Neill Blomkamp on ‘Chappie,’ A.I. and a ‘District 9’ Sequel
He’s essentially a baby, this creature, totally unable to communicate or take care of itself. Loud noises frighten it; sudden movements make it scurry into the corner and cower. Eventually, it will learn to talk, to run, to experience happiness and fear, to hate and to love. It will be proud of its nickname: “Chappie.” And because it’s a highly developed, artificially intelligent robot — part of a line of cybernetic cops produced to police Johannesburg in the not-so-distant future — who’s being “raised” by the zef rap duo Die Antwoord, it will also learn how to talk trash and shoot up crime scenes with pink Uzis.
That’s the concept behind Chappie, the latest sci-fi mindblower from South African filmmaker Neill Blomkamp that drops a compelling nature-versus-nurture argument into one of his patented grimy, future-shock scenarios. Having helped a private firm manufacture security droids to maintain a national police state, a young engineer (The Newsroom‘s Dev Patel) develops an A.I. program that he installs into a spare robocop. The now sentient machine is then jacked by Die Antwoord’s Ninja and Yolandi Visser (playing meta-thug versions of themselves) and taught how to swagger, swear and use heavy weaponry; the plan is to turn the childlike Chappie into their partner in crime. Their ward, however, finds itself trying to deal with a newfound sense of humanity — and the fact that it can never be human.
Like the 35-year-old writer-director’s previous movies — District 9 (2009) and Elysium (2013) — his new work combines a realistically dingy, D.I.Y. look with cutting-edge visual effects and a smart, savvy sense of using science fiction to get at bigger issues. It also features explosions, crazy bot-on-bot action sequences and Hugh Jackman and Sigourney Weaver as corporate villains. As Blomkamp tells Rolling Stone when he sits down to talk, he’s trying to deliver thrills and deep thoughts in a way that isn’t mutually exclusive. “You can change the lens through which a person looks at something. But you have to do that without violating the reason that someone paid for a ticket in the first place.”
This was originally inspired by a short you did — Tetra Vaal — correct?
The genesis of the short and Chappie are actually separate. A lot of my favorite directors — Ridley Scott, David Fincher, Michael Bay — first broke into filmmaking by making commercials and music videos. So around 2004, I started directing these little pieces here and there, just to have things to put on a reel and get ad work. One of these things was a visual-effects heavy ad for a fake robotics company: Tetra Vaal. It’s so freaking weird, that short, but it did get me into a commercial production company, so it did its job.
Years later, while I was writing Elysium, I was listening to Die Antwoord while I was writing very late at night — and suddenly this thought just came to me out of nowhere: What if this band were to raise one of Elysium‘s artificially intelligent robots, but with a clean slate? And they tried to make it do all the illicit shit they do? What kind of fucked-up movie would that be?!?