Chappie;House Of Cards
Conceptual design is South African director’s big thing, but he’s getting better at people
There’s nothing better for Neill Blomkamp than creating a cinematic playground of science fiction. So much so that sometimes other stuff falls down the director’s pri- ority list.
“Scripts and actors and characters for me take a back seat to visual or conceptual design, and film lets you play with those if you want to,” says the South African filmmaker, 35. “That’s definitely more my domain.”
His movie Chappie (in cinemas today) envisions a futuristic world policed by robots, and one of them is stolen and raised to be human. It’s akin to those scenarios Blomkamp’s already created on screen. In 2009’s Oscar-nominated District 9 it was a tweaked vision of apartheid in South Africa but with segregated refugee extraterrestrials; and 2013’s Elysium tackled immigration, class warfare and other struggles as it showcased a luxury space station for the rich and a wrecked Earth for everyone else.
Blomkamp says he spends a lot of time thinking about social issues, though Chappie is “more about the nature of consciousness and what it means to be alive and the idea of what the soul is”.
He’s been interested in A.I. since his late teens, he says.
“I tend to be less interested in people and more interested in statistics or patterns or concepts,” he says. “I’m good DNA for someone interested in science fiction and I’m not totally good DNA for someone who should be telling stories about people. But I’m becoming better at it.”
He also adores the movie Alien, and his next project is adding to Ridley Scott’s iconic sci-fi franchise. Blomkamp signed on last month to develop and direct a script that would take place after Prometheus 2, the 2016 follow-up to the Alien prequel starring Noomi Rapace and Michael Fassbender. Blomkamp’s first experience with the fanged race of horrifying Xenomorphs occurred when he was eight and watching the original 1979 film at a resort. His parents interrupted his viewing, however, when they turned off the TV right at the infamous scene where a chest-bursting creature came flying out of a guy — not because it was too gory, but because it was time to go to the beach.
“I was having like a panic attack because I was getting pulled away from it,” Blomkamp recalls with a laugh. “It literally blew my mind. It took me like two years to get my hands on it and see the rest of it.”
Doing an Alien movie isn’t about adding to a legendary property as much as it is being a fan eager to play around in a familiar world, even one he didn’t create.
“It’s like this powder keg of all my favourite ingredients,” Blomkamp says. “It has so many different things in it that I love: challenging the director to make something that has this real terror or dread about it, playing on some primal fears that we have, all the way over to creature design, and theatrical design in general from sound to visuals.
“Everything about it is exactly the thing that I love.”
I’m good DNA for someone interested in science fiction