Top 33 Neill Blomkamp Quotes

I just watch movies I like over and over. It seems to be a lot of sci-fi stuff. My favorites are probably – besides the first two ‘Alien’ films, I watch ‘2001’, I watch ‘Star Wars’, the first ones, because those actually had a huge effect on me as well, ‘Empire Strikes Back’ especially.

If you don’t have something that glues the audience to the screen, you’re in trouble.

‘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.

I think that, if there are topics that are just on people’s minds, things manifest into reality out of the sort of global consciousness of being aware of those topics.

I like where we’re going with technology and global integration, but the fact that corporations and dollars rule everything in our lives, I don’t like it. This isn’t the Hollywood I wanted to be part of.

If I wanted to make something that actually made a difference roughly in this industry, I would make a documentary. That would be the closest I could come to actually try and make a difference.

The first film that I can remember seeing where, like, I just couldn’t stop watching it – and it didn’t necessarily make me want to be a director because I was so young, but it made me know that that’s what I wanted to be doing – was ‘Alien.’ And I saw that when I was probably just over 10 years old.

Obviously I don’t want to make a film that offends people, but the whole world is so politically correct – I’m not going to not do something because it may be politically incorrect. At some point, the metaphors and allegories break down. They disappear, and you just have science fiction.

I want to make a film that is commercially successful because that means that the larger cinema-going audience around the world like the movie, which is my goal. That’s my job, to make films that people respond to.

A lot of parts of L.A. are interchangeable with suburbs in Joburg. Very big, ostentatious houses with palm trees and lawns. Lawns are very important. Never underestimate lawns.

If you just compare South Africans to the rest of the world, I think that white South Africans, and especially English-speaking white South Africans, are exactly the same as Brits or Australians or New Zealanders or Canadians or Americans.

I think that people who make films and think they’re changing the world are sorely mistaken. If that really is your goal, there are far better ways to do it. I’m making politically observant films for audiences.

The concept of even having fans is still kind of weird to me. I really just feel like a filmmaker that is only just finding my foot in and is beginning to participate in Hollywood and making films. So the idea of any kind of fandom or people that are waiting for something that I may release is very distant in my mind.

What I do is spend too much time thinking. Most of the time I just walk around annoyed. Would I describe myself as relatively happy, I suppose, but society gets to me. And the people that have mastered life seem to not care, and then they die, and then the grenade goes off.

I have zero strategy for my career – like, zero. I could get as much satisfaction about doing a $20,000 shot film the same way I could do a $100 million film with a bunch of effects.

‘Chappie’ would be like ‘RoboCop,’ but hilarious. If you mixed ‘Robocop’ with ‘E.T.’ and it was… funny, that’s what it is.

I actually think Johannesburg represents the future. My version of what I think the world is going to become looks like Johannesburg.

If you look at the most meaningful science fiction, it didn’t come from watching other films. We seem to be in a place now where filmmakers make films based on other films because that’s where the stimuli and influence comes from.

On one hand, I think people are destined for something incredible if we don’t wipe ourselves out, but I think we’re going to wipe 90 percent of ourselves out.

The main stuff I like is from the late ’60s to the early ’90s. That’s the stuff I love. It’s the James Cameron’s and the Paul Verhoven stuff. I guess when I was younger, ‘Star Wars’ had an influence.

There is something fundamentally fascinating about the mechanics, I guess, of the human body and where consciousness and mind exist, and what you can do with the mechanics of the body while keeping those intact, and where those two cross over.

I think naturally I’m a very visual kind of person. If I wasn’t in filmmaking, I’d be in something related to visuals. And I used to actually work as a visual-effects artist.

If something is as smart as you, do you treat it differently if it isn’t a human?

I just want to make films that have enough of a budget to pull off high-level imagery but also have a budget that is low enough that I can do what I want.

I think that in the realm of commercial, popcorn cinema, the amount of message or smuggling of ideas you can get in there is quite limited. Like, if you think you’re going to make a difference or change anything, you’re on pretty dangerous thin ice.

‘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.

I think our problems are inherently unsolvable. We need to change our genetic make-up or create computers that will think us out of it. I don’t think humans are able to deal with what we have.

I think the world of ‘District 9’ has a lot of race and oppression-based ideas that I would still like to explore in that world.

I think filmmakers in general are, as the tools become more and more advanced, you’re able to tell stories in a way that I think is more realistic. The technology just wasn’t there up until pretty recently, and it takes a bit of time for the normal artistic way of approaching something to become a mainstream thing.

I don’t want egos and personalities on the set that make it more difficult to make the film. I don’t want people who take the focus away from the movie and the ideas behind the movie.

There’s no question that how Johannesburg operates is what made me interested in the idea of wealth discrepancy. ‘Elysium’ could be a metaphor for just Jo’burg, but it’s also a metaphor for the Third World and the First World. And in science fiction, separation of wealth is a really interesting idea to mess with.

Satire also allows you to make fun of every different aspect. It allows you to make fun of both sides. It allows you to make fun of everything, really, so you can do it in a harmless way.

If you’re not observing the world around you, in some sense you’re not really an artist because then that means you’re just replicating other people’s stuff, or, I don’t even know what you’re doing.