Hi, this is Neill Blomkamp.
I am the director and co-writer of District 9...
...and this is kind of interesting because the film hasn't come out yet...
...anywhere.
In fact, I just showed it to an audience for the first time a few nights ago...
...at a screening in San Diego for Comic-Con.
The first time an audience has seen it when I've been sitting with them.
And it was a pretty good experience, which is awesome.
But the anticipation of it coming out in theatres...
...around the world is still upon me.
So hopefully, it's been, you know, mildly successful...
...and you've bought the Blu-ray or the DVD...
...and you're watching this.
So, yeah.
So I'll just kind of start talking about everything...
...I think I find relevant and interesting.
And here we have Sharlto Copley...
...who is my high-school friend in Johannesburg.
He was a few years older than me...
...and he graduated high school, I think...
...as I was kind of just arriving in high school.
But he was my sort of guy...
...who was the closest thing to the film industry in South Africa.
And as I started getting more and more into film...
...as a high-school kid, he was starting his own companies...
...and sort of shooting a lot of his own stuff...
...and really was involved in filmmaking...
...on a level that I wasn't capable of.
And I started to really, you know, get a lot of a kick...
...out of hanging outwith him and all of these other older guys...
...and be involved in film.
And now he's the lead guy in the film...
...so I guess I'll get back to that in a second.
So Alive in Joburg was a short film that I made in 2005.
And the reason I think it exists at all...
...is because I simply wanted to see science fiction...
...put into the South African environment that I had grown up in.
And District 9 is the feature-length extrapolated version, really...
...of that idea.
And the genesis of it is as simple as science fiction--
Western science fiction placed in southern Africa...
...and specifically in Johannesburg.
And it's pretty amazing to be sitting here now, you know.
The film is complete, it's about to come out...
...and it's an incredibly personal project.
And it's something I think that reflects me...
...on a sort of creative and interest level in a very accurate way.
So I feel very happy with the product...
...and I find it sort of a very--
A rewarding film to have been allowed to make.
And rewarding as well...
...in terms of just getting some of the imagery...
...that I had in my head out on-screen and some of the concepts as well.
And so to have it released around the world...
...is a pretty awesome thing.
So the-- Here, we have some of the aliens...
...that Image Engine created...
...which I'm incredibly happy with the result...
...I think of all of the creatures in the film, on a visual-effects level.
They did extremely, extremely good work.
But ultimately, one of the weird things...
...about the way we approached the effects...
...was to make sure that there was almost a disregard...
...for the way that they were filmed and the way that they were rendered.
If that makes any sense. In some films, you put visual effects on a pedestal...
...and you kind of--
When the camera moves onto a visual-effects creature...
...you sort of have this big moment...
...of, you know, showing off your expensive work.
And it tends to be a little bit glossy and polished.
Yeah, like, this is a perfect example. It's a dirty, hand-held shot.
You're not really showing the ship off.
And it kind of makes it feel a little bit more real, I think.
So all of the effects in the film I'm pretty proud of.
And I think all of the companies that contributed to them...
...did a really, really great job.
You know, besides even the low amount of money...
...that we had to pay everyone.
They did a stellar, stellar job.
But this film is so--
You know, it's a really chock full of different ideas...
...and different concepts and stuff. And it comes at you pretty quickly.
It's kind of-- it has a lot of layers for me.
I don't know how many of them...
...are clear to an audience who watches the film...
...but there's a lot of different things going on at the same time.
And I'm gonna try to remember to speak about each one of them.
This is one of the main things I wanted to talk about on the commentary.
All this imagery we're seeing right there...
...with the rioting South Africans, like the stuff right here.
What this represents is the xenophobic attitudes...
...of predominantly, weirdly enough, the slum residents...
...the actual Alexandra and parts of Soweto and parts of--
You know, all of this--
All of the townships around Johannesburg.
There's a xenophobic sort of edge...
...that has been brewing in South Africa for a few years...
...which is aimed at the impoverished Zimbabweans...
...that moved into South Africa...
...as Zimbabwe became more and more unstable.
So you had completely, you know, just destitute Zimbabweans...
...that came to South Africa for a better life.
And the poverty-stricken South Africans...
...who are also trying to look for a better life, in their own country...
...had a lot of...
...you know, animosity towards these aliens, essentially...
...that had arrived in their communities.
And that idea-- On the surface level, that idea was really the genesis...
...for Alive in Joburg...
...where you have a Third World poverty-stricken environment...
...and then you have science fiction, you know, placed on top of it.
But the science fiction represents this other alien group...
...which in South Africa is Zimbabweans...
...and to a certain extent, Nigerians.
The footage that I was referencing earlier...
...with the guy pulled out of a shack...
...and the Molotov cocktail being thrown up against it...
...is something that none of us expected.
Which is that, as we began filming this film...
...within about, I think, literally within a week or two of us rolling film...
...the entire city woke up to headlines...
...of mass murder...
...that was occurring in Alexandra, which is one of the townships...
...and then eventually, most of the townships in the whole city.
And the black residents in these really, really poor areas...
...who were South African had woken up...
...and attacked the black immigrants from Zimbabwe for the first time...
...in a life-threatening, murderous rampage...
...and had set fire to people, they'd lynched people...
...they'd macheted them.
It was an absolute worst-case scenario.
And so as I started filming my first film...
...which I was very clearly trying to make not...
...you know, too much of a political film...
...I had essentially rolled cameras on something...
...that had now become a much more sensitive issue...
...and a much more serious issue that needed...
...you know, either to be dealt with in a very serious way...
...or just to be left alone.
And it looked-- You know, I was faced with this feeling of:
"Have I started filming something...
...which now has taken on a very different meaning?"
So I apologise to the South Africans who view this film...
...as, you know, me stomping around with gum boots...
...on a topic that's now extremely, extremely serious...
...and I think will continue to be serious far greater--
To a far greater degree than it was when I set out to make the film.
But having said that, the aliens...
...the science-fiction version of the aliens...
...and the sort of, you know, residents of Johannesburg...
...and the residents of South Africa clashing with that race head-on...
...can be viewed as a metaphor on a direct sort of, you know...
...Zimbabwean, black, South African way.
Or it can also just represent the world that I grew up in as a child...
...which is apartheid South Africa and segregation...
...and xenophobia in general.
There's no question that this film is a sort of a living example...
...or a reality sort of manifested out of many deep...
...sort of, I guess, psychological and, you know, historical things...
...that I went through as a kid.
They've just manifested themselves into this bizarre science-fiction world.
But I think that really-- That's the genesis for District 9.
It's layering science fiction into this apartheid world.
And this is the outcome.
So this stuff now, here...
...they're starting to talk about the character of Wikus...
...early on in the film...
...and when we started writing the film...
...I was up in this house in Wellington with Terri...
...and we started to throw ideas around...
...after Pete and Fran had, you know, sort of given me the opportunity...
...to start making the feature version of Alive in Joburg.
And pretty quickly, like, it became obvious...
...that I wanted to create a world of this bureaucrat.
He's a complete--
Complete bureaucrat.
And this very, you know, anal...
...rule-following, bureaucratic kind of guy...
...who, in a way, is this--
He's a sort of a passive racist or, like, you know, an indirect racist...
."I suppose is the best way to put it.
And through the course of the film, he goes through this staggering arc...
...where he comes out on the other side...
...180 degrees away from where he began.
And I found that to be very interesting. I thought that was--
The moment I figured that out...
...that this guy was essentially gonna become one of these creatures...
...and his arc would be so defined...
...it just clicked instantly.
So it's cool seeing some of this footage...
...like interviews of people talking about him.
And hopefully, the audience wondering...
...where this guy is gonna end up.
Because what are they saying that for?
Why are they saying he took choices handed to him...
...and ultimately made, you know, the best choices that he could?
I love that kind of mystery for someone who's this total office bureaucrat.
Those South African vehicles, by the way...
...I was very particular about getting.
These are Casspirs that were developed...
...by the South African military in the 1970s for the border war...
...that South Africa was fighting with Angola...
...and sometimes were fighting in Namibia...
...and they were fighting Cuban soldiers as well.
And they developed these V-shaped-hull, anti-mine vehicles...
...which were used to go out of the country and go fight.
But then later on, like in the '80s, you would see them...
...because they were used as...
...civil unrest, sort of control vehicles as well.
So you'd see them in the townships, you know, driving all over Joburg...
...and then sort of deploying soldiers...
...and paramilitary police where needed.
And now, here is this gate shot here where--
The idea here was to just kind of make the idea of segregation...
...as visual as possible and have this-- There it is there.
This kind of Gaza Strip style, you know, apartheid realised...
...and cement kind of wall...
...that the aliens would be fenced off with.
I love this kind of stuff here.
Just completely insane science-fiction aliens.
--And get them to sign the form.
First one, E-X-triple-seven.
Okay. So now, this area here...
...there's a good wide shot coming up, a few shots after this.
This area that we filmed most of the film in...
...is in--
It's in a sort of-- I guess you could call it a suburb of Soweto.
Even though some people think Soweto itself is a suburb.
Soweto has, like, about one and a half million people...
...and there's many different areas and sort of facets of Soweto.
And Tshiawelo is the name of the area that we were in here.
And like, you know, life imitating art or art imitating life...
...all of these residents that live in these shacks--
Like, you can see all of them here.
All of these shacks had the residents cleared out...
...and sent off to government-built RDP housing...
...in a different area of Johannesburg.
Which means they get government-subsidised...
...like, brick houses and they get moved out.
A whole bunch of the people actually didn't have RDP housing...
...but, you know, they needed to be removed from the land...
...as far as the government was concerned.
So they were pulled out of these shacks...
...and that meant that through...
...the Gauteng, like, Film Department or something...
...we were able to move into Tshiawelo...
...and we had several hundred shacks that just became ours.
All of this whole area here just became--
We put a fence around it...
...because, you know, in Soweto, every piece of corrugated iron...
...and material and stuff just gets recycled.
So that meant, without a fence...
...we'd come back and all the shacks would be gone...
...because they would've-- The zinc and corrugated iron...
...and everything else would just be taken somewhere else.
So this was our environment for shooting in June and July of 2008.
And it was a pretty difficult shoot.
It was the most harsh environment...
...you could imagine shooting anything in.
Absolutely insanely difficult on many different levels.
And at the same time, it also had this, like, incredible feeling of authenticity...
."because it was completely authentic...
...and this feeling that, you know, we weren't bullshitting the audience.
Like, we were filming something that was as authentic as it could be.
Which is exactly what I wanted.
And I think it really sort of--
The film hopefully captures some of that.
You know, it conveys the sense of living in a South African township...
...and what it feels like, and just how dirty it is.
I mean, I think even for us, we didn't even, you know, expect...
...the level of sort of just how bad the situation really is.
A lot of that isn't even captured in the film. Just the level of pollution...
...and the amount of abrasive, dangerous materials everywhere.
I mean, there's literally asbestos everywhere.
That's not an exaggeration. There is broken...
...sheets of asbestos every single metre you walk.
There's just chips of asbestos. There's broken glass everywhere.
There's rusted nails and barbed wire everywhere.
It is just the most caustic, violent place you could possibly be.
And then after a while, if you shoot enough days, it becomes normal.
You just start thinking of it like...
You know, it almost becomes home after a while.
So those little creatures on the ground...
...I'm a massive fan of that shot...
...because one thing I kept saying to the crew when we were filming...
...is that this is bad Star Wars.
It's, like, this is like Star Wars in Africa.
It's like, you know, bad Star Wars is a good way to describe District 9.
And those little pets on the ground remind me-- I don't know what it is.
It reminds me of watching Star Wars when I was a kid, but in a bad setting.
So I just-- I absolutely love that shot.
And, now, all this kind of stuff, those weapons, I love the--
This imagery is the stuff I was talking about...
...that I really am happy that I managed...
...to sort of get, you know, finalised and get into the film.
I love seeing those Nigerian gangsters with these weird weapons.
It's like, the whole film is based on the idea...
...of the fantastic and the mundane.
You know, the impossible and the mundane.
And it's like when you make--
When you take something that's a piece of crazy technology...
...or a piece of, you know, alien weaponry or an alien itself...
...and you present it in this weird, mundane way, it kind of--
At least for me, the effect it has for me is it kind of grounds it...
...and it makes it feel kind of different to a lot of the way...
...that science fiction has been presented to me before.
And that's my favourite thing about this film that resonates with me.
Like this shack, for example, you know.
I just love seeing alien eggs inside a shack in Soweto.
It just works for me.
This stuff is pretty gross.
I can just show you a little bit how it works.
So this cow is real.
There was-- Soweto has a lot of dead animals just lying around.
And I kind of--
I mean, I know obviously, this is a part of the alien world here...
...because the idea is that they've got this kind of technology...
...that links up to carcasses...
...and then just drains all of the nutrients out of the carcass...
...and grows the eggs from that biological matter.
You know, just redistributes them into a new form of matter.
I mean, exactly like how the life cycle on Earth works.
It's just that they can link directly into it.
So I liked the idea they found some cow...
...and then they, you know, put it in the shack...
...and linked the eggs up to it.
But for us to pull that off...
...one of the sort of on-set art directors, Emilia, was--
The assistant director dubbed her "the queen of death"...
...because she just constantly could find corpses of animals...
...and bring them to the set as we needed.
You know, the whole film always had to feel real...
...so that cow in that room...
...when Sharlto opens the door and he's coughing and choking...
...that is completely real. I mean, it was so disgustingly rank.
It was impossible to even, honestly, film the scene or be around it.
Hey. Smile for the cameras there, eh?
This montage goes pretty quickly. I forgot how quickly this cut together.
Trent, look at this.
You see the weapons on the right there...
...and then there's just regular human magazines in the middle.
It's the same kind of idea. It's, like, not focusing on the science fiction.
Like here, the ship's in the background but you focus on the kid.
I just love that kind of approach to the sci-fi stuff.
Pretty much all of the stuff that you're seeing here...
...these weapons and the ships and all of the hard surface...
...you know, sort of metallic and geometric...
...and mechanical designs come from--
Mostly from Greg Broadmore...
...at Weta Workshop. These were all his designs.
And that was one of my favourite parts of the film...
...was just working with Weta Workshop...
...and designing all of the stuff and sort of realising it.
And so it's got a great-- I think, a great kind of throwback...
...to some of the sci-fi that I grew up with as a kid...
...mixed with, you know, like--
It feels like a mechanical, working piece of technology.
I'm not sure about the bra on this alien.
--Requesting First Battalion air support, please.
I think I'm on the fence about that.
I almost cut that, but then it makes them kind of funny.
I was trying to make them feel individual and unique...
...and I thought it would make sense...
...because they're like magpies, they find stuff that interests them...
...and then, you know, like...
...they could decorate their whole shack...
...with a bunch of plastic spoons because that alien was into it.
And that guy just-- Maybe he's into bras.
The aliens themselves took quite a while to design.
I knew right from the beginning when we were writing the script...
...that there's no question that they were this drone society.
They-- It's almost like a termite hive or an ant hive or a beehive.
They have a very clearly defined queen...
...and sort of upper echelons of their society...
...maybe, you know, army generals...
...and thinkers and philosophers and then, of course, the queen.
And then the vast majority are the drone workers...
...that require direction and guidance.
And, you know, that's, like, a clear...
...departure from human biology and human social constructs.
You know, the analogies to apartheid and everything...
...break down at that point. It just becomes science fiction.
So when I decided that that was the thing that I wanted...
...you know, that they are able to think up this kind of technology--
It's not necessarily them thinking it up though...
...it's another sort of genetic quadrant...
...of their society that's thinking it up.
And they are there to execute...
...whatever the higher echelons of the society want them to do with it.
They're naturally, biologically-- They need direction.
And so I thought the idea of aliens...
...with a whole lot of crazy weapons and a ship...
...but that their queen is dead and they're directionless...
...living in South Africa would be an interesting idea.
And so when I realised that that was the social hierarchy...
...then it became obvious they should be designed...
...along similar lines as insects.
You know, there should be nods to insects.
And, you know, cockroaches...
...and like the character of Paul on the left...
...is this is very waspy, bee-like yellow and black, which I really like.
And then they're colourful. They're like ladybugs, some of them.
Some of them are black like dung beetles.
But you run into this issue where, because of the nature of the story...
...and the fact that you have to empathize with the aliens...
...they needed to have a human-like face.
I think because of the psychology of human beings...
...we would find it difficult to empathize...
...with a creature that was just completely alien.
You know, like, if you take Giger's alien.
The thing that's so awesome about having an alien...
...which is a dangerous, you know, oppressive...
...or just completely dangerous, animalistic kind of alien...
...there's no need to empathize.
The only need is to scare the shit out of the audience.
And if that's the goal, that means that you can then--
You can design it with complete freedom.
You know, you can really go to town on it.
But if you tell a story that's a bit more like this...
...where the points of view become a little bit more blurred...
...and you can see things from both directions...
...and you have to empathize with the aliens...
then you may have a little bit more of a difficult time if it doesn't have eyes...
...or if doesn't have an anthropomorphic shape.
So it took quite a long time...
...to kind of find something that felt insect-y and alien.
The way I always put it was that...
...you wouldn't wanna sit next to it on the bus.
You could see that there was a sentient...
...intelligent being behind the eyes...
...but that it's gross and you totally don't wanna be sitting next to it...
...or standing in a line-up next to McDonald's next to one of them.
And I think the design achieved that in the end, which is cool.
This stuff was pretty funny to film.
I mean, this whole movie, you know, we had--
We did have a very clearly defined script...
...and, for the most part, we actually had lines--
We had written lines, but we--
Yeah, this is funny. We went completely away from the lines.
I knew I wanted to do that right from the beginning...
...to get improv performances, predominantly from Sharlto.
Just because he's so incredibly good at it.
And then, you know, from other cast members to varying degrees...
...to provide that level of realism.
But you can see here, the whole film rests on Sharlto's back, really.
And to provide this kind of level of realism...
...and someone who was South African...
...I knew that this guy who was my high school buddy...
...would essentially be the right person for the job.
So filming this, like this scene here right here...
...that was a funny scene to film. Like, I loved filming that scene.
But you do run into...
...you know, most of the scenes...
...where it can be so draining because he's doing his improv thing...
...which means every take is different, and I'm--
It's not that I keep him on the rails.
It's rather that I'm watching his performance...
...and if he's stepping outside of the parameters the script has defined...
...you know, that this scene needs to convey X, Y and Z...
...then we have to try it again and, you know...
...get his incredible ability to make this character so hilarious...
...and so real and yet make sure that it conveys the story...
...in the way that I need it to.
And most of the time he'd hit the ball out of the park.
He would just get it and it would just work.
But it is-- Thinking on your feet like that many hours a day...
...as opposed to just reading lines, was a pretty gruelling process.
You see what's happening?
First Battalion, my friend, you know what that means?
That means your days of flaunting the law are over.
Now, these guys, the mercenaries, this was a big kind of...
...concept that I really wanted to put into the film.
I'm very interested in the idea of private military contractors...
...and mercenaries, in general.
And South Africa is kind of the birthplace, I think...
...of the modern military contractor and the modern private military.
Because there were so, so many special-forces soldiers...
...in the South African military community that were unemployed.
When the government switched from a white apartheid government...
...to a black government, they disbanded a lot of the special-forces units.
And these guys had been fighting for, you know--
Some of them had been deployed...
...for, like, literally, 20 years up until that point.
So all of a sudden, the country finds itself...
...with thousands and thousands of these soldiers...
...you know, of this extremely high calibre...
...who the government wants nothing to do with.
And regardless of their political background...
...they're just very good soldiers.
So in the sort of early '90s...
...the most famous one, Executive Outcomes...
...was formed by Eeben Barlow.
And they were famous for going into many African countries.
And in Sierra Leone, they kind of-- They were actually...
...you know, a force that actually crushed a rebel group...
...and restored power back to a president...
...that you can research and decide whether he was corrupt or not...
...but they had a massive effect on the country.
And they are extremely prevalent in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But South Africa just made it illegal for mercenary companies...
...to operate based from South Africa. It's illegal now.
So anyway, I wanted that in the film.
No question I was gonna make a film about South Africa...
...and not have private military.
So the character of Koobus is this kind of...
...you know, veteran special-forces soldier...
...that's now heading this private military company...
...that MNU uses to enforce whatever law they want.
And they kind of operate with impunity, you know.
Behind the wall of District 9, they can just do whatever they want.
Like this scene where Paul just died there.
You know, it's kind of a lot like what George Bush created with Iraq...
...is literally that kind of cowboy environment...
...and if you're a gun for hire, you can find work.
- The little ones. - That's why we abort.
So this child alien, "Little C.J." as he was dubbed...
...I was kind of on the fence about, originally.
You know, it's a strange film because you walk this fine line...
...with when it becomes too cutesy and too cliched...
...and too popcorn and too Hollywood. I kept--
That was my word, it was too "Hollywood" in, you know, quotations.
But I think in the end...
...Terri really wanted to have a child alien in there.
And now, I think he's a great character...
...because it really galvanizes Christopher Johnson...
...and his need to get back to his planet.
And it makes us empathize with him in a huge way.
I just had to be very sort of delicate with trying to direct...
...that relationship between them.
And then eventually the relationship between Wikus and the child alien...
...and make it feel not too Hollywood, you know.
Because, I mean, the film does--
The film is two things. Like, it is a Hollywood popcorn film...
...because, you know, it needed to be.
But then it also needed to be something that felt...
...hopefully as real as possible and sort of as grounded as possible.
Finding that balance for me, as a first-time director...
...was something that I was trying to really pay attention to.
This is my favourite scene with a digital creature in it.
I really, really am so happy with the work that Image Engine did.
I mean, I think these aliens look really good.
And this kind of--
I love this kind of science-fiction stuff like this, you know...
...where you have a human being engaging with an alien...
...in what seems like quite a weird, organic, real way.
And the reason for that is because the entire approach...
...to how we did all of, you know, every single interactive scene...
...is that Sharlto right here is interacting with Jason Cope.
And Jason is another improv actor...
...who literally plays every single alien in the film, except the child alien.
And he's also-- In the movie, he's also the journalist, Bradnam.
That's what Jason looks like.
So it's kind of cool that we got him in...
...as an actual character in the movie besides playing Christopher Johnson.
It's funny, because at the end of the film...
...he talks about Christopher Johnson's goals.
"We don't know what he's gonna do, whether he's gonna effect a rescue...
...or come back and blow us up."
He's talking about himself, which I thought was kind of funny.
But, anyway, we had Jason...
"acting as Christopher Johnson...
...and Sharlto simply bounced off of Jason.
The two of them just were going against one another.
And then Image Engine would paint Jason Cope out of the scene.
And at the same time they were painting him out--
There's a process called rotomation which is-- It's not motion capture...
...and it's also not animation, but they are essentially--
It's almost like trace-animating Jason's performance.
And then the digital alien with that new rotomated performance...
...would be placed back into the scene once Jason was removed.
You would end up with something that looked like Sharlto was engaging...
...and speaking to an alien that was sitting right there.
Provided the alien was rendered to a photoreal enough level...
...that the audience thought it was existing in 3-D space and, you know...
...living in the same lighting environment as Sharlto was.
So I'm extremely happy with how these creatures have turned out.
I actually feel a lot better.
See, this kind of stuff here, this body horror sort of thing--
This is really where it begins for Sharlto.
Or for Wikus, I should say.
--Was something that I was incredibly...
...incredibly sort of creatively stimulated by. I love the idea of--
There's nothing more horrifying than the idea that your body...
...is coming apart at the seams, although he doesn't know that yet.
But the idea of a complete genetic and biological transformation...
...is a really cool sort of genre idea.
I love the idea that you just are coming apart at the fibre.
And you are-- The very core of you is disappearing.
You are turning into another being, you know.
And then, of course, it becomes a question of, you know, does your--?
Does the structure of your brain and all of those neural connections...
...turn into something else as well?
And what's left and, you know, what goes away?
And at what point is Wikus no longer Wikus?
It's all interesting kind of stuff.
But in the beginning here, it just provides--
It provides a kind of, you know, slightly horror...
...slightly psychological...
...gross scene. That was pretty funny.
I like this shot.
See, like, here. This is Jason holding a lamp.
There's no alien child in the scene, of course. There's nothing there at all.
So that means the child is completely animated...
...thanks to the animators...
...and Jason is just painted out. I mean, that's a difficult shot.
They gotta paint him out with a moving light and then replace him.
Okay, so here's the Nigerian lair. And this is-- It's kind of a strange concept
...to have a gangster stronghold in the middle...
...of an already complicated alien-only zone.
But it is an interesting concept that they may be trying...
...to extract weapons from them and sort of exploit them.
And because of the satirical nature of the movie...
...I wanted to throw Nigerians into the mix.
And if you walk around some of the poor areas of South Africa...
...and you ask people's opinions of Nigerians, it's typically kind of negative.
And that there's an association with crime, and I wanted to poke fun at that...
...and sort of throw that into the mix.
So what we did was we wrote Nigerians in this as these gangsters.
And it's very unrealistic in a way in terms of the fact that...
...all of the people playing the Nigerians are actually South Africans.
And we just couldn't find Nigerian actors when we went to cast the movie.
So we have a whole bunch of South Africans playing Nigerians...
...and then we have the lead Nigerian guy, who is played by Eugene...
...is Malawian. So he's speaking Nyanja to them...
...in the sort of improv-based dialogue, and they're speaking...
...Xhosa and Zulu and Sotho and all these South African languages...
...back to him. So no one knows really what anybody's saying to one another...
...in terms of the head of the Nigerian gangsters and his subordinates.
So that's kind of hilarious, but you know, I apologise...
...to the people on the South African and the Nigerian side...
...that are both equally misrepresented I guess.
But, you know, that's the satirical sort of fun of the film.
The guy who just sold the cat food to him, Johnny...
...with the missing teeth...
...who later on Sharlto shoots, like, through the wall of the shack...
...when he tries to chop his arm off, was actually just a stunt guy.
But because of the improv nature of the whole film...
...he was so funny. He just sort of rose to--
You know, he became this kind of front-and-centre guy...
...that in any improv scene, he just--
He just stood out. He's absolutely hilarious.
So he kind of features in the film, which is pretty cool...
...but I kept putting him in all these speaking roles.
And then at the end of each shoot day, he'd kind of come up to me--
This was after we shot him through the wall with a nitrogen gun.
By the way, that shot coming up later is completely real. There's--
I mean, other than the slight distortion to simulate that kind of sonic...
...you know, atmospheric distortion from the gun.
He is being shot with a high-pressure nitrogen cannon...
...and he is going through the wall. It was a tough-- He's a tough guy.
So he'd come up to me after a day of-- What any other actor, you know...
...being pulled out from the back of a bunch of, you know, extras...
...and sort of the stunt guys...
...and becomes a speaking role, he'd come up to me and he'd be like:
"Why aren't we doing more stunts, you know?
Neill, you gotta do more with me, man.
Can you--? Could you maybe just throw me under that tank...
...or smash me up against the shack?" And I thought it was hilarious.
He was not interested at all...
...in being this funny kind of front-and-centre Nigerian.
He just wanted to get knocked around.
So I'll definitely use him if I'm back in South Africa shooting anything else.
So now this party of Wikus' here...
...this was a pretty funny scene to film, actually.
I just love the idea that, you know, his--
Wikus' character is this guy that has this unbelievably...
...overwhelming sense of self-importance...
...which is based on nothing at all.
And his achievements are, like, quite limited.
And yet somehow, he's just not aware of that at all.
He thinks he's incredibly important.
So I love the idea that this party is with this very slim...
...sort of number of people...
...and some of them are from work that now work under him...
...and then his family members.
And his father-in-law, obviously, isn't a big fan of his.
I just wanted it to be this really awkward, lame party...
...which it kind of looks like it is.
Now, one thing I should say about this film--
This scene always reminds of it. --Is that we...
The amount of footage that we shot...
...and because of the fact that, you know...
...we had a lot of improv--
We stuck to the script for the most part...
...but there's a lot things that changed, and I guess the nature of filmmaking...
...you cut the film down sometimes because it's running too long.
And we threw out an entire day.
There used to be two days of evictions.
He'd go and evict everyone then the party would happen.
Then he'd go back, evict people the second day...
...or evict aliens the second day. And then on the second night...
...he would end up here. Which is why...
...he's got all of the handwriting on his cast...
...when he's back at work, and his nail comes out--
ls because we out an entire day out.
So I always wondered if this would be sort of an abrupt jump...
...from just the way it progresses, but I mean, at least it moves forward.
The story is constantly moving forward, which is good.
It's not keeping you bored, but--
Let me through!
- Wikus. - Madam, get your hands off me.
Sharlto said that that scene there where we put him in that bag...
...was the toughest thing he had to do in the whole shoot.
Some sort of claustrophobia issue or something.
Here, this thing. So now this is a set now.
This was filmed...
...at the National Exhibition grounds in Johannesburg.
We kind of took over one of these massive hangar things...
...and built all of our sets there.
And Phil lvey built these really cool medical environments.
This was this kind of cross between...
...sort of, like, a pharmaceutical company and a hospital...
...and then just a weird research lab.
So it had to feel very clinical and very high-tech.
And I kind of wanted the audience to not notice...
...you know, that there was no real sci-fi kind of aspect to it...
...that it could just be a real hospital.
But there's just things that are just slightly, slightly off.
Like these weird stainless steel doors that open like Star Trek.
And this kind of, you know, slightly, slightly over-designed feel to it.
Like, I mean, that grated floor.
And you can see the door there has kind of just very slight remnants...
...to kind of alien spaceship designs.
But it's meant to be very subtle. And now here, we're in--
This is on the outskirts of Pretoria here.
And this is a veterinary clinic.
It's a veterinary school, actually, which--
This I love because in the wide shot, which is coming up right here...
...it has this awesome roof, you know, that feels completely authentic.
The whole place feels authentic because it is.
And again, it's the fantastic and the real.
You know, the fantastic and the mundane.
Like, they have a genetic-research programme...
...that's being conducted on aliens, but it's in something that feels real.
Which is-- Which is-- Which interests me. I love that.
- B5. - Testing AMR-B5.
Now, this sequence, which I really like.
This idea here is basically that...
...the aliens can't operate the--
Humans can't operate the alien technology...
...because, you know, it registers the user on some sort of genetic basis.
But I really wanted to do a scene that felt like this horrendous...
...kind of very clinical, very sterile--
It's all about the information. It's all about gathering data.
And the human aspect and the human connection, you know...
...to their specimen is literally nonexistent.
Like, he's crossed a threshold now...
...where in Multi-National United's eyes...
...he's simply something that they can profit from.
And I love that idea.
There's something so barbaric about it.
And so I thought the best way to do it...
...would be to put up these time-code numbers and stuff...
...as though, you know, the people that were conducting this experiment...
...wanted to document everything.
I'm sure they document all of the experiments they do in these bunkers.
And then, these tapes would exist on some rack...
...somewhere in MNU's archives.
And we just pulled them out and viewed them.
And so it has this kind of cool, real...
...you know, atrocious feeling about the whole scene.
I think it could still be a little bit more extreme, actually.
Like, I really like the film. I'm pretty proud of the film.
But every once in a while, I feel like I could turn the volume up...
...a bit more on some of the scenes.
But overall, I'm definitely proud of it.
One of the things I like about it the most...
...is kind of the dark humour, kind of satirical nature...
...of how it deals with some of these topics.
Like, this whole scene is pretty dark but it's also--
I don't know if anybody else finds it funny but I find it kind of funny.
I think it's sort of funny.
It was Pete's idea.
It was his idea to kind of have those time code--
Sorry, not the time code, the little clapperboards...
...with the test numbers and the name of the gun on them.
Which worked well really because you have this hand-held documentary guy...
...who's covering it, and he films the board...
...then films the gun and then they show the results of that.
Which is pretty cool.
It's been awesome working with, you know--
Or Pete Jackson kind of allowing this film to happen...
...and the whole process...
...of being my mentor on it and really, you know...
...he kept saying to me, "Make the film you wanna make."
He provided an atmosphere for me that I could go about...
...trying to execute something that felt like...
...it was me and it was a personal film.
And he would step in if he thought that something was--
You know, if I could make it more--
One of the things was clarity, actually.
With editing the beginning of the film together, he was--
He helped because of how much information needed to be conveyed.
There's the idea of setting up the aliens within District 9...
...and the residents of Johannesburg and their response to these aliens.
You know, when they arrived, then they were put in District 9.
Then the setup of Shame' s character...
...and then the story can kind of begin as they go in to evict them.
There's a hell of a lot of information that has to be condensed down there.
And, you know, just on a sort of hands-on level...
...he was a massive help with clarity just in general.
But on a bigger level than that...
...just being around someone who's so experienced...
...and has so much of a history in film...
...it's cool to soak up all of the knowledge...
...and the experience that he has.
And, of course, he just provided an environment...
...that this film could take place in after Halo collapsed.
We were quickly given the opportunity to move into this, thanks to him.
And Fran.
It was actually Fran Walsh's idea to develop Alive in Joburg...
...into a feature right after Halo collapsed.
It was an idea of, "We can take any idea and develop it."
You know, "You can do whatever you want."
My mind started going down the realm of just a science fiction film.
And it was her. She was like, "Why don't you take Alive in Joburg..."
"...and use that as a diving-off point for something?"
Which sounded incredibly--
You know, it sounded amazing to me.
Not a good idea.
And now here we are, two and a bit years later.
Fuck you. Fuck you!
So the girl, the nurse right here that he's fighting with here...
...she's a South African kickboxing champion-slash-stuntwoman.
And Sharl threw her there onto that stainless-steel bench.
And we-- I took about, I think, four different takes of that same event.
And after each one, I asked her if she was okay.
And she's pretty tough.
And then I found out after the fourth one...
...that she went off and had a whole bunch of stitches.
I never spoke to her, didn't see her after that...
...but I wanted to apologise for that.
I'm sure it's probably common, but I felt pretty bad.
It was a pretty brutal stainless-steel bench that she hit.
You need to let go of him now.
Now we're into the part of the story where this guy is on the run.
And this was kind of this very--
It was very appealing for me, the idea of this character...
...who thought that he had all of these--
You know, this big, fancy company backing him up...
...and then his wife and his family at home.
And his big ego and his big over-inflated sense of self-importance.
And now he finds himself more alone and destitute and worse off than that.
That this company that he was so blindly loyal to...
...is going to butcher him for every last cell in his body...
...so their stock price can go up.
That's, you know, a harrowing and hilarious concept...
...at the same time. Like this kind of imagery here.
That donkey, by the way, is just another part of Johannesburg.
That's just how Joburg is.
Donkeys and carts...
...meet BMW M5s and CL63 Mercedes-Benz.
It's just a crazy, crazy city.
I don't know whether-- I'm sure it's because I grew up in Johannesburg.
I left Joburg in 1997 and I've lived in Vancouver ever since.
But Johannesburg is science fiction to me.
I think it's why I went back there every year, and why--
I think it's why this film exists.
I just am absolutely besotted with Johannesburg...
...and a few other cities like Rio...
...but they just interest me almost on a science-fiction level.
Like, you have these gated communities...
...that have all the money in the world, and electric fences...
...and biometric, you know, fingerprinting devices...
...to open the gate.
And outside of these gated communities you have poverty...
...that, you know, doesn't exist anywhere really...
...except Africa and parts of India.
And there's not many cities like that in the world.
I kind of-- I fear that Johannesburg represents the future of the planet.
In my personal point of view, I think that where we're going...
...with lack of resources and overpopulation...
I think Johannesburg represents where we're going.
And it's the elite get richer and richer, the masses get poorer and poorer...
...until finally you end up in a place where you have a city that--
You know, or a country...
...that has got 5 percent of the population controlling all the wealth...
...and everybody else lives in abject poverty.
And if you wanna see that future...
...just catch a plane trip to Joburg because it'll--
It'll present that reality to you...
...in such a harsh way, you won't even believe it.
I kind of see that in very slight ways in L.A.
Los Angeles reminds me of Johannesburg. I call it diet Joburg.
It's like Joburg lite.
And you can see hints of it. It's beginning.
There's just gonna be more and more people and less and less resources...
...and the rich are gonna protect what they have.
So, yeah, I'm just very interested in Johannesburg.
That's one of the things I'm proud of in this film is--
I don't know whether I've conveyed-- I mean, I think it's impossible...
...to convey an accurate representation of Johannesburg...
...if you decide to throw 1.8 million aliens into it...
...but what you can do is you can sort of show, you know, a face of a city.
You can show a city to an audience that doesn't really get a lot of airtime.
And that people don't know much about outside of South Africa...
...other than, you know, its apartheid history.
But that's more of a textbook thing. You don't get the feeling.
Like this shot, even this shot right here.
The veld, like this grass, this African savannah grass...
...and the amount of pollution that creates these amazing sunsets.
This shot feels like Johannesburg to me.
I don't know how much it comes across to the audience.
That's one thing I'm proud of: When they're going into District 9...
...and they're evicting the aliens, it's harsh sunlight...
...and pollution on the horizon...
...and there's constant helicopters and constant guns...
...and, you know, it's an urban prison.
The mine dumps-- You can see them there.
You'll see them in the wide shot better now.
Those are both mine dumps...
...because a huge percentage of the world's gold comes from that city.
It's absolutely covered in mine clumps everywhere you look.
He ended up hiding in the one place he knew...
So of course, our protagonist flees to the area...
...that he is responsible for creating...
...and ends up in his shack...
...which is precisely what this guy kind of deserved, I think.
So one thing that is kind of interesting--
I spoke about it I think a little bit earlier on...
...is filming in Tshiawelo and being in Soweto like this.
This is in southern Johannesburg...
...and we were staying in the northern suburbs...
...which is where most of the wealthier residents live.
So our production was based in the north.
That's where we'd sleep when I say we were based there.
And then we would drive out into Tshiawelo every day.
And every day...
...it was just another amazing kind of, you know, journey...
...into this area that a lot of people have just--
Even a lot of residents in Johannesburg have never been into.
A lot of the white residents have never been to a lot of these areas.
That thing that Sharlto was eating, he didn't know I put that in there.
It's kind of cool that he just went with it though, because he's that kind of...
You know, he's that kind of-- He got into it to such a great degree...
...that he would just go with it all the way.
I told him to pick up some cans and look like he was really hungry...
...and I put some crushed sort of rusks with some milk in one of them.
And he drank it, funnily enough.
So this kind of thing here, what you're about to see with the cut sheep head...
...this is a real-- This is not-- I mean, none of this is made-up.
This is all real South African stuff there.
That's called a smiley.
And it's called a smiley because half of the sheep's face is smiling.
You know, if you turn it on its side, it looks like a smiley.
So then you barbecue that, or in South Africa it's called braaing.
You braai that.
So, you know, the brain is kind of fried and stuff, and it costs about 15 rand...
...which I guess is about $2.
So if you're in some parts of Soweto, Alexandra, or Diepsloot or whatever...
...and you want a snack, you can have a smiley.
I guess Wikus' character wasn't into smiley...
...so he opts for cat food here.
According to Sharl, this is the second most gross thing that he had to do.
The first one was that bag that I was talking about.
He had his little mini panic attack in there.
And then this one with eating that beef that was in the can...
...in the cat-food can.
He told me if I'd asked for one more take, he wouldn't have done it.
Which was the only time in the whole film where he would have said no.
So I don't know what kind of-- I don't know what his problem was.
He just--
It must have just really grossed him out.
Tania?
Oh, God, please, let it be you.
- Yes, it's me. - Baby...
I'm so happy you called me, baby.
- Wikus, listen to me. - Okay.
I have something to say to you and it's not gonna be easy.
No, okay, look. Listen, baby, before you say anything.
Your father is working against me, baby. He's lying to you.
I did not have sex with one of these...
...fucking creatures, man.
I would never have any kind of--
He's got a lot of energy, I mean, as you can see in the film.
He's one of the most energetic people I've ever met...
...which is why his improv quality is so good.
He's just bouncing off the walls all the time.
And I think, you know...
...the sort of intense filming period that we went through--
Because filming this was incredibly intense.
He was up all the time. He just wasn't getting enough sleep.
He was getting like two hours of sleep or something.
It was insane. And he was just grinding himself into the ground.
It was not an easy thing to film.
And I mean, I don't really have much to measure it up against...
...because this is my first film...
...but I've done a lot of shoot days on their own.
I've never strung them together, obviously, for the length of a feature.
Just doing that, even if you're in the most comfortable place in the world...
...is quite a mountain to climb.
But to do it with improv in a slum...
...working long hours is pretty difficult.
So this is pretty funny when he chops this finger off.
Yeah, this worked out well.
I wasn't totally sure about this.
And then in the end, it's actually one of the funniest things in the film.
The audience is just-- There's no way he's gonna do it...
...when he's holding the axe up, and then of course he follows through.
That is pretty awesome.
That little hill that he's on there...
...this ravine or whatever you wanna call it, which is--
It's a sewerage outlet that you can--
Right there on the right-hand side of the screen you can see the pipe.
Outlets the sewage.
And I guess it's created this little V-shaped valley there.
When he cut his finger off, he was on the other side of the valley.
This is one of the grossest things I've ever seen.
Because those cow heads we saw earlier that the guy was serving...
...the cow, which is called skop, if you want that meat or the smiley.
They throw all of the cow-head carcasses...
...once the meat has been taken off the head--
They throw all of them right where that river was, there, that ravine thing.
So we didn't photograph it.
I should've made more of a sort of little photographic event...
...out of it and put it in the film.
But there was about 3 or 400 skulls just on the ground...
...which is difficult to be around because of the smell...
...and it's rotting, and that also means that as soon as the sun goes down...
...the cat-sized rats that come out and start chewing on the skulls...
...and running across your feet with, like, zero fear of humans...
...was unbelievably overwhelming.
It's just pretty gross, but, again, it's awesome.
You know, it's awesome to put a science-fiction film...
...next to a bunch of cow heads like that.
I love this kind of stuff.
This sort of nerd, kind of geekery stuff of the idea that the aliens--
You know, Christopher Johnson is able to take these human scraps...
...like human pieces of scrap technology and then string together--
Sort of daisy-chain all of these...
...old-school Pentiums and stuff together...
...and come up with some computer...
...that can interface with the ship's computer...
...and he's using these old cathode-ray-tube monitors.
I really like that idea.
I like two different civilisations of technology coming together...
...and somehow he's writing some algorithm...
...that the two can interface with one another. I think that's pretty cool.
I guess he's trying to, you know--
At that point, since he's lost his important nanofluid...
...he's just kind of making sure that the ship is ready to go...
...should he be able to get it back.
Cool stuff, though.
There's a lot of things-- That's the thing I like about this film...
...and I like about the idea is it feels like an open universe.
Like, it's a multifaceted, kind of three-dimensional universe...
...and you can go off in any direction.
If you wanted to, you could make a whole documentary about...
...you know, one of the agents of MNU discovering...
...this massively parallel-processing...
...you know, render farm of computers that are spread out across the slum...
...that have all been fibre-optically linked together...
...you know, by some alien.
It's a cool-- I love that sort of thing.
And then, of course, there's the question about whether--
You know, how it works that he's a drone and yet he's--
There's this, like, inclination to start having a goal...
...and an idea to get off this planet and get home.
And also to have enough initiative to get the technology working.
And you can get really nerdy and geeky about all of it.
But I think that within this beehive kind of structure, there's--
Because they act as a hive.
The hive mind, like the overall sort of, like, telepathic group of insects...
...at some point will realise that they're missing any direction...
...and they'll naturally start to alter the genetic makeup of some of them...
...to start fulfilling that role of direction...
...and start formulating plans and start getting society back on track.
And I mean ultimately, really what they should do is give birth to a queen...
...or give birth to one of the real decision-making aliens...
...which is also a whole other story you could go off on.
What did you say about the fixing?
Like this scene here, Sharlto is interacting with Jason.
It doesn't matter, it's too late.
And then Image Engine has painted Jason out.
You get this cool performance now between the two of them here.
And in shots like this...
...you know, if you can imagine Jason here in his grey suit...
...that's exactly what Image Engine would work with, then they would just--
He doesn't have a mouth...
...so, you know, you lose some of that human emotion.
But what they would rotomate...
...is they'd rotomate his eyes and his face...
...and gather some of that performance from Jason.
It's not motion capture though. It's different to motion capture.
It would've been easier for everyone...
...if we could just put some motion-capture cameras up in our sets.
You know, and just let the software...
...pull the motion out of his performance...
...but it just doesn't work that way.
You can do that on a well-controlled set if you want...
...but you can't do that in a slum.
Now, this-- I love this shot here. This is really cool.
And the essence of the-- "We're the same."
It's cool and that's pure animation.
This is out of an animator's head, because there's no--
There is no reference of a motion for that.
So here, like the shot with the-- Eventually we start--
We see blood dripping off the wound that his arm has become...
...and his back and his upper shoulder.
And it's like all of the torn flesh is bleeding...
...and running down his arm and then onto his foot.
I just love that kind of, you know, body-horror...
...sort of psychological stuff.
Like for him to see that-- He's also not dying though.
It's just the structure of his body is changing.
I love this.
I mean, it's a disconcerting thing to see.
You know, you wouldn't be happy if you saw that.
And then the next scene that we have coming up...
...where he starts pulling those prosthetic pieces of skin...
...flapping off of his carapace kind of insect shell...
...that's forming underneath his skin is also pretty gross.
These shots are cool.
So those were done by Weta Digital.
Weta Workshop and Weta Digital, although they interface a hell of a lot...
...they're very different companies from one another.
And Weta Digital, obviously, gets involved later on...
...because you use Weta Workshop to design everything...
...and if you have practical stuff, anything that's in-camera...
...like everything you're seeing here...
...Weta Workshop would be responsible for this.
And then we had two...
...really highly qualified makeup artists that would travel with us...
...Sarah and Joe, and they would put all the stuff on Sharlto.
But anyway, Weta Workshop is responsible...
...for all of the in-camera stuff and then the designs of everything.
Like the design of the spaceship.
Like I was saying, Greg Broadmore did it.
And then Weta Digital will pick up later once you're in postproduction...
...and they'll take that spaceship...
...and turn it into the world of digital visual effects.
They'll build it as a three-dimensional object, then start putting it into shots.
So predominantly, Weta Digital was responsible for the mother ship...
...and for the drop ship that we see later on...
...that gets tractor-beamed up into the mother ship.
And Image Engine did a few shots with the mother ship...
...but their whole thing in the film was the digital aliens.
I think they did about 35 minutes of photoreal aliens...
...and then The Embassy Visual Effects in Vancouver...
...did the exo-suit sequence that we see at the end.
And the little pets, the little Star Wars pets we saw earlier.
I don't know why I say those are Star Wars. They remind me of them.
And...
And then Zoic in Vancouver did a few shots.
There's a digital Casspir later that gets blown up.
But for the budget of this film...
...I think, you know, the effects that we did were really, really, really awesome.
We also have quite a lot of effects, given the budget range of the film.
I know how to fix myself. And it'll be me...
...and we'll be back together.
See, here, he's really starting to see things falling...
...completely apart for him.
And he's gotta make some decision pretty soon.
It's kind of interesting, like...
...you know, how far a person can be pushed before they need to...
...you know, admit to themselves that everything is gone.
I suppose if your body is changing, it's easy to start doing that.
But the idea that you cross over to become this mercenary rogue guy...
...that will do whatever they can just to restore their biological--
You know, preserve their biological kind of essence back to human.
That's the first stage.
I think the idea of him getting back to his wife...
...is a lot further along than just restoring himself...
...and not dying or not turning into one of these things.
I can't wait to see our planet.
I love the way these holograms look.
The lighting environment in, you know--
The lighting, in general, I was really kind of aware...
...of always trying to portray the digital creatures...
...in the best lighting environment that would make...
...for the most photoreal result...
...given that we were dealing with less money...
...and we had less time, because less money equals less time.
That we would start off from-- You know, start off on a good footing...
...like give the artist something that looks like it could work...
...with, you know, photoreal light hitting these creatures...
...and have them feel like they sit in the photography...
...in a very real way.
The stuff inside the shack here...
...worked out better than I thought it would...
...because it's not movie lighting per se...
...but it's a lot more like a traditional movie, I think...
...than the photography on the outside, in the harsh daylight.
They have all these little kicker lights...
...and all these little point lights in the shack...
...these fluorescent lamps and stuff.
So they're being hit from multiple angles.
But it ended up looking pretty cool.
It looks real and it also looks kind of--
It has a different feel to the rest of the photography in the film.
It's similar to the stuff that you see with the aliens inside the drop ship.
And Trent Opaloch is the DP, who's kind of my--
He's my friend and long-time DP...
...since I was doing low-budget music videos in Vancouver.
And this is his first feature film.
Kind of the same way it's my first feature film.
And I spoke to him a lot...
...about making sure that everything felt as real as possible...
...and that we were doing everything on a photographic level...
...that sold the realism and the grittiness of Johannesburg.
And obviously that I wanted to use--
You know, 40 or 50 percent of the film...
...would be presented as a hand-held documentary...
...or news footage or security-camera footage.
Basically, anytime the actors are aware of the camera...
...that in their reality the camera is present...
...then we're in something that within the realm of the film...
...is considered real footage...
...like the documentary guy who follows him around...
...or the news footage.
And for most of that stuff...
...we used the Sony EX1
...and the Sony EX3, little prosumer cameras...
...which are incredibly cool.
And for most of the film, like this stuff here, the cinematic stuff...
...we used the RED ONE camera...
...which is an unbelievably awesome, powerful piece of technology.
But I mean, you know, the stuff looks really cool...
...but we were going for something that feels real.
So even in DI...
...when I was at Park Road Post colourising all of this...
...a lot of the time-- I mean, obviously, you have to tweak every shot.
You know, you have to do something to it just to balance them.
But in the end, I think there's many, many shots in here...
...where besides just being balanced...
...so that the footage is within the same colour space...
...it's basically not treated.
It's essentially as close to what came out of the camera as possible.
And that just makes it feel kind of real.
And it makes it feel less glossy and less polished...
...and it has a sort of honesty about it that I like.
Oh, shit!
Come here. Come.
You see, this is so funny.
I love this character that just constantly--
Things just keep going wrong for him, you know?
He wants to get some weapons...
...so he can go steal the stuff that can get the ship to work...
...so that he can get his arm restored, and instead...
...the Nigerians would rather just lop his arm off...
...because they have their own agenda.
I wasn't really sure-- The film hasn't come out.
So who knows, this whole thing could tank but--
It used to-- it worries me a lot less now...
...but it used to worry me a lot.
Like, how North American audiences would perceive the idea of muti.
And muti in South Africa is-- It means traditional medicine.
And sometimes traditional medicine in Africa means...
...you know, at its most extreme, consuming body parts...
...and there's ritual muti killings that happen in South Africa...
...where lots of different body parts are cut off people...
...and used in a variety of different ways.
Whether you consume them or--
For example, you'd cut someone's hand off...
...and bury it under the front doorstep of your store.
That would promote people...
...to buy more using their hand to get money out of their pocket.
It's a lot like voodoo and witchcraft and spells.
The idea that Nigerians would be chopping stuff off...
...and consuming it because he wants to become like the aliens...
...wants to be able to operate their technology...
...within the realm of South Africa, if there were aliens...
...would be a completely normal thing to happen.
The first thing that would happen.
It would be some sort of muti related to the aliens.
So I definitely wanted to capture that in the film.
And I think it makes sense, you know.
It's a little bit of a leap, I think, for North American audiences.
There's enough films with voodoo and everything else...
...even though it's Haitian and Jamaican...
...for the audience to just grasp it right away.
It's pretty frightening that the stuff is real though.
So this building, the one on the right there, the taller one...
...is the Carlton Centre, which was--
I love this brutalist architecture. It's one of my favourite kinds.
And Johannesburg has a lot of it.
Just going back to my sort of fascination with Johannesburg.
And I used to go up that building as a kid...
...because there's an observation tower on the top floor.
It's the tallest building in Africa, and--
So I don't know. I think just subconsciously...
...I've always wanted to creatively put that into a film...
...put that into something I was working on.
It's cool that it became the Multi-National United headquarters.
And then there's the lower one, which is the hotel...
...which is the front entrance that we blow up in like four seconds.
And also, we did also damage the front of the building in the process.
Right there.
But this is one of the interesting things about Johannesburg.
This is-- I think it's 40 storeys, the hotel.
I'm not talking about the skyscraper that's next to it.
I just treated both of them as some sort of MNU complex.
If you imagine a 40-storey hotel that was a five-star hotel in the 1980s...
...that entire building is mothballed now.
It's like the most extreme version of Detroit you could imagine.
So there used to be a barbed-wire perimeter fence.
There still is one around the hotel...
...that we had removed when we were filming.
It's like something out of some horror movie.
I mean, you can go-- You know, all the power is off.
You can go up to the 38th floor, the 39th floor, the 40th floor.
It's pitch-black. It's decrepit.
There's no furniture. The stuff is falling off the walls.
I mean, I don't know where else you can find stuff like that.
And then, of course, next to it, the actual business tower...
...which is the observation deck--
It's the tallest building in Africa...
...was sold, I think in 1998, for 3.5 million U.S.
It's, like, not even a mansion in Vancouver.
So pretty incredible stuff, but, I mean, we had access to it.
And then here, you see that vault door, right there, behind C.J.'s leg.
We out it from the film, but right now he's hitting the entrance code...
...and then if we kept the footage we had...
...he goes and opens that vault door.
And it opens up to the actual...
...apartheid nuclear-weapon storage facility in--
Just on the outskirts of Pretoria by the Pelindaba nuclear base.
And now, you know, it's just sort of falling apart now...
...but it's connected to an area called Gerotech...
...which is a military vehicle testing and training ground that they--
Now they use it for lots of sort of commercial applications now.
But we built that set around...
...essentially, a nuclear bunker for storing nuclear weapons.
And we just cut out of it early because it--
You know, the story wasn't moving fast enough.
So, what Christopher finds here, this dead body, is--
The idea is taken from--
You know, I mean, obviously, everybody knows about...
...the Nazi experimentation stuff and then the Japanese.
I think it was Unit 617 with the Japanese in World War ll.
But not many people know about apartheid's...
Like Wouter Basson and all of the--
Lots of different kinds of medical experiments...
...and research and a lot of crazy stuff that was going on.
And so the idea of experimenting on the aliens...
...within a South African context was--
You know, I drew from that part of history that--
You know, it's not unique to South Africa...
...but South Africa definitely was part of it.
Like, they were trying to develop...
...pathogens and poisons and stuff...
...that could affect a black genetic group...
...and not a white genetic group. You know, research like that.
So this kind of thing would happen in South Africa...
...that you'd see these aliens being researched on.
I mean, it would probably happen in any country, really...
...but this is the South African version of that.
So here's one of those situations in a movie where I'd be like:
"Oh, those are the worst mercenaries I've ever seen in my life."
"They can't hit a target for the life of them.", you know.
But this is how filmmaking goes sometimes...
...when your protagonist gets stuck somewhere and he has to get out...
...and you have to make it interesting with bullets flying.
You just have to have a--
Have four really highly trained mercenaries having a hit ratio of zero.
But that's life.
These renders look cool.
That alien looks pretty good.
I try to, you know--
The mercenaries, like I was saying earlier, just the idea...
...of the private military contractor and stuff.
I can really get into all of the specifics...
...about military hardware...
...and soldiers and, you know, guns...
...and I really, really--
There's something about all of that that interests me.
So I really wanted those mercenaries to feel authentic...
...and also to feel South African, and I love the way they look.
You know, the only quasi sort of science-fiction element they have...
...is every once in a while you see some of them wearing...
...these very high-tech looking white vests that they're wearing.
And the idea behind that was that they were resilient...
...to some kind of alien weapons.
So it would be like taking--
Again, just taking the everyday mercenary...
...and then putting them in my sci-fi construct...
...and that's the only piece that changes.
Try to make it feel real.
You can see the guy on the left is wearing one of them.
So that's a Weta Workshop design and build.
But anyway, everything else I try to keep authentic.
A lot of the soldiers-- Like Koobus is using a South African R5 as his rifle...
...which is built by a company in South Africa called Vektor.
It's based on the Israeli Galil, which in turn is based on the AK-47.
I guess all guns, all automatic rifles...
trace their heritage back to that rifle, in some way.
But a lot of this stuff you don't really see outside of South Africa, you know.
Those armoured vehicles, the Casspirs...
...you see them now because the U.S. and Canada--
Canada only uses South African vehicles now in Afghanistan.
I mean, they used to use the G-Wagen...
...and whatever that General Dynamics Coyote thing is.
But they use the RG-31 now in Afghanistan...
...which is a very modern version of a Casspir.
And the Americans built a whole bunch of new vehicles...
...like, I think since 2005, that are based on this V-shaped hull.
Those vehicles that you see at the beginning are unique to South Africa.
They're starting to enter the rest of the world.
I wanted it to feel like this very oppressive, militaristic environment...
...but exclusively South African.
And the military turned us down.
There's other stuff that we could have put in here that would be so crazy...
...to get on film...
...but, you know, without them signing off on it, it just wasn't gonna happen.
I'm a fucking medical experiment. You hear me?
So I think this is kind of a cool turn...
...when he slaps this alien with this piece of timber.
It's a good place for his character to go, you know.
It makes you kind of hate him again.
Because at his core he's kind of a dick.
And I'll see you in three years time?
I will come back. I promise.
Hey, Christopher.
And then when Koobus comes back in to the shack...
...and he starts beating the alien up...
...I was really interested in the idea of a computer-generated character...
...who was getting the snot beaten out of him.
I thought that was kind of a cool idea.
You know, it's not over the top.
He just-- He gets hit again later on with a telescopic baton...
...outside of the Casspir.
And there's something kind of disturbing about it...
that he's just geometry, you know, he's just a visual effect, but he's still--
It creates kind of an upsetting feeling when you see him getting beaten up.
So I like the idea of flesh and a real human...
...you know, filmed through a lens...
...beating up something which is just not there.
Trying to make it look as real as possible.
It goes in here, eh?
How the fuck do you open this, prawn?
See that. All of the stuff he's wearing there is all-- That's just--
He's the most authentic South African soldier out of all of them.
That's exactly what they would wear...
...in the '80s.
This is a total stretch, of course, you know, the human--
I suppose it's driven by the fact that he's turning into an alien...
...and he's got this alien DNA...
...that's beginning to alter the genetic structure of his body...
...so the ship will interface with him.
But, of course, that's not the problem, the problem is the stretch...
...in believing that he would know how to interface with it...
...and know how to fly it up to the mother ship.
But it's all driven just out of desperation.
And I think if you buy into the character...
...on a desperation level...
...and you understand how badly he wants to revert to being human...
...you know, hopefully you go along with that as an audience member...
...and you kind of go along with him for the ride.
But I suppose that's still yet to be seen.
I like the idea of this kind of crazy nanofluid...
...that he's gotta interface with.
It's either that or it's the urinal...
...in the cockpit.
Get out! Now!
This shot, this is a pretty complicated shot that Weta Digital did.
Right there.
And there was-- It's one of those shots where, you know--
It's not as though the idea came after we'd filmed the movie...
...but what that shot was...
...with all of the earth rising up behind him...
...we certainly didn't necessarily...
...film it with that kind of extremity...
...of how much dirt in mind, you know.
It's pretty amazing what they pulled off with that.
Fuck. Fuck off.
And then I love-- These holograms are really cool.
That shot doesn't totally feel real to me.
I mean, I guess that happens, you know, with every film. It's just--
That's just how life is...
...that you just can't get everything exactly the way you want it.
But there has to be a bunch of-- A handful of shots in a movie...
...that feel awesome as the director and a handful of shots that didn't work.
You just can't get them to work. That's just how it goes.
One of the engines is billowing smoke. It's out of control.
When that missile hits the ship...
I watch a lot of crazy videos on, like, LiveLeak.com...
...with all of the, you know, stuff that you see...
...coming out of Afghanistan and Iraq.
And whenever they detonate IEDs or there's some sort of explosion...
...or, you know, anything that has a concussive effect...
...there's always this kind of effect that happens...
...to the on board camera mike...
...because, presumably, the soldiers just have some little hand-held camera.
So you see footage in Iraq...
...they detonate an IED or an IED goes off...
...without, you know, any soldier knowing about it.
And it happens to get caught on film.
Or I should say on video.
And it just absolutely destroys the on board mike.
You know, you get this crazy distortion and you can barely...
...sort of hear the sound of what the explosion is...
...other than a whole bunch of distorted sound waves.
So when that missile hit the ship...
...and the ship starts spiralling down...
...I wanted the sound guys at Park Road...
...to kind of try to emulate that.
I think it sounds so cool.
You're viewing it from this news helicopter that isn't--
It's just not set up for that kind of level of, you know...
...just the sheer amount...
...of sound concussion...
...that's hitting the mike from the chopper.
And it just blows the whole thing to pieces...
...so you get this very distorted sound when the missile hits.
I think one of my favourite parts of this whole film process...
...really has actually been at Park Road Post.
Going between the sound mix and sound design.
And then, you know, down to the DI suite...
...to see the final visual-effects shots come in...
...and just tweak the look of the film.
And then go back upstairs...
...and sit in the mix room with all of the sound guys.
And...
I think the sound is just-- ls so awesome in the film, you know.
And maybe I just think that because it's my film...
...but there's a lot of cool stuff, like the mother ship booting up...
...and the sound of the exo-suit. It sounds cool.
And the music...
...which was done by Clint, who scored the original short film...
...so it only seemed fitting that he would kind of do District 9 as well.
And I think he seriously stepped up to the plate...
...and just hit the ball out of the park.
I love the score for this.
I really wanted it to be a combination...
...between Africa and...
Africa and Hollywood, you know. What I kept saying to him was:
"It's sort of like Hans Zimmer meets, you know, Soweto."
And I think for the most part...
...he really just nailed that. It's exactly what it sounds like.
It gets big and cinematic and theatrical when it needs to...
...and it also gets, you know, gritty and sort of African when it needs to.
You get this cool balance between the two.
Get up. Move! Move!
So all of this action stuff, you know, with the shootout here--
I mean, generally with the whole film, I felt a bit unprepared in a way.
Like when I was shooting it...
...I just wasn't as prepared as I should have been.
And...
So I kind of feel like I could have done better with a lot of this stuff.
But the thing that I like overall is I do like how raw...
...a lot of the stuff feels. Like, it doesn't--
It does feel quite, you know, just sort of abrasive and real.
And there's-- There isn't really any kind of--
There's no real Hollywoodness about it. It's just kind of happening.
And then later on...
...when you include the exo-suit in that kind of mix...
...you get a pretty cool result because it kind of feels...
...like you're not glossying anything up.
And you don't have any really crazy camera moves...
...and it's not particularly Hollywood per se...
...but it is a whole bunch of visual effects with an exo-suit...
...so you're kind of caught between two things.
And I like the result that that gives.
Of course, the drivers of the Casspir are dead...
...from an RPG...
...implosion at the front of the vehicle, which just would never happen.
See, this is what I do. I pick it apart.
That's what happens with films, I guess.
Why would the drivers be dead? It can drive over a limpet mine.
It blows the wheels off. It blows the suspension off.
And then you can tow it away and have that put back on...
...with, like, within an hour and let the vehicle go back out.
But, of course, in my film...
...I have to kill the driver and the co-driver with an RPG...
...to the front of the car.
Now, I wanted this to be pretty gross and pretty brutal here...
...when they're gonna cut his arm off.
We got those awesome shots coming up later with the guy...
...sharpening the two machetes against one another...
...which is pretty intimidating.
This was hilarious when we were filming this.
Right here, this chopper coming down.
This whole area of Tshiawelo is built on top of a landfill.
I mean, it's garbage. The whole place is built on garbage.
And there's literally, like, human faeces everywhere.
I mean, it is so disgusting.
I can't even explain how bad of an environment this is.
So that helicopter comes in...
...which, I mean, is an absolutely immense troop-carrying helicopter.
Cover the eastern block.
And the chopper wash from it, like the amount...
...just the pure cubic litres of air...
...that it's thrusting down onto the ground...
...and then, you know, moving into a horizontal speed...
...centrifugally out from the middle of the helicopter...
...is so much greater than what I was expecting...
...and what the crew was expecting...
...that we just got absolutely just covered...
...in this kind of, like, silt faeces kind of rubbish that was lying around.
I mean, it was so ridiculously disgusting, it's not even funny.
Because we filmed it a bunch of times going up and down, we got smarter...
...with the second and third kind of landing of that thing.
But it's like the whole concept...
...of as you increase something's size...
...you know, the mass kind of squares itself.
You start ending up with-- The chopper only needs to be twice as big...
...to have four times as much of an effect on its environment.
And that thing was ridiculous.
This is cool. I love this shot.
This is really cool.
So you can see Weta's got like--
The pylons and the electrical cables are fluctuating...
...and then the tin on top of the building.
This stuff is cool.
So I like the idea here...
...that although the exo-suit doesn't have anybody controlling it...
...it just automatically goes into some kind of--
You know, it goes into this mode...
...where it identifies Wikus' DNA as something that needs to be preserved.
And it identifies the humans as DNA that is posing a threat...
...to the alien DNA, and therefore should be, you know, gotten rid off.
It's like a default protective thing...
...that the technology just does if you were to turn it on.
And then, of course, it opens itself up and kind of offers itself to the alien...
...as a form of protection. Clearly, it's under some kind of threat.
That's hilarious, by the way. I love that shot.
A lot of the meat-bag explosion stuff we did...
Max Poolman and his guys in Cape Town...
...came up to Joburg as the special-effects crew.
And we really kind of honed our meat bags.
Towards the end, they started getting really good...
...where it was the right balance between explosiveness...
...and, you know, the right grams...
...of explosive powder mixed with liquid...
...because if you have too much explosion...
and too little liquid, it just looks like a whole bunch of red vapour.
If you get the balance just right like the one where Obesandjo died there...
...which is my favourite one...
...then you get this kind of just-- It looks like someone...
...popped a huge water balloon or something, which is pretty funny.
But, I mean, all of the alien technology in general, you know, I think--
Especially the weaponry.
Like I was saying about how much I like the idea...
...of this open universe with these different facets...
...and different pieces of information...
...that you can choose to get into or not get into.
It feels like you can make an entire film about the mother ship...
...because, you know, presumably you'd have 98 percent...
...of the population are these drones on the mother ship.
And then you've got the elites in the society...
...who, in my mind, died off with some sort of...
...you know, virus or sort of bacteria that attacked just the elite population...
...and left all of these drones in the ship.
And at that point--
It's the same thing as the exo-suit saving Wikus.
The technology at that point...
...actually has more direction than the aliens themselves.
So the ship may autopilot to the first planet, you know, that's--
The first planet that's within the Goldilocks band, as they call it.
You know, like, some planet that has liquid--
Has liquid water.
Or water that's existing in ice, liquid and steam, you know...
...which is, I guess, what astrobiologists look for...
...if you're looking for life on other planets.
So the ship goes there and just, you know, Earth is the closest one.
That's how it's gonna keep its population alive.
And we end up with this problem of all these directionless aliens.
But on the mother ship, you'd have--
You know, you'd probably have several hundred thousand...
...of those suits.
And I think the way that we designed the suit--
Again, it's Greg.
--You know, was that not only is it this thing that you can be--
You can use it in warfare if you want. Because I'm sure these creatures...
...get into a lot of resource wars as they move around the galaxy.
But also that it has a whole lot of measuring equipment.
You could land it on an asteroid and get, you know--
Get a very accurate reading, take core samples...
...and sort of analyse a whole lot of information...
...that the mother ship can then decide to deploy aliens to that planet...
...to gather the resources or move on.
But if it becomes a case of, you know, full-on war...
...then, you know, I think a quadrant of the ship...
...just is chock-a-block full with weapons...
...which is kind of a hilarious concept. Like, the ship arrives on Earth...
...and it's just, like, stuffed with weaponry.
And then other parts of it--
You know, like, there's those huge kind of cylindrical ore receptacles...
...under the ship that I think...
...when the elite population was alive...
...they'd fill that with whatever mineral or resource or water...
...or whatever it was they wanted and then move on to the next planet.
--Keep on running, you fucking coward. Run!
See, here, this is where you get to the essence...
...of Wikus' character there, which is someone...
...who's, you know, armed to the teeth and yet he'll run off...
...because he's kind of a coward.
And then his turning point is that he comes back and saves the alien.
The idea that as he becomes more alien, he becomes more human.
I kind of like the idea here also that the--
I think we could have pulled it off more...
...but you do get a little bit of a sense of it, that the exo-suit...
...like right here...
...is playing back the sound that's occurring on the battlefield.
The exo-suit thinks it may be necessary...
...for the occupant to hear this...
...whatever info is being gathered around them.
And in this particular case is they're gonna kill the alien.
But I just like that it's sourcing information constantly...
...and kind of replaying it.
You know, it's this three-dimensional sound and visual environment...
...that it can be updating and giving the user...
...whatever info the suit thinks they need.
I guess until they take control of it...
...which Wikus clearly has no idea how to do.
I can't, it's too far.
It's not too fucking far. Get up.
I'm gonna get you there.
I still think the render on the alien's jacket is awesome.
I love that material.
It's kind of like, I remember in--
One of the films that made me wanna get into filmmaking...
...or at least into visual effects, was Jurassic Park when I was 13.
I love that movie.
And I've seen all these interviews with Spielberg and ILM and stuff...
...talking about how--
They were telling him he had to lock the cameras off.
And he was saying that he wanted to move the camera.
And there's that famous shot with the whole pride of dinosaurs...
...that are running by the kids.
And he moved the camera, you know.
And they had to track the camera and then--
And then place the digital creatures into the track camera motion.
And so for people who don't know what that means...
...it just means that you have to--
You can't put something that's a visual effect into a scene...
...unless you can mimic what the real-life camera was doing.
Because, you know, your computer-generated camera...
...has to simulate the real-life one.
And therefore, the motion of the digital creature that's being filmed...
...by the digital camera will then line up with the real one.
So it's pretty interesting if you look at this film.
Pretty much every shot is hand-held and loose and three-dimensional.
Just how far the technology has come in such a short space of time...
...that I could run around on set with a hand-held camera, you know.
In certain cases, you don't even need lens settings, really.
You could run around and film...
...and put the 3-D stuff back in there, which is pretty amazing.
I love that that RPG just comes out of nowhere.
We don't really explain where it comes from.
Kind of Black Hawk Down-ish, I guess.
...hold him off here and I'll join you soon.
No, we stick together. I'm not leaving you here.
I also like the idea of a digital creature with blood on them.
I wish we could--
There's always things you want to do more, I suppose, looking back.
But it'd be cool to have some blood running off his face.
But then you start getting into, like, simulating liquid...
...and fluid dynamics and stuff...
...which we could do if we had all the time in the world.
So one of my favourite things about this movie is how...
...you know, Wikus is a dick...
...but ultimately, his redemption at the end here is--
Because of all he's been through...
...despite where he came from originally...
...he's been through so much that you really just wanna see him do this...
...because this company is so horrible.
And you want--
You kind of wanted to be cheering for him here, which is sort of cool.
You know, because his arc has been quite dramatic.
You do get behind him by the time he starts unloading on these guys.
Yeah, that meat-bag explosion with Brandon is pretty funny.
But I guess it depends, again, on your sense of humour.
But that's pure comedy to me.
And then this is the pig. We shot two--
There was another pig that the exo-suit flung...
...that we cut.
But that one remained. And that's just because, you know...
...that's the kind of thing you see in Soweto.
You'd totally see a dead pig lying by the side of the road...
...or a dead dog.
So why not grab one and throw it, because that's what an exo-suit...
...standing in an area with dead pigs would do...
...using its gravity gun.
Kind of felt bad when we were making the film just because...
You know, it's-- There's a lot of dead animals and just--
I almost can't even remember how many are in the film...
...versus what we actually filmed, but we filmed a lot of dead animals.
And you're kind of caught in this place where--
Like, I felt so bad for the creatures that are, you know--
Even though they're dead, it just feels wrong.
But conveying any sense of authenticity in that region...
...that's just part of life there.
There's just-- It's a hard life and these animals die.
And you see them everywhere.
I love the idea of those multiple rockets.
That's a total sort of Robotech, you know...
...1980s anime kind of thing that has just stuck in the back of my mind.
All those little wispy rockets that fly around.
It's almost more really from those '80s cartoons...
...coming out of Japan than actual anti-personnel weapons...
...which look a little bit different to that, the real-life ones.
But you could go to town on all the different weapons...
...that the aliens could have brought.
And there could be some really crazy, cool geek things...
...you could get into with them.
Fuck!
This car was such a piece of shit. It was like--
You see how we had to out there?
The way I wanted to film it was that thing was going...
...like 150 kilometres an hour when it hit the exo-suit.
But I think by the time we actually got to filming this part of the film...
it literally had like two cylinders left that were firing.
So it had about four horsepower. I mean, it was just totally pathetic.
That was its absolute top speed there. Like, it wouldn't--
No, actually, in fact, it got towed. We towed it to get it up to that speed.
There's a more powerful car, somewhere else...
...driving at 90 degrees to that with a pulley...
...kind of where the exo-suit is.
And then a right angle on the rope that pulled the pickup up the street.
Come on.
So docking with the mother ship here is something--
I really like this sequence.
Like, from--
Just from a character perspective of where Wikus has arrived at here...
...and, you know, this level of redemption...
...and then also the combination of music...
...and then finally these aliens getting back to their ship...
...hopefully will be a good payoff for the audience, but I really--
I really like it.
One thing I was really trying to do...
...was keep as much of this harsh sun...
...on the visual-effects stuff as possible.
Like on the drop ship before it and now on this shot here.
You get the occasional glint from sunlight...
...on some of the shinier metal.
And that sound there that's like a dentist drill...
...are these drills that have drilled into his head.
Like, to interface with his brain directly, which we--
You know, I could've shown those a bit more clearly, I guess.
So this stuff, this whole sequence...
...I was so worried about how this would cut together.
Just purely on a continuity level...
...because those two shots we just saw were literally sunset.
We shot at every possible hour of the day.
And not only that, we shot--
You know, it was mostly really just harsh sun.
But then Johannesburg can get these thundershowers...
...that come out of nowhere.
And within half an hour you can have pitch-black clouds...
...with these incredible thundershowers.
And then another half an hour after that, it's complete sun again.
So the clouds-- It's this particular sequence at the end...
...the clouds just go insane.
Like, they just go from pure blue to overcast...
...to pure blue to, like, sunset.
But I think, you know, with colour timing, we kind of got--
We got it sort of in the right balanced spectrum.
But the actual pixels of the clouds we couldn't do anything about.
I love this eye enlargement thing.
Making his eye larger, I think, was Pete's idea.
He also had this other hilarious idea that I kind of-- I just didn't do.
I think it was the insanity of filming, I forgot to kind of do it, but it was--
When he told it to me, I thought it was the funniest thing.
Which was to put a sharp kind of pebble in Sharlto's left shoe...
...on his heel so that it would just mess up his gait a little bit.
His rhythm and his walk would be screwed up and he'd be limping.
He wouldn't have any choice, because the thing would be penetrating skin...
...if he decided to step on it.
But I didn't do that. If I had implemented that...
...for the last quarter of the film, it would be pretty funny.
I think this is a pretty good death for Koobus.
And I love how these guys--
This particular piece of visual effects here...
...this is motion capture. I mean, obviously, it's tweaked with animation.
But we did actually motion-capture that on a stage...
...with a bunch of guys that were tearing stuff apart.
So we got that animalistic thing where one of them has an arm...
...and they're interested in the arm. They see someone else has a leg.
They're interested in the leg...
...so they drop the arm and then fly over to the leg.
Which is hilarious and, you know, also accurate to what happens in nature.
Also, I love-- These holograms are cool.
So now, his ship leaving...
...this was one of the things--
You know, I mean, obviously, this is a big payoff at the end of the story.
It's one of those things where you have to balance...
...between making it an event and making it sort of a spectacle...
...but, again, trying to keep it within the realm of being real.
This shot is good. I think that shot really makes it feel quite real.
But how do these huge sort of interstellar boosters that fire up--?
How do you make those feel real, you know?
It's these kind of questions that are interesting...
...that I love trying to answer.
But they have this heat distortion...
...very slight heat distortion, that we applied...
...and then a few other sort of very faint plasma things.
This is hilarious. Those people are waving at our helicopter...
...to get out of there. They didn't want us there.
They're not waving at the ship. They're not part of production.
There was some sort of, like, trade-union rally...
...going on in downtown Joburg, which happens, like, weekly.
You know, there's always some group that's protesting about something.
So we flew over with our camera mount.
We had no idea they would be there.
We were filming the downtown core for something else.
We discovered like, you know, 80,000 people or whatever.
So when we started hovering above them...
...they started waving us away.
So, of course, you just have to use that.
You've gotta use that, because that's a bunch of people...
...waving the alien ship away.
It's funny how things like that sort of work out.
Other than the fact that one in two people...
...was wearing a red shirt identifying whatever cause...
...they were kind of out for that day.
...last known footage of Wikus van de Merwe.
So it's like I was saying earlier...
...the idea of balancing the cinematic versus documentary...
...or found footage in this film was an intricate sort of balance.
At the end of the film, after all the cinematic stuff...
...we kind of go back to documentary again.
And I think it's a really cool way to end the film.
Because you can use these characters to sum things up quite elegantly.
Wikus, sadly, is gone...
...but I'm the one who stays behind with all--
It's funny, his dad's character always cracked me up the most.
Like, this guy. "He's dead to me."
It's like, his son became an alien. He can't deal with that.
So the guy died in his mind a long time ago.
It's that kind of instant, you know, sort of dropping of a family member...
...due to this social pariah kind of status thing...
...that I find so funny and so interesting.
I mean, the whole data was there, you know?
They didn't even do a good job of hiding it.
So there's the Carlton Centre.
I love this shot because it sums Johannesburg up. Joburg is like--
People always complain about the sprawl of L.A...
...but Johannesburg is like the sprawl of L.A. without the ocean...
...and more barbed wire, and more highways, and more mine dumps.
...my wife. Let me show you my wife.
So, yeah, I hope audiences feel...
...they've gone along this journey with Wikus...
...and that he redeems himself in the end.
Of course, the question is whether he actually redeemed himself...
...or whether the architecture of his mind...
...the actual physical architecture has begun to grow...
...into this more insect, alien-like, you know, fractal brain.
And he's actually just looking out for his own...
...because that's what the hormones and the genetics are dictating.
Or has he decided to do that?
I don't know whether people will pick up on that or not...
...but an interesting idea.
I know it's true.
So I guess that's it for me.
This is my first film and been one hell of a ride.
Wanna thank everybody involved that helped me make it...
...and a massive thanks to Pete Jackson and Fran.
Been quite a ride, so I guess in the next few weeks...
...we'll see how the world receives it...
...but this is me until the next one.
So thanks for listening. Cheers.