‘This is not science fiction. This is now’
SA-born filmmaker takes a dim view of the state of humanity, writes John Hiscock
AFEW years ago, Neill Blomkamp was made an offer that most young filmmakers would find difficult to refuse: Sony Pictures was willing to give him more than R1-billion to make his sci-fi action film Elysium on one condition: it wanted him to cast Hollywood stars.
South African-born Blomkamp had planned to make Elysium with a smaller budget and a more left-field cast. The lead role was first offered to his friend, Die Antwoord frontman Ninja. When he turned it down, Blomkamp approached Eminem, who accepted as long as the film was made in his home town of Detroit. The director refused.
“I was very nervous,” Blomkamp recalled. “I’d heard these horror stories of how a really powerful actor can come in and change your script. I didn’t feel like getting into the political strife.”
But after meeting Matt Damon and Jodie Foster, Blomkamp changed his mind. “I was very lucky, or I picked the right people,” he said. “They just made my job easier because they did exactly what I asked of them and there were no egos or any kind of on-set bull***t.”
Elysium, a grim vision of a future Earth, is Blomkamp’s second feature film and his second depiction of a world full of gross inequalities. His first, the 2009 apartheid parable District 9, was made for $20-million (about R200-million) and became a $210-million hit, earning an Oscar nomination.
District 9 was not meant to be Blomkamp’s debut. A former special effects artist and advertising director, he was hired by producer Peter Jackson in 2007 to make a $125-million film of the video game Halo. After months of work, Universal Studios pulled the plug. Blomkamp made District 9 instead, on his own terms.
Elysium takes place in 2154 when the world has been divided into two classes: the elite rich live aboard Elysium, a hitech orbital space station where life appears to be one long garden party, whereas everyone else struggles on a garbage-strewn, poverty-stricken Earth. Damon plays Max, a shavenheaded, tattooed resident of Earth who gets irradiated at his factory job and, after being fitted with an exoskeleton, must break into Elysium (ruled by Jodie Foster) to cure himself using the station’s advanced medical technology. Blomkamp’s friend since childhood, Sharlto Copley, who starred in District 9, plays a psychotic gun-for-hire who does Foster’s bidding on Earth.
As well as packing in plenty of action and special effects, the film touches on issues such as healthcare, immigration, economic disparities and environmental decay. “The entire film is an allegory. I tend to think a lot about wealth discrepancy,” said Blomkamp, sitting in the comfort of a Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, hotel. “People have asked me if I think this is what will happen in 140 years, but this isn’t science fiction. This is today. This is now.”
Blomkamp modelled Elysium on the gleaming mansions and swimming pools nearby. For the slum-like Earth, he took inspiration from a trip he and a friend took to the Mexican border town of Tijuana. “We were walking down the main drag drinking beer, which apparently you’re not allowed to do,” he said. “These federales pulled up, slammed me on the hood, took my passport and put us both in the back of the squad car and began driving out of the city.
“We started pushing money through the grate in front of us separating the front and back seats, and when we ran out of money they stopped and left us on the side of the road. It took us about three hours to walk back and that was really the genesis of Elysium, because I could see floodlights from the US border and there were Black Hawk helicopters flying up and down, and we were in this poverty-stricken area with fires and feral dogs and it was the most insane feeling I’ve ever had in my life.”
For the scenes on Earth he chose one of the world’s largest garbage dumps on the outskirts of Mexico City. The crew wore masks and respirators, but the actors were not allowed to. At one point things were so bad that a union representative objected to the toxicity of the working conditions; some of the top layer of silt had to be scraped off and replaced with fake filth.
Blomkamp’s liking for politically provocative stories has its origins in Johannesburg, where he grew up in a middle-class family during the dismantling of apartheid and the skyrocketing violent crime rate that followed. He witnessed violence against blacks. A teenage friend was killed in a carjacking. In 1997, the year he turned 18, he moved with his mother to Vancouver, where he still lives with his partner and co-writer, Terri Tatchell, and their 14-year-old daughter, in a house shared with several robot guards from the set of Elysium.
As he recently revealed to Wired magazine, Blomkamp hopes to make a spectacular return home in a few years — to buy a Johannesburg skyscraper at a knock-down price and build his own Elysium.
His ultimate aim is to be “an artist that’s just left alone”, which is why he turned down an approach to be considered for the new Star Wars film: “If you imagine a filmmaker trying to just be left alone as much as possible and make Star Wars, how does that work? Exactly, it doesn’t.”
He will begin filming his third feature, Chappie, in South Africa next month. It will star Copley as a sentient robot. Blomkamp promises it will be “lighter” and “more emotional” than his previous films, but it will again ask awkward questions about humans’ relationship with technology.
“I don’t know if it’s because I grew up in South Africa and whether it would be the same if I’d just grown up in Vancouver, but these topics just won’t leave my mind,” he said. He stops short of believing that Elysium will come true, but Blomkamp is not exactly optimistic about the future. “I think our problems are inherently unsolvable,” he said. “We need to change our genetic makeup or create computers that will think us out of it. I don’t think humans are able to deal with what we have.” — ©