Halo gives rise to District 9

By TOM CARDY - The Dominion Post

It was game over for South African film-maker Neill Blomkamp's big-budget Halo movie, but thanks to Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, he has made sci-fi thriller District 9.

Three years ago, when he was just 26, South African film-maker Neill Blomkamp landed the big one.

After making short films, advertisements and visual effects for movies, not only was he going to direct his debut feature film, but it would be a US$128 million adaptation of the bestselling science-fiction video game Halo. To top it off, the executive producers would be Peter Jackson and partner Fran Walsh, with the visual effects done by the Oscar-winning Wellington studios Weta Digital and Weta Workshop.

Blomkamp, who has lived in Vancouver since he was 18, flew to Wellington to begin work. But by late 2006, Jackson was forced to pull the plug on the project after backers Universal and 20th Century Fox withdrew.

"Halo collapsed and I was getting ready to pack my bags and leave Wellington because my whole purpose for being there had just fallen over," says Blomkamp, on the phone from Vancouver.

"Then Fran said, 'Let's just take this negative opportunity and turn it into something positive. Let's work on a new film'."

The world will get to see the result next week with sci-fi thriller District 9, a month before Blomkamp turns 30.

With a US$30m budget, it's a smidgen of Halo's, but those who have seen it are full of praise.

The Hollywood Reporter declared: "District 9 is smart, savvy film-making of the highest order."

Walsh suggested to Blomkamp that he expand on his 2005 short sci-fi feature Alive in Jo'Burg, which, in a gritty, documentary style, detailed how a group of aliens had been living in a run-down refugee camp in Johannesburg since arriving in a giant spacecraft. The aliens were treated with disdain by most humans, with clear parallels to South Africa's apartheid era.

"I was really into science fiction when I was a kid and I still am. I just wanted to try to see what it looked like to put science fiction that I'd grown up with and what would that look like if I just took one element and placed it in an environment that I'd grown up in. Alive in Jo'Burg seemed like a good place to start, so right away we began to jot down ideas and move forward with that. It was a pretty cool turn of events."

Blomkamp, who co-wrote the script with Terri Tatchell, shot most of it in Soweto. Some scenes, including inside the spacecraft, were shot in Wellington, while Weta Digital and Weta Workshop contributed to the visual effects.

The story expands on Blomkamp's short film. The aliens have been stranded in Johannesburg for 20 years.

There are plans to forcibly move them to a rural concentration camp called District 9. But at the same time, humans are eager to get hold of alien weaponry.

The film has a couple of Kiwi actors, including Jed Brophy and Nick Blake, but South Africans have the starring roles, including Sharlto Copley as Wikus, an operative for a private company contracted to control the aliens.

Copley had never starred in a film before, but was an old friend of Blomkamp's, who says it was only because he had Jackson producing the film that he had the power to cast Copley.

"If I was to try to do that under any other circumstances, I probably would have failed. Pete has two things - the political ability to make that happen and the talent to recognise Sharlto's talent. In a way, he was taking a gamble and I was taking a gamble, and Sharlto massively stepped up."

Jackson was shooting his next film, The Lovely Bones, while Blomkamp was in Soweto shooting, so didn't get to South Africa himself, but he helped in many ways. That included financing a 10-minute film which showed Blomkamp's vision for District 9. It was shown to potential backers to secure finance.

"In Neill's case, he grew up in the apartheid of South Africa and the last days of the regime there. He saw the ugliness, he saw with his own eyes what apartheid did to society," says Jackson.

"All of that finds its way into District 9. It's real because it is Neill's life experience. It has a whole cool sci-fi twist, of course, which is fanciful, but at its heart, it has an authenticity."

HALO, GOODBYE

The Halo series is one of the biggest-selling video game series. One reason for Peter Jackson's involvement when the project was announced in 2005 was that he loved playing the sci-fi game. Microsoft was one of the film's backers.

But if any Hollywood studio decides to revive plans to film Halo, it's unlikely director Neill Blomkamp would be involved.

"I'm incredibly grateful for the course of events that happened that I was given Halo, that I met Pete and Fran [Walsh] and ended up doing District 9," he says. "I think if I was offered it now I would probably turn it down. It's simply because it came into my life and I worked on it and it dissolved."

Audiences did, however, get a taste of Blomkamp's potential for Halo, when he shot some short live-action scenes in Wellington used online to promote the Halo 3 video game instalment. It included helmeted "spartan" soldiers, enemy aliens, spaceships and a working jeep-like "warthog" vehicle.

Blomkamp didn't get to drive it.

"I was going to take it for a spin and then I managed to get 20 stitches in my ear when I slammed my head into the side of a gatling gun while we were filming a scene."

Jackson says he won't rule out being involved in a Halo movie but it would depend on his other commitments.

When Halo was first canned it was reported that Universal and 20th Century Fox pulled out because Jackson and Walsh refused to reduce their profit share.

But Jackson says there were many reasons.

"It wasn't about the cost of the movie. My memory of it was that we never got to the practical things like how much is the film going to cost. Universal had just been taken over ... the powers at Fox thought that the [new heads of Universal] weren't experienced enough to be supervising a big franchise film like Halo.

"Fox tried to take the project over and become the lead studio and that's pretty much where it started to go sour."

Jackson says Microsoft, which holds the rights to the film, has other plans.

"They are planning out what they are going to do with the games in the future and having to expand into Halo 4 and Halo 5. I think they are creating new characters and new plots, so I think the whole Halo thing has gone back into the workshop to some degree.

"Their priority is with the game. At the end of the day the film is of secondary interest to Microsoft."

Jackson was also working on producing his own series of video games set in the Halo universe that would have included characters and events in the film version. Despite the film falling over, it was assumed that the games were still a goer.

But Jackson says his Halo games are "on hold" while decisions are made about Halo instalments and spinoffs he isn't involved with.