“I was drawn to films as far back as I can remember,” confessed writer/director Neill Blomkamp. “When I lived in South Africa, it didn’t seem viable, but by the time I got to Canada, I was 18, and pretty much went straight to Film School.” Working in VFX, Blomkamp saw a clear path to real work in the industry.
Blomkamp started to study some of his favorite directors, like Ridley Scott, and realized many of them got their starts in commercials and music videos as a path to making features. “I just kept scaling it up,” he said.
“Shorts are wildly different from commercials. I don’t even know if it’s possible to be creative in commercials,” he said about this path to filmmaking. “You can definitely be creative in short films. You can have more creativity there than in a big film.”
“The more that [novice creatives] can put some unique element into their short, the more it will create a situation where there is a higher possibility that they manage to land a bigger film. If there are a thousand people making shorts, ask yourself what makes this unique? What makes it you?”
As for what makes Blomkamp Blomkamp, it’s what Ebert once called the science-fiction fable. Best known for District 9, Elysium, Chappie, and most recently, Demonic, the creative certainly practices what he preaches.
Neill Blomkamp
“What makes it so that if this film was directed by anybody else, it wouldn’t be this?” This artistic style is equally important in his writing and storytelling.
Leaving Hollywood
“I’m super interested in how to monetize Oats,” said Blomkamp about Oats Studios, the independent film studio he began in 2017. Their big budget shorts often fit the science-fiction fable realm. Some attached names include Sigourney Weaver, Carly Pope (also in Demonic), and Dakota Fanning.
“It’s definitely possible to use the Internet to do what you want to do. You just have to go about it in the most intelligent way. Go into it knowing that initially you’re going to lose money, until you figure out how to fine-tune it.”
With all of this in mind, Blomkamp no longer wants his projects to “touch Hollywood.” He said, “Hollywood is sort of traditional, so you can’t shoehorn something highly untraditional, that has evolved on the Internet, into Hollywood. It doesn’t work. Also, I don’t want to. I want it to have its own life, separately.”
“I find more inspiration in a lot of YouTube creators than I do with a lot of feature directors out there. [But] I feel like the revolutions are kind of finished. I think we’re in an age of corporate content, which seems to be [a goal] to make as much as possible.”
Blomkamp continued, “Because so much is being made and the budgets are so extravagant, there’s definitely really incredible pieces of artwork out there, because of the sheer volume. But I would say, in general, it’s a quantity over quality situation now. The quality is high, but it’s a result of the sheer amount of stuff being made.”
Carly (Carly Pope)
“I don’t think there are any more revolutions or any more walls that need to be knocked over. It’s a case now, of, if you have a good idea, you should go out and make it.”
Socio-Political Topics
Neill Blomkamp is no stranger to social causes. In District 9, an extraterrestrial race is forced to live in slum-like conditions on earth. In Elysium, the wealthy live in a man-made space station while the poor live on a ruined earth in 2154. In Chappie, crime is controlled by a mechanized police force.
“I’m hugely interested in socio-political topics, class warfare and class struggle. I assume it’s as a result of growing up in South Africa. I think if I had grown up in Canada, maybe things wouldn’t be the same with me. I don’t actually know. But whatever it is, it’s hard-wired in me.”
“But, going forward, there’s space for other things too. This film is techno-horror,” he said of Demonic. “There are other avenues that I want to go down, but it doesn’t discount how much effort I want to put into other things that are like District 9 and Elysium.”
In his latest film, Demonic, “A young woman unleashes terrifying demons when supernatural forces at the root of a decades-old rift between mother and daughter are ruthlessly revealed.”
Ironically, this movie would not have been made if it didn’t happen during coronavirus. “If it wasn’t for COVID, none of this would have happened. I probably would have made a short with the idea, but I always loved Paranormal Activity and how the filmmaker just went out and shot it in his house.”
The original version of Demonic was shot in Blomkamp’s house. “It was cut from the same cloth. How do you go out and just film a low budget horror film yourself? What does that look like? Because of the Oats Film School we had gone through our low budget production, so we thought we could do a feature the same way.”
Creative Limitations
In addition to the logistic constraints of shooting essentially a contained horror movie during quarantine, the creative also wanted to try his hand at Volumetric Capture. Volumetric Capture is a new three-dimensional video technology that turns actors into geometric objects you can render into 3D environments.
“I needed to justify it in the script in a way that it felt narratively that the audience would accept how glitchy it was as a technology. So it had to be written in like a piece of prototype technology in the world where the movie takes place.”
To further elaborate on the plot, this technology is described as a simulation for a comatose detainee. For audiences, this is sort of a science fiction exorcism film. “It creates a different kind of creativity. A problem-solving mindset, where you’re working backwards. The film was the result of puzzle pieces. When that clicked, I just ran with it.”
“It’s the reverse of how you normally go about making a movie,” said Blomkamp. In the end, there was a script and the shooting was very traditional. “It was more like, what are the puzzle piece elements we have access to? Make a list of them. Figure out what we want to use and write the script based on that.”
Angela (Nathalie Boltt)
Since Volumetric Capture was one puzzle piece, the screenwriter spent some time detailing the look on the page. “You can’t write it like Avatar because it looks like glitchy CGI.”
Writing for Directors
For writers who want to create similar experimental projects, he would recommend “following an instinct through to the end. Do the screenwriting version of experimental. Break up the timelines. Change the POV. Change the way a screenplay is structured.”
“It should be a document that is representative of the story and the characters so you’re drawn into the story,” he said of his screenplay, adding that camera movements on the page drives him crazy. “If it’s being sent out to directors, they know what they’re doing. They will apply their own choices and style.”
Blomkamp is constantly sent scripts, but the one’s he responds to are all about the material. “It’s interesting because there have been a bunch of projects where I’m collaborating with a writer who is entirely responsible for the script, and then there’s time where you are sent scripts and they’re relatively baked, ready to go.”
“It’s hard to put your finger on in terms of what makes something unique and special, or what you see in it. There are so many examples of a director taking a script that others didn’t see. They didn’t see the gem inside of it. The writer’s ideas mixed with what the director did with it yields this incredible movie.”
Abandon Screenplay Structure
Since he cares little about three act structure, he’s focused on other rules to make his projects work in a storyteller sense. “Are theme and character intertwined with one another and doing what you want them to do? That’s basically the most important thing to me. Then, is what they’re going through reinforcing the theme, but also emotional? Are they changing or evolving? If so, then you’re in a pretty good place.”
As for bringing complex ideas to life, this is where things get a little more complicated, and essentially why he created Oats in the first place. “Inside Hollywood, you have streaming content and traditional studio movies. Under streaming, you have movies and TV shows, so there are three categories of things.”
“Each of those three follow different rules. Streamers and theatrical are similar. TV shows are pretty similar. So if you say, the audience needs more and you need to keep them hooked because they have 787,000 other choices.”
Because audiences have to physically exit normal viewing methods to watch a short on Oats, it is its own thing in a way that moving through some extra friction demands your attention. “It does whatever it wants. If it wants to start halfway through a story and it’s only 17 minutes long, that’s what it’s going to do. The audience can take it or leave it.”
“There’s something beneficial in that, but at the same time, it’s purposefully trying to steer away from structure. The structure in Hollywood annoys me. If it’s a feature, it’s probably three acts. Certain films break that and it’s very refreshing, but they’re anomalies. Same with TV.”
“I think the audience, to some degree, is starting to feel that. They will go towards weirder, more unusual things because it’s fresh and unpredictable. But you can also watch media bend and mutate to fit the technology that it is on.”
As for the future of Oats, the vibe is not drastically different from the tagline for District 9: “You are not welcome here.” In Blomkamp’s own words about audience filtration, “There’s an element of what I want to do for Oats eventually, which is, this isn’t for you, just go away. Actively try to get rid of the audience, then, if they stick around, okay, here’s something for you.”
This interview has been condensed. Listen to the full audio version here.
