Name: How South Africa Influenced Neill Blomkamp's Movies
Uploaded: 2021-08-19T17:30:44.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'How South Africa Influenced Neill Blomkamp's Movies' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-08-19. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'How South Africa Influenced Neill Blomkamp's Movies' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-08-19. Transcript available.

Well, when you make films like Elysium, you know, these dystopian films about
potential futures,
it's got to sort of spark these thoughts in your mind, like how many of these
possibilities could
we encounter in our lifetime? Well, Elysium was, I mean, Elysium and District 9
are both kind of
cut from the same cloth in the sense that I do think a lot of that had to do
with growing up in
South Africa and just being affected by, I'm very naturally interested in how
society seem to
stratify and how wealth and equality, you know, again, this is biological
programming, right? Like
I think, I think that people hang on to resources that they have as much as
they can. And so you end
up with, you end up with, with billionaires because it's, it's an
understandable thing, right? It makes
total sense. You're just hoarding food in your cave to live through the winter,
you know, and keep your
family safe. So, but, but Elysium really, if, if District 9 was the, was the
sort of racial part
of growing up in South Africa and just being very aware of the environment that
I was in, then Elysium
is the kind of wealth discrepancy part of it, you know, where, where South
Africa and Brazil and India
would be, would be in first place when it comes to that. And you just see very,
you see imagery that's
extremely striking, um, in that country that leaves an indelible mark on you, I
think. Actually,
you know, the inspiration for Elysium entire, the, the, the whole thing
actually for me was,
I was shooting commercials in, um, it was, I was, it was 2005 and I was, I was,
I had started directing
commercials and I was doing a commercial for Nike and I was in, uh, San Diego
and the line producer
that I was working with really wanted to go to Tijuana and, and I was like sick.
I didn't want
to go. And he's like, we got to get in the car and we got to go to Tijuana.
Like now we got to go down
there and get a, get a beer or something. And I was like, I really don't want
to do this. And he's
like, let's just go. It'll be fine. So I, I went, we went through the, the
border into Mexico as the sun
was going down and we got there and got onto, you know, we were on some street
corner and I,
we bought beers and then we were walking around in Tijuana with the beers and
these federales saw us
doing it. And we got arrested like kind of relatively violently where we were,
you know,
it was a shakedown for money, obviously, but it was like, we, we got cuffed and
thrown in the back
of a police car. And then they started driving out of Tijuana in the darkness.
And, and the producer
that I was with kept putting like hundred dollar bills through the graded thing
to the, to the front
seats. And then once there was enough money that had gone through, they just
kind of opened the doors
and let us out. And we had to walk back to where the car was. And the- How far
was the walk?
I don't remember how long we were walking for. It was, it felt long. It felt
like 40 or like an hour,
maybe 40 minutes somewhere in there. But the thing that was crazy about it was,
was I could see U.S. Blackhawks flying the border with like lights on them and,
and flood lights on
the far, on the U.S. side. And we were walking through basically favelas with
dogs barking and like,
they had dropped us in places that like tourists from the U.S. would never go.
So we were walking in
basically what felt like a South African shanty town in Mexico with feral
animals and just like this.
But to see this country that, you know, is, was, was this, the sort of global
hyper power that everyone
from Mexico was moving into, um, was trying to get into, uh, was incredibly
striking. Like it was just
crazy. I mean, it is crazy if you think about that, that level of poverty up
against the U.S. border. And then,
and I think Elysium really was, was the sort of subconscious part of it was
South Africa. But
the conscious part was that I, I, at, in that moment, I was like, I really want
to find a way to turn
that experience into, into visuals that represent these two worlds that live on
one another's doorstep
like this. So you were, as you were walking by, you could see the planes that
were flying over the
U.S. side? Not the planes. It was border patrol. They were Blackhawks. Oh,
helicopters. That were,
yeah, that were flying the border. And, um, and just floodlights. There were
floodlights like along the,
along the fence, along the perimeter. Like, I guess they'd driven us kind of
like, you know, east of,
of where we were. It was weird. It was, it was, it was very impactful though.
Like it had a huge effect on me.
Watch the entire episode for free only on Spotify.