alien nation)more misunderstood than dangerous, unless drugged or tipsy on dairy products. tendency to go all melty when exposed to salt water.

“How did I end up headlining this film? That’s a very good question. I’m still trying to figure it out!” laughs the genial Copley, who has never acted on-screen before, beyond a cameo as ‘Sniper’ in Alive In Joburg. “I can say that throughout my school years I did an enormous amount of performance — at one point I could do 20 characters, all talking to each other in different accents. But after school I decided I’d rather direct and produce.”

The leftfield idea came to Blomkamp while shooting test footage in Johannesburg to raise funding. “I didn’t have any actor in mind for Wikus... A Hollywood star doing a South African accent could have been a trainwreck. But I asked Sharlto to play an MNU field agent for this promo piece, and as soon as he put on the bulletproof vest and started to improv, it was clear he had to be the lead guy.” Once Jackson saw the footage, he threw his weight behind the decision. “We were dubious about him at first, because he was this high-school buddy of Neill’s, not an actor. But he’s the key to the improvisation working. He’s got what Ricky Gervais and Sacha Baron Cohen have got — he’s fearless, naturally very funny and also touching. District 9 is very much a day in the life of this guy, Wikus. And Sharlto is the heart and soul of the movie.”

Di s t r i c t 9 i s , a t i t s c o r e , t h e s t o r y o f o N e m a N ’ s t r a N s f o r m at i o N . w i k u s B e g i N s t h e

film as a yes-man, fixated on climbing up the corporate pole. “He’s a bureaucrat; he does his boss’ bidding,” Copley says. “It’s a desk job, but once in a while he has to go out to deal with the aliens and that’s the part of the job he doesn’t like. The aliens are difficult: if you invited one of them over for tea, you might be fine, or he might eat your dog or puke all over your lounge. It could go either way!”

When he gets exposed to an alien bio-weapon, however, Wikus begins to transform, black goo streaming out of his nose, the colour of his retinas mutating. As his colleagues and family start to view him with suspicion, it seems his only refuge may lie within the place he detests, District 9. And as he spends time with one of the aliens, his eyes open to their plight. “The upper echelons of their society have died off,” explains Blomkamp, “and only the drones have been left behind, stranded on Earth. They could be extremely formidable, because they have a lot of tools for offensive colonising, but they don’t have any direction.”

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The stranded alien mothership is filled with technology that MNU wants to get its dirty mitts on.

Going viral: Wikus discovers the downside of sniffing suspicious

alien canisters.