Neill Blomkamp is Back, Doing What He Does Best: Being Weird

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Two years after the release of his last Hollywood movie—the nutso Chappie, featuring a sentient, gangsta robot and a mullet-sporting Hugh Jackman—director Neill Blomkamp is back with something even weirder. This time it’s via his new independent film incubator, Oats Studios, which is specifically dedicated to oddball and unconventional shorts. The studio’s first release, Blomkamp’s 20-minute alien-invasion film Rakka, stars Sigourney Weaver and can now be viewed for free on YouTube and Steam (or just above this very paragraph).

Oats is “a strange experiment," Blomkamp says, "born out of wanting to be able to make whatever we felt like making and giving it directly to the audience.” The 40-person, Vancouver-based operation is an end run around the traditional Hollywood system, with its test screenings and bottom-line mentality, but that isn’t to say Blomkamp is done with making Hollywood movies. He’s currently working on a big-budget adaptation of Thomas Sweterlitsch’s upcoming sci-fi novel The Gone World, and he hopes to develop some of Oats’ films into theatrical features—much like his early short Alive in Joburg served as the basis for his 2009 breakout hit District 9—to keep the incubator afloat.

For now, Blomkamp describes Oats’ business model as “setting fire to a bunch of cash.” All the films will be free to watch, though fans will be able to purchase them through Steam, entitling them to assets like 3D models, the score and raw footage. “I’m really interested in opening up all that the stuff that is usually hidden behind closed doors in filmmaking,” Blomkamp says, “so that anyone who feels like they can cut it together in a more interesting way, or who just wants to take a stab at it because they’re learning film editing, can have access to that.”

Blompkamp has directed all of Oats’ four upcoming films—three more, including a futuristic horror short starring Dakota Fanning, are due out in the next month—are all directed by Blomkamp, but he can see other directors getting involved down the line. And he’s very open to input from the fans. “There may be one in a thousand incoming ideas or scripts or sentences or napkin sketches that could be incorporated in [future] episodes of Rakka,” he says by way of example.

Written with Sweterlitsch, Rakka takes place in 2020, on a decimated earth occupied by some seriously sadistic reptilian aliens. Weaver plays a leader of the human resistance, a bit of casting that came about by happenstance, around the time Blomkamp’s hopes of making an Alien film were being extinguished.

“When it became pretty evident that Alien wasn’t going to happen with Sigourney—or that Alien from me wasn’t going to happen at all—she asked me what I was up to,” Blomkamp says. “So I sent her the Rakka script, just as an example of what we were doing at Oats. She wrote back, ‘I love this! I want to play Jasper.’ I was like, ‘Holy shit!’”

There was one small hitch: Blomkamp had already cast a friend in that part, originally written for a man. “So I told the guy, ‘Dude, it’s Sigourney Weaver, you have to let her play this role,’” the director recounts. “And he actually tried to talk me into not doing that, which I thought was hilarious. But I put him in something else, and we’re still friends.”

At the moment, Blomkamp is “just really happy” to be making short films with his friends, famous or otherwise, and getting them in front of the public. “I feel like I’m doing what I should be doing,” he says. “I really do believe that if you’re putting ideas out there and trying new stuff, that something’s gonna come back around and work. But even if we just crash and burn, it’ll have been a very interesting journey.”



Wired