Neill Blomkamp Poster


Jump to: Overview (2)  | Mini Bio (1)  | Spouse (1)  | Trade Mark (4)  | Trivia (7)  | Personal Quotes (58)

Overview (2)

Born in Johannesburg, South Africa
Height 5' 11" (1.8 m)

Mini Bio (1)


Spouse (1)

Terri Tatchell (? - present) ( 1 child)

Trade Mark (4)

Cinéma vérité technique
Blending naturalistic and photo-realistic computer-generated effects
Social commentary using Science Fiction
Often casts Sharlto Copley (District 9 (2009), _Elysium (2013)_ and Chappie (2015))

Trivia (7)

Graduated from Vancouver Film School's 3D Animation and Visual Effects program in 1998.
Immigrated to Canada at 18 years old.
(May 10, 2010) Merited a position in Time magazine's - The 100 Most Influential People in the World ("Artists" category) - with an homage contributed by Ridley Scott.
He is friends with Michael Bay.
Was set to direct a highly-anticipated movie adaptation of the popular video game Halo: Combat Evolved (2001) after a screenplay by Alex Garland. Peter Jackson would supervise as producer. There were initial difficulties because Microsoft, the owner of the game franchise, had a long list of demands, including 10 million dollar for the screenplay, 15% of the box office earnings, a budget of at least 75 million dollar and a lot of creative control. Most studies turned the project down, until Fox and Universal agreed to co-produce it. Ten million dollar were already spent on development, and Blomkamp even moved to New Zealand to oversee pre-production at WETA studios, when Universal tried to force budget cuts. Since neither Jackson or Microsoft were willing to agree on this, the project was shelved. Jackson then asked Blomkamp if he had any other ideas, and Blomkamp suggested an expanded remake of his short film Alive in Joburg (2005), which ultimately became his much praised feature film debut District 9 (2009).
Was considered to direct The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012).
Winner of the 2003 Leo Award for Best Direction of a Music Video for "Tango Shoes" by Bif Naked.

Personal Quotes (58)

Johannesburg is weird, because half of it is like Los Angeles. It feels like just wealthy parts of L.A. But half of it is severe slummy, something like Rio De Janiero or something. So it's kind of weird, because it's both happening at the same time.
A lot of parts of L.A. are interchangeable with suburbs in Joburg. Very big, ostentatious houses with palm trees and lawns. Lawns are very important. Never underestimate lawns.
Chappie (2015) would be like RoboCop (1987) but hilarious. If you mixed "Robocop" with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and it was... funny, that's what it is.
A lot of America is kind of done. People have been making films about it for 100 years. Everything to me feels used up. But Jo-Burg feels unbelievably inspirational to me.
I still really love the world and the universe and the mythology of 'Halo.' If I was given control, I would really like to do that film. But that's the problem. When something pre-exists, there's this idea of my own interpretation versus 150 other people involved with the film's interpretation of the same intellectual property.
I have zero strategy for my career - like, zero. I could get as much satisfaction about doing a $20,000 shot film the same way I could do a $100 million film with a bunch of effects.
In a lot of the really impoverished areas of Johannesburg you see these packets of cheesy puffs which are like 6 feet long and the width of a basketball, and they're transparent and they have like 10,000 cheesy puffs in them, and you can buy that for like 50 cents. It's kind of a weird treat that you'd see people having in the townships.
Satire also allows you to make fun of every different aspect. It allows you to make fun of both sides. It allows you to make fun of everything, really, so you can do it in a harmless way.
I actually think Johannesburg represents the future. My version of what I think the world is going to become looks like Johannesburg.
If something is as smart as you, do you treat it differently if it isn't a human?
I think our problems are inherently unsolvable. We need to change our genetic make-up or create computers that will think us out of it. I don't think humans are able to deal with what we have.
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.
District 9 (2009), Elysium (2013) and Chappie (2015) were all born out of some visual concept first. "Chappie"(2014) is the imagery, because I think I'm a visual person first, of this ridiculous robot character. It's much more comedy based and in an unusual setting.
I think that in the realm of commercial, popcorn cinema, the amount of message or smuggling of ideas you can get in there is quite limited. Like, if you think you're going to make a difference or change anything, you're on pretty dangerous thin ice.
High-level actors can be all about their close-ups and the size of their trailers. I'd heard these horror stories of how a really powerful actor can come in and change your script.
I grew up as an artist. Science fiction allows for design and creatures and guns and all the stuff that I like as well. So I think most of the films I make, I'm sure, will be in that category. But I can also see myself making a film like Black Hawk Down (2001) and I could also totally do horror.
The first film that I can remember seeing where, like, I just couldn't stop watching it - and it didn't necessarily make me want to be a director because I was so young, but it made me know that that's what I wanted to be doing - was 'Alien.' And I saw that when I was probably just over 10 years old.
I'm a massive hater of 3D. I don't like it at all. For me, you go to a movie theatre and you want to be taken to a place and transported to a place and be in that environment, and I know 3D is meant to do that, but the effect for me is the reverse. I feel like I'm looking though muddy water, and I can't really see the image.
I think that people who make films and think they're changing the world are sorely mistaken. If that really is your goal, there are far better ways to do it. I'm making politically observant films for audiences.
If you don't have something that glues the audience to the screen, you're in trouble.
District 9 (2009) was a singular anti-Apartheid metaphor, and Elysium (2013) is a more general metaphor about immigration and how the First World and Third World meet. But the thing that I like the most about the metaphor is that it can be scaled to suit almost any scenario.
I never really think of something in terms of what not to do. It's always what's appealing or what's cool.
I think the world of District 9 (2009) has a lot of race and oppression-based ideas that I would still like to explore in that world.
I just watch movies I like over and over. It seems to be a lot of sci-fi stuff. My favorites are probably - besides the first two Alien (1979) films, I watch 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), I watch Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977), the first ones, because those actually had a huge effect on me as well, Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980) especially.
I think that Elysium (2013) the movie is unrealistic, with the space station and everything. I think "Elysium" the metaphor is completely realistic: it's exactly where we're going.
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.
I think growing up in South Africa, and then moving to Canada, I'm just genuinely interested in the difference between the First World and the Third World, immigration, and how the new, globalized world is beginning to operate. All of those things run through my mind a lot.
I think naturally I'm a very visual kind of person. If I wasn't in filmmaking, I'd be in something related to visuals. And I used to actually work as a visual-effects artist.
I want to make a film that is commercially successful because that means that the larger cinema-going audience around the world like the movie, which is my goal. That's my job, to make films that people respond to.
I think that, if there are topics that are just on people's minds, things manifest into reality out of the sort of global consciousness of being aware of those topics.
I think there's a lot of crazy stuff on the Internet. You read stuff that is wild speculation, and there's an element of it that makes me not trust it because there's this undercurrent of insanity to it sometimes.
My favourite stuff is visual, and I always want to work with visual artwork. I think it depends on the person, but for me, photographs of an image of something interesting or inspiring is worth a lot more than words to me. I think every concept I've come up with and turned into films or that will be hopefully become a film comes from images first.
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.
If there isn't a deep core reason for a film existing, what is the point? For me to be known as a filmmaker that makes films that have a point, I'm stoked.
If you're not observing the world around you, in some sense you're not really an artist because then that means you're just replicating other people's stuff, or, I don't even know what you're doing.
The main stuff I like is from the late '60s to the early '90s. That's the stuff I love. It's the 'James Cameron''s and the Paul Verhoeven stuff. I guess when I was younger, Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) had an influence.
The only genre of movie that I could see making that doesn't have anything magical or otherworldly about it would be a war film. I'm very interested in history, and a war film could be something that would lure me in.
On one hand, I think people are destined for something incredible if we don't wipe ourselves out, but I think we're going to wipe 90 percent of ourselves out.
There are loads of sociopolitical, racial, class and future-planet situations that really interest me, but I'm not really interested in making a film about them in a film that feels like reality because people view that in a different way. I like using science fiction to talk about subjects through the veneer of science fiction.
There's no question that how Johannesburg operates is what made me interested in the idea of wealth discrepancy. Elysium (2013) could be a metaphor for just Jo'burg, but it's also a metaphor for the Third World and the First World. And in science fiction, separation of wealth is a really interesting idea to mess with.
There is something fundamentally fascinating about the mechanics, I guess, of the human body and where consciousness and mind exist, and what you can do with the mechanics of the body while keeping those intact, and where those two cross over.
What I do is spend too much time thinking. Most of the time I just walk around annoyed. Would I describe myself as relatively happy, I suppose, but society gets to me. And the people that have mastered life seem to not care, and then they die, and then the grenade goes off.
[on _Elysium_] I feel like I fucked it up, I feel like ultimately the story is not the right story. I still think the satirical idea of a ring filled with rich people hovering above the impoverished Earth is an awesome idea. I love it so much, I almost want to go back and do it correctly. But I just think the script wasn't... I just didn't make a good enough film is ultimately what it is. I feel like I executed all of the stuff that could be executed, like costume and set design and special effects very well. But ultimately it was all resting on a somewhat not totally formed skeletal system, so the script just wasn't there.
[on using motion capture in Chappie (2015)] Think of the animation like really, really expensive makeup. The actor drives the performance: they are completely and utterly captured in the process of rotomation.[2015]
[on shooting Chappie (2015) in Jo'Burg] Johannesburg can be both township and completely urban and almost American. You can choose the Johannesburg you want, so I made "Chappie"(2014) exclusively urban. Because Die Antwoord is native to South Africa, I felt the film had to be set there. However, I started to feel that I was treading too close to District 9 (2009) so I moved the second draft to America. But moving the story to America felt like it created a fish-out-of-water feeling for Die Antwoord, so I set it back in Joburg, but with South Africa as the backdrop but not the star.[2015]
[on Los Angeles] Joburg Light [2013]
[on Johannesburg] It has this thermonuclear-weapons feel, like it's going to go off at any point.[2013]

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