Sharlto Copley knows the pain of collecting Hot Toys. And yes, Hot Toys make a Wikus figure already.
Elysium's Director Thinks His Hellish Paradise Is Our Future. Let's Hope He's Wrong | Underwire | Wired.com
Posted the link to this long article before (dated July 16) and is worth a read, but I thought I'll highlight few things this time.
Quotes from the article:
But Blomkamp insists Elysium isn’t some sort of filmic Paul Krugman op-ed piece. It’s important for him that his movies grapple with things that matter, in this case economic disparity, immigration, health care, corporate greed. But he disdains prescription-happy “message” movies—that’s what documentaries are for, he says—and intends Elysium to be first and foremost a mass-appeal, summer popcorn flick. Allegory, satire, and dark humor interest him; providing pat answers to society’s woes does not. “Anybody who thinks they can change the world by making films,” he says, “is sorely mistaken.”
Born in 1979, at the height of apartheid, Blomkamp was raised in the upper-middle-class suburbs of Johannesburg. His parents divorced when he was a toddler; both remarried quickly. His mother ran an interpretation company that handled UN and NGO conferences, which she says helped inform Blomkamp’s interest in sociopolitical issues. The filmmaker credits his father and stepdad with his fascination for all things mechanical. Both men loved cars and were into firearms, his stepfather “massively” so—nothing unusual for white South Africans, who have a deep-rooted gun culture. The director has vivid memories of his stepfather taking a shotgun to venomous spitting cobras in their yard. Blomkamp was similarly exposed to third-world culture: The household’s nanny, who was training to be a sangoma, or healer, would collect the snake corpses for her studies.
Growing up, Blomkamp had three major haunts: the Midrand Snake Park, the Museum of Military History, and Estoril Books, where he first saw the work of Syd Mead, the futurist designer who contributed to two of the director’s favorite movies, Aliens and Blade Runner. Young Blomkamp fixated on one image in particular: Mead’s National Geographic–commissioned illustration of the Stanford torus, a ring-shaped, rotating space habitat first proposed during a 1975 NASA conference. That design and, to a lesser extent, Halo’s titular ring-shaped worlds were the basis for Elysium’s orbital space station—in fact, Mead, now 80, designed sets for Elysium.
The dismantling of apartheid in 1994 brought with it a spike in violence and crime in previously protected white enclaves. In came the electric fences and razor wire and rottweilers. Viciously racist attitudes, of course, remained. Blomkamp was exposed to both extremes: A white 17-year-old family friend was shot dead in a driveway carjacking; the director once witnessed members of an opposing rugby team brutally beat a black janitor. Though no serious violence befell Blomkamp’s family, by 1997 his mother had had enough, and she relocated the household, which included three of Blomkamp’s stepsiblings, to Canada. (Blomkamp’s parents split about a year after the move; his stepfather died of brain cancer in 2010, a “brutal” experience that Blomkamp says provoked Elysium’s brain-surgery scene.)
Seventeen-year-old Blomkamp didn’t much care for his new, sedate environs, and it wasn’t long before he was preparing to return to Johannesburg. Alarmed, his mother brought a video of her son’s CG animation to Vancouver Film School—without Blomkamp’s knowledge. Her gambit worked; Blomkamp was enrolled right away and threw himself wholeheartedly into the computer-animation program.
Given Blomkamp’s problem with most contemporary sci-fi films—he doesn’t know what they’re about, “other than **** exploding and spaceships and stuff”—it’s jarring to hear about his affection for Michael Bay, Hollywood’s preeminent exploder of ****. Blomkamp and Copley are in a booth at the ArcLight café prior to the promotional event, and when Bay’s name comes up, Copley exclaims, “Michael Bay? Ohhhh!” Blomkamp has a more measured take: “It’s not just blowing stuff up,” he says. “I like the way he composes scenes and action. He’s inspiring.” (Turns out Blomkamp is a longtime Bay fanboy; when he was 19, he made a failed pilgrimage to LA to meet the man.)
But Bay’s movies have no message, I protest. “Elysium doesn’t have a message either,” Blomkamp says with a laugh.. The director finds it unfortunate that observers are already drawing parallels between Elysium and the Occupy movement, a phenomenon that he says wasn’t even a consideration. Blomkamp identifies as neither liberal nor conservative, which doesn’t stop people from ascribing all sorts of agendas to him and his films. The focus group comments for an Elysium test screening bear this out: “Some people said, ‘This guy’s a racist!’ and other people, ‘He’s a liberal!’ It’s like, well, which is it?”
It’s a good sign, in his view, that the film provokes such disparate reactions. But he doesn’t care for the idea that by making two Big Theme movies he’s bound to be branded a political filmmaker. “That would be the worst calamity of my career,” Blomkamp says. Though given that he’ll soon be back shooting in Johannesburg, it’s easy to imagine worse calamities. Around his neck, tucked under his T-shirt, Blomkamp wears a talisman bearing the Latin phrase Dominus custodiat unum (“May God bless you and keep you”). It’s a gift from Tatchell, intended to keep him from getting shot on return trips to his homeland.
He’d better hold on to it. Within six years, Blomkamp hopes to buy a skyscraper, maybe 40 or 50 floors, in downtown Johannesburg—a place to stay when he’s in town. He insists it’s not such a crazy dream; since the crime rate skyrocketed downtown in the late ’90s, so many high-rises went vacant that they can now be had for a relative pittance. He envisions the building as his own version of Blade Runner’s Tyrell Corporation headquarters.
It sounds a lot like his own little version of Elysium, I point out. “Exactly,” he says. “That’s exactly what I want.”
I'm interested in the way they tell the story and the subtleties of the characters' personalities.
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