Neill Blomkamp
Neill Blomkamp
Neill Blomkampis a South African-Canadian film director, film producer, screenwriter, and animator. Blomkamp employs a documentary-style, hand-held, cinéma vérité technique, blending naturalistic and photo-realistic computer-generated effects. He is best known as the co-writer and director of the critically acclaimed and financially successful science fiction film District 9 and the dystopian science fiction film Elysium, which garnered moderately positive reviews and a good box office return. He is also known for his collaborations with South African actor Sharlto Copley. He is...
NationalitySouth African
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth17 September 1979
world firsts suits
'District 9' was a singular anti-Apartheid metaphor, and 'Elysium' is a more general metaphor about immigration and how the First World and Third World meet. But the thing that I like the most about the metaphor is that it can be scaled to suit almost any scenario.
character thinking elysium
'District 9', 'Elysium' and 'Chappie' were all born out of some visual concept first. 'Chappie' is the imagery, because I think I'm a visual person first, of this ridiculous robot character. It's much more comedy based and in an unusual setting.
powerful horror-stories actors
High-level actors can be all about their close-ups and the size of their trailers. I'd heard these horror stories of how a really powerful actor can come in and change your script.
kings climbing intellectual
When any young director gets hired by a studio to do a $125 million film based on a preexisting piece of intellectual property, they're climbing into the meat grinder. And what you're coming out with on the other side is a generic, heavily studio-controlled pile of garbage that ends up on the side of Burger King wrappers.
interesting people design
News is almost more interesting to me than other people's fiction, if that makes sense. But other people's fiction in terms of design is still incredibly interesting to me.
strong thinking long
In the realm of strong A.I. or in the realm of human consciousness, I think that it's been something that troubles humans or forces us to look at it over and over for millennia, or as long as we've really been conscious, because there is no answer. There is no explanation for us, even for a one percent grip to hold on to. So we just don't know why we're here, we don't know how consciousness is created.
strong writing thinking
You have weak artificial intelligence, which is a robot or a computer system that follows a list of protocols and it's like yes/no answers that can be as complex as you want, and then you have strong A.I., which is basically like a human, like something that can think up a thought that's never been thought up or paint a painting or write a poem.
views ties giving
My point of view actually on artificial intelligence, which ties into the nature for humans constantly looking into the reasons for why we exist and why consciousness exists changed during the making of Chappie. And I'm not actually completely sure that humans are going to be capable of giving birth to A.I. in the way that films fictionalize it.
honest compromise standards
My own standards that I'll hold myself to is if the product that I'm making feels honest and it feels like I didn't compromise and it just came from an honest, correct place.
battle scene middle
Deleted scenes are like in a middle gray zone. It's like, well, they're deleted because they're not good or you lost the battle and you couldn't put them in the movie.
drones east middle
Generally speaking, it's a very hard thing to wrap your head around that a drone operator in Nevada can be releasing munitions in the Middle East.
acting way evidence
There's a lot of evidence in evolutionary sciences that show that altruism and acting in ways that are empathetic to others are actually beneficial on an evolutionary basis.
optimistic views gains
It's just my maybe naive, optimistic view that whatever knowledge we gain, and if it comes to pass that we can somehow understand what consciousness is, if we can somehow create that, it will ultimately be used for the good.
areas buy cheesy feet people treat weird
In a lot of the really impoverished areas of Johannesburg you see these packets of cheesy puffs which are like 6 feet long and the width of a basketball, and they're transparent and they have like 10,000 cheesy puffs in them, and you can buy that for like 50 cents. It's kind of a weird treat that you'd see people having in the townships.