For most of us, the early pandemic months were are a time to panic, stay home, panic and make banana bread (while panicking) but for Oscar-nominated writer-director Neill Blomkamp, he saw an opportunity.
“I always had this idea in the back of my head of doing a self-financed small horror film,” he tells me over Zoom from the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia, where he decided to shoot back-to-basics supernatural thriller Demonic, able to capitalise on the relatively quiet, unpopulated surroundings. Rather than hinder things, “the pandemic created the film because everything got put on hold” and during summer 2020, he made his first full-length feature in six years.
The result, a rather regrettably clunky film about a woman using a new form of tech to interact with her murderous, comatose mother, is more impressive for its existence rather than its quality. But for the director of bigger, slicker studio fare, from the dazzling breakout District 9 to his $115m-budgeted follow-up Elysium to Hugh Jackman-starring robo-caper Chappie, it allowed for a certain freedom. “It was a very unusual movie, we just pieced it together,” he says. “Honestly if the studio films are set up correctly, they can feel very intimate and creative … but this was a tiny crew, it was very nimble, you know everybody very well and there was a sense of camaraderie.”
Blomkamp’s career has become defined as much by the films he hasn’t made as the ones he has. The 41-year-old South African-Canadian multi-hyphenate quickly became one of Hollywood’s most in-demand young film-makers after his debut District 9, a deft and thrilling adventure about an alien internment camp in Johannesburg, became a critical and commercial smash, the rare sci-fi film to score a best picture nomination. The years after saw him attached to a new Alien sequel, a film based on the hit game Halo and a Robocop reboot yet none came to fruition. The films he did make were met with shrugs and/or sighs, reviews worsening with each one (a pattern that has continued with Demonic, currently at a lowly 13% on Rotten Tomatoes).
In a 2015 interview, he claimed that the negative response to his film Chappie, a strange R-rated riff on Short Circuit also set in Johannesburg, affected his career (The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw was one of its kinder defenders, praising its “subversive energy”). He’s still proud of the film but disappointed by what happened. “If you’re gonna try to take risks, you better be OK with getting knocked down a bunch of times because you’re not always gonna get it right and that’s exactly what happened,” he says. “So it doesn’t change my opinion of the film and it doesn’t make me think any differently of the audience. I get what the issues are.”
It led him to take stock and regroup, to lick wounds and stew on a vital question. “When you get it right, according to yourself, and the audience turns their back on it then it raises a question of who in fact are you making films for?” he says. “And so it leaves you in a strange place so I was like: well who am I making them for?”
One person who he suggests Chappie wasn’t for was Ridley Scott, the gatekeeper of the Alien franchise, who earlier that year had expressed interest in Blomkamp’s concept for a sequel. In February, it was announced. In March, Chappie was released. In October, it was cancelled. “It’s possible that Ridley watched Chappie and he was like, this guy can’t do Alien so let’s just go ahead and move on,” he says with a smile.
Blomkamp’s film would have carried on from James Cameron’s Aliens, bringing back Sigourney Weaver, who also starred in Chappie. The collapse was hard on him. “I also felt bad for Sigourney because she was really into what I had brought forward,” he says. “I felt like [for] audiences who loved Aliens, there was an opportunity to do one more film with Sigourney in a way that may have satiated what people were looking for and what I think I was looking for.” He adds: “What doesn’t make sense is that I feel like it’s what the audience wanted so it’s strange because Fox would never really turn down money.”
I ask if he spoke to Scott after, if any more specific clarification was given. “Not after, no no no, there’s no coming back from that,” he says. “I’m not gonna work on a film for two years and have the rug pulled out from underneath me and then go hang out and have beers. It’s exactly why I don’t want to do IP based on other people’s stuff ever again.” (He also denied a report that emerged earlier this year that his Alien film was back on track: “I’m sure they will make many films with that piece of IP, it just doesn’t include me.”)
His comment about intellectual property seems extreme, especially given his dalliances with other franchises but when I ask if he’s serious, he relents a tad. “It’s not that black and white,” he says. “If there’s something amazing and the set-up is right, I wouldn’t say no but generally speaking after Halo and after Alien, it would be unwise to do that.”
Blomkamp’s vision for Halo, the phenomenally successful video game series, also fell apart back in 2007 after five months of work, less dramatic than Alien but a frustrating loss nonetheless. “Halo was just the mechanics of Microsoft being the owner of the IP and then two large studios: Fox and Universal,” he says. “There are many points of control and power that are fighting with one another and profit-sharing and issues that led to the implosion of the project.” (A Paramount+ TV series is currently in production without his involvement.) He was briefly attached to a Robocop sequel in 2019 but left the project soon after. He describes the experience as “a much more pleasurable situation” and his departure was just a matter of timing.
I’m curious to talk about Elysium, the mega-budgeted Matt Damon sci-fi thriller, that was his big post-District 9 bet, an ambitious and interesting gambit that has plenty to say (from issues including immigration and healthcare) but isn’t quite sure how to say it. It was met with mixed reviews and in the years since, he’s been upfront about his feelings. “I just didn’t make a good enough film is ultimately what it is,” he said in 2015. When I ask about it now, he’s less hard on himself.
“I like Elysium more as time goes on,” he says. Later he adds: “Making Elysium was a super cool thing. Making a $100m film like that about the topic that it’s about, I couldn’t have done without District 9.”
There’s something refreshingly candid and unfiltered about the way he talks about what has and hasn’t worked and the hows and whys involved. I wonder if such honesty in an industry overflowing with bullshit has made him unpopular with studio execs. “Maybe, maybe not, I don’t know,” he says. “It doesn’t really bother me. I’m just being honest about it. Directors are far more curated in what they say than I am generally and so they paint an illusion about themselves that is like this weird almost like an Instagram version of a director. I don’t think there’s any issue with talking about why films have gone down.”
He’s keen to look forward, though, rather than back, and his future includes the much-anticipated sequel District 10, which is being written at the moment (he told the Hollywood Reporter that it will be “stripped-down and bare bones”). We also talk about a broader industry future, given how Covid has shifted studio strategies with hybrid releases and shortened windows affecting how we view films.
“I’m not sure that there’s anything we can do to change the course of what is essentially a market-driven thing,” he says. “Everyone is only responding to what the paying audience is telling them they want otherwise it’s an unsustainable system.”
Like many film-makers, he’s still keen to make work that’s meant to be seen on the big screen (Demonic is receiving a small theatrical rollout alongside its digital release). And unlike his post-Chappie period of existential reflection, he’s now eager to get back in the mix. “Now, I feel like I want to work constantly,” he says “I’m pretty clear-headed so I want to jump back in and do a whole bunch of movies now.”
Demonic is out now
