District 9 couldn’t be contained. It cost $30 million to make and brought in $210 million and four Oscar nominations. Not bad for a Science Fiction movie. Not bad for any genre movie. Fans have been waiting to find out what happened with those aliens for four years and they are finally getting some word. Neill Blomkamp wrote a treatment for District 10 and it’s “really fucking cool.” But, and it’s a big but, Blomkamp isn’t sure he wants to make it.
Neill Blomkamp told Wired magazine that he wrote an 18-page treatment for District 10 with his partner Terri Tatchel, but that he wasn’t sure if he wants to commit to it. He wants to keep his options open. He also casually mentioned that he passed on making the new Star Wars for Elysium producer Simon Kinberg. Blomkamp’s new movie Elysium opens next month and he’s got the touching action comedy Chappie coming in the fall with the South African rap team Die Antwoord, Ninja and Yolandi Visser, playing themselves: Sharlto Copley and Dev Patel. Anything past that, he’s keeping close to his vest.
Elysium was supposed to be a small budget picture starring Die Antwoord's Ninja, who turned it down because he didn’t want to fake an American accent, Blomkamp then approached Eminem, who didn’ t want to leave Detroit, so the part went to Matt Damon, who got the picture a bigger budget. Damon says “About 15 minutes in, he pulled out what was essentially a homemade graphic novel of the movie. It absolutely blew my mind. I talked to Jim Cameron about Avatar early on and what struck me about Neill was the same thing that struck me about Cameron: The world had already been created. It existed in their minds.”
Elysium takes place in 2154 and Blomkamp believes he’s painting a fairly accurate picture of what Earth will look like when “The dice are going to be rolled, and either we’re going to end up coming out of this through technological innovation”—leaps in genetic engineering, say, or artificial intelligence—”or we’re going to go down the road of a Malthusian catastrophe.”Blomkamp gives the earths a 50-50 chance of survival. Elysium is not a message movie, Blomkamp hates those. He prefers allegory, satire, and dark humor. He says “Anybody who thinks they can change the world by making films is sorely mistaken.”
Peter Jackson put his reputation and money on the line to back District 9 and some might say that he owes Hollywood big time. Blomkamp loves everything about Los Angeles but the “fear-based, bottom-line-worshipping” film industry that wants him to crank out a sequel. He’s skirted the issue of a District 10 for years in interviews and said in 2012 "I'm not sure I'm making that film. It would be cool, but these films take two or three years to make, and the investments are so extreme, you can't accurately predict where you'll be a few years from now, I believe. If you're not creatively invested in it, you're making a mistake, and that creative investment happens day to day. So I don't know when that feeling for a District Whatever film happens."
Blomkamp was born in Johannesburg , South Africa in 1979, at the height of apartheid. His old man instilled a love of mechancial things, fixing cars other doodads and playing with guns. His mother ran a company that interpreted UN and NGO conferences, which is where he got his interest in sociopolitical issues. When apartheid was dismantled in 1994 it didn’t do away with racism. Violence and crime shot up in the white areas that had been previously protected. People put up electric fences and razor wire and rottweilers. Blomkamp saw both sides, a white 17-year-old friend of his family was shot dead in a driveway carjacking and he saw a rugby team brutally beat a black janitor. He isn’t ready to follow any easy path or let his vision suffer for the whims of show business. He told Wired “When any young director gets hired by a studio to do a $125 million film based on a preexisting piece of intellectual property, they’re climbing into the meat grinder. And what you’re coming out with on the other side is a generic, heavily studio-controlled pile of garbage that ends up on the side of Burger King wrappers.”
Blomkamp is at work on a comedy “somewhere between John Waters and Jackass” called Mild Oats. It features "a 3-foot-tall, photo-realistic silicone puppet [named Marvin] rocking a mullet and jailhouse tattoos. The deranged redneck stands completely naked, revealing six nipples and a prodigious, uncircumcised penis." No wonder he turned down Star Wars.
Elysium opens on August 9.
SOURCE: WIRED
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