Neill Blomkamp used to be known in Hollywood—to the extent that he was known at all—for what he didn't do: direct Peter Jackson's Halo movie, which stalled in 2006, when two studios pulled funding. How did the South African-born Blomkamp land the gig in the first place? Jackson saw a series of shorts that the TV commercial director—with zero feature-film credits—had shot in his spare time. His official big-screen debut is now the Jackson-produced District 9, out August 14. This low-budget thriller, set in a Johannesburg slum colonized by aliens, will flaunt Blomkamp's talent. "Once we're finished with D9, his phone's going to be ringing like crazy," Jackson says. "He's definitely on the radar."
Four shorts that got director Neill Blomkamp noticed
Tetra Vaal (2003) Way before Cloverfield made shaky hand cams blockbuster-worthy, this faux advertisement for a third-world RoboCop established the director's penchant for mixing lo-fi production with seamless CGI. Using a consumer camcorder, he filmed himself playing the part of the robot, then rotoscoped the image into the footage—a technique he also employed for District 9.
Alive in Joburg (2005) This gritty "documentary" about extraterrestrials marooned in Johannesburg would expand to become District 9. "I'm a sci-fi freak, so I wanted to take all these Western staples and revisualize them in the African context I grew up in," Blomkamp says. "Most of the planet lives in settings that are closer to Joburg. To me, that stuff represents the future."
Yellow (2006) As part of its Adicolor viral campaign, Adidas gave Blomkamp a hue, a small budget, and said, "Go." The result? A futuristic dystopian mini-thriller about a globe-trotting AI gone rogue. Blomkamp added Hebrew tattoos to the cyborg's face to create a non-Western vibe. "It's an Israeli machine," he says. "I didn't want it to look like another clichéd R&D center in California."
Tempbot (2006) A (literal) cubicle drone, Tempbot tries to make friends and avoid embarrassment in this Office Space-esque spoof. "What interests me is taking the fantastic or beyond-real and making it as mundane as possible," Blomkamp says. Case in point: He digitally refurbished his Tetra Vaal mech's white Kevlar exterior with "that shitty beige color of 1990s printers."
District 9 Movie Trailer For more, visit wired.com/video.
In District 9, a crippled alien ship is stranded in South Africa, and its extraterrestrial occupants become unwanted refugees. Photo: Courtesy of Sony Pictures
The South African government in District 9 quarantines aliens (called "non-humans") in a small, decrepit area of Johannesburg in an effort to disarm tensions. Photo: David Bloomer
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