Director Neill Blomkamp has earned a following for his intriguing and socially conscious sci-fi films District 9, Elysium and Chappie. And now, Blomkamp is taking on the traditional content distribution model by forming his own production house, Oats Studios, and releasing short films online for free in the hopes of eventually raising the funding for more shorts and feature films. The first Oats Studios short was an alien invasion aftermath tale called “Rakka” and the second was “Firebase,” which introduced viewers to a wild alternate-history take on the Vietnam War. Earlier this week, Oats Studios released its third short, “Zygote,” a sci-fi horror thriller starring Dakota Fanning and Jose Pablo Cantillo.
IGN caught up with Blomkamp to discuss the origins of “Zygote,” the fourth Oats Studios short, “Lima,” and the potential future for his new company. There are mild spoilers ahead for “Zygote,” so stand warned! (Read our "Zygote" review here.)
IGN: What inspired that creature in "Zygote"? Because that was terrifying.
Neill Blomkamp: I actually don't know. I was on a flight between Vancouver and Toronto. I was trying to think of a horror film to do. And I wrote down on the plane ride "a monster made of men." And I had this vision of different limbs stitched together with actual physical stitches that altogether just made a new, different form. But built out of humans. The story kind of grew out from that.
IGN: That thing is so creepy and unsettling.
Blomkamp: It's pretty disgusting.
IGN: How did you bring that creation to life?
Blomkamp: Almost all of it really is computer graphics. There's basically no shot other than when she cuts its hand off and she lifts its hand. That's the only physical prop that we built. So it was always virtual. We did some two-dimensional design work with an artist. His name is Doug Williams. And then our awesome 3D organic modeler, Ian Spriggs, built a 3D version of that creature and then kind of really made it his own and embellished it. Then we just went into surfacing and skin tone. Blood and hair. And then, on set, we filmed the stunt guy who was on stilts. It was the timing and placement reference for where the creature would be.
IGN: What struck me the most about this short is that it starts out like a play. Was it your intention to begin the story on such a small scene with two people?
Blomkamp: It wasn't intentional to start out that small; it was intentional to have a story with only two people. The whole piece was meant to feel desperate and claustrophobic. And that the whole mining community that lived up there had been whittled down to two. That was intentional. The set up at the beginning is just the byproduct of that.
IGN: Tell us what Dakota Fanning brought to Barklay.
Blomkamp: Dakota is just awesome. I would love to do a lot more work with her. She kind of reminds me of a young Jodie Foster. She's really talented, and the thing that's awesome about her is how much of a pro that she is. I mean, she's been doing it since she was so young. She's just a consummate professional. It's really interesting.
In terms of specifically for Barklay, I love the idea of this character that was sold off as an orphan and then raised to believe that they are a synthetic human that is lower in the social order than the humans that force her into slave labor. And I knew that the audience would probably connect with her in a way when it felt empathy for her. And that she would convey that really well and feel vulnerable when whatever this thing is starts hunting her down.
I always thought of it as a feature film in the sense that there's another 100 minutes floating around in my head while I've shown the audience [only] 20 minutes. And that 120-minute piece that hopefully we will make one day felt like she could carry that and that she would be perfect for it. After the piece now, I feel like that is completely true.
IGN: I completely agree. It felt like the whole rest of the movie missing in this piece. And we're just coming in at the end.
Blomkamp: Yeah, it was quite a purposeful thing. Inside the company, we talk about it like this. If you think of these 20-minute pieces as snapshots of the world of "fill in the blank," there's a really interesting problem to solve in "how do you show the audience the greatest amount of the snapshot of that world?” How do we, at Oats, convey what we're trying to convey in this roughly 20-minute window? What gives the audience enough of an idea that if you were to go to see a feature film of this, this is kind of what the world would be like? And that poses an interesting conundrum. Because you can go down the road we went down in "Rakka" where you tell a nonlinear, borderline documentary piece about the world and what's happened to it. Or you can do something like "Zygote," where it very explicitly feels like someone sliced 20 minutes out of the film. And you're not really sure about where it came from and where it is going. Both are intriguing to me. And this piece is probably the most linear because of that.
IGN: In "Zygote," it also feels like there could be more story afterwards too.
Blomkamp: Yeah. A lot of that is worked out. Where she goes, what happened, and where they came from. Writing a two hour screenplay based upon the best film we haven't done yet, but the stories were worked out in both directions.
IGN: Let's talk about Jose Pablo Cantillo's character because he gives out so much information about the world that we don't get a chance to learn much about his character.
Blomkamp: I think Quinn, who is played by Jose, is pretty remorseful now that he's coming face-to-face with his own mortality. And he's been working in a facility that has used humans in such abject slavery conditions. The moral part of him is really starting to dictate how things play out. I love the idea that this being has infected people's minds and psychology by traveling through light. It kind of downloads a few gigabytes of biodata into your mind. That has started to take hold in his head and you can see it starting to turn within him.
So those two things are fighting one another where he's trying to help her and he knows what's happening to him. I also thought he did a really good job delivering pages and pages of dialogue. These momentary emotional flashes that are just expository for the audience. Again we're trying to paint as much of the world as possible. I was really stoked about what he did.
IGN: Can you give us any insight into Quinn and Barklay's relationship before this part of the story?
Blomkamp: He was security, and basically, I think if you were to have traveled back in time, he would be very abrasive, like a slave driver, essentially. He's a security guy that makes sure that the synthetic humans do their job; which is like 23 hours of manual labor every day, day in and day out. And to put down revolutions within the mine. If there are synthetic workers that turn on the corporate managerial guys, the security guys like Quinn would go in and put that revolt down. That's what has led to the empathy that he has now, when he's faced with his own death.
IGN: I'm told that you filmed this short in a Cold War fallout shelter called Diefenbunker. What was that experience like?
Blomkamp: That's one of the interesting things that I love about the way that we're doing things inside of Oats. We're trying to be as purely efficient with the dollars as we can be. One way that we managed to do that is that we have final say on stuff. It means that we don't really have to go through the complex and inefficient process of going up the chain of command and getting a sign off on everything that we do. So an example is, I go to our [locations manager], and I [say], "What are all of the interesting locations for this horror film where I have a human monster that's stitched together out of 46 different humans? Where are interesting locations that this could take place, that feel like it could be a rock quarry or a mine?” Initially I kept saying to her “like an actual mine, an actual rock quarry.” And she came back with these binders of locations that we could look through that would be scary, horror based environments that we had access to. And then, I can page through it, and if I see something that I really like, we can find out if it is available. I can tweak the script to make it work in that environment.
So I when I saw the Diefenbunker I was like, "Holy s***!" This is an amazing location! Can we get this? So, she looked into whether we could shoot there, and when we figured out that we could, I went with my production designer, Rich Simpson, to go and walk the space and see what he could do with really limited amounts of cash to kind of science fiction-ize this 1960s or 1970s Cold War nuclear fallout shelter. And that's exactly he did. He just kind of embellished it, made it feel like it was slightly tweaked, and slightly not what it actually is. But it was really cool, and it's like four stories underground. It's a retired nuclear fallout shelter for Canadian politicians and it was awesome.
IGN: How many shorts are there in Oats Studios Volume 1?
Blomkamp: In Volume 1, there are four shorts that we have termed the bigger pieces because they're more expensive and they're larger. So there's four pieces that would be in the 20 minute realm: "Zygote," "Rakka," and "Firebase." There's a fourth one that hasn't come out yet called "Lima." That would make up the films that the audience would consider the biggest ones. And then there's a host of other, weirder things like the cooking show, there's an unreleased puppet show that I don't know what to do with ... And there's probably another 60 or 80 minutes of other weird s***. But those are much smaller in scope than the larger pieces.
IGN: What about your God shorts?
Blomkamp: We shot four God [shorts]. And we get individual effects and completed two of them. And one of them has been released.
IGN: You're releasing these shorts on YouTube and on Steam, but is there any chance that we might see them on Blu-ray at some point?
Blomkamp: We've never spoken about Blu-ray internally. It's always been a very internet based distribution system. I don't even know what it would cost to print Blu-Rays and get it out. It does sound cool. It would be cool to have an anthology on one disc.
IGN: That's exactly what I was thinking.
Blomkamp: Yeah we haven't looked into that yet. Maybe we should, actually. It would be kind of cool.
IGN: Can you offer us any more teases regarding the final 20-minute short of Oats Studios Volume 1?
Blomkamp: The only problem with the final piece is that I'm not sure when it's going to be done. We're kind of in a holding pattern at the moment and trying to figure out the best way to complete it. It's up in the air for when it will be released, but it's called "Lima." And it's a lot more contemporary kind of conspiracy thriller than any of the others.
IGN: Who's going to star in it?
Blomkamp: Kellan Lutz, who is pretty cool. Essentially, he plays an assassin in it.
IGN: Assuming that you're able to go forward with more volumes of Oats Studios shorts, would you consider financing and releasing feature films the same way?
Blomkamp: That's exactly what we want to do. We have this insane business model where we're trying to figure out what we're doing. We're essentially giving away millions of dollars of free films. But the bigger picture, the bigger idea, would be we put out volumes of shorts that are ideas that I want to turn into feature films, and we see what really resonates and what doesn't work. If we pick one of the ones that resonates with people and they want to see more of it and I feel like I want to direct more about that, then we raise capital to make that piece exactly the same way we've made these pieces. Financially, we would make a very efficient in-house two-hour feature film based upon whatever the idea is. Then release that traditionally, take the proceeds from that release to make more incubator ideas for more potential features. That's the model.
Read our "Zygote" review here.
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