While some people, including this writer, felt Neill Blomkamp's sophomore effort Elysium was good for what it was, many sci-fi fans were disappointed in the filmmaker's follow-up to District 9, including the director himself. While promoting his latest, Chappie, Bloomkamp revealed he felt "like I f**ked it up."
"The thing that bothers me is if I feel like I f**ked it up," were the director's exact words when interviewed by Uproxx. While he said he felt he f**ked it up just "a little bit," he expanded on his thoughts on his film and also his process both in conceiving ideas and in director's chair.
"I feel like, ultimately, the story is not the right story," Blomkamp confessed."I still think the satirical idea of a ring, filled with rich people, hovering above the impoverished Earth, is an awesome idea. I love it so much, I almost want to go back and do it correctly. But I just think the script wasn’t… I just didn’t make a good enough film is ultimately what it is."
"I feel like I executed all of the stuff that could be executed, like costume and set design and special effects very well," he continued. "But, ultimately, it was all resting on a somewhat not totally formed skeletal system, so the script just wasn’t there; the story wasn’t fully there."
Blomkamp said he didn't feel pressured by the studio, he admits his follies come from getting too caught up in the film and its ideas instead of concentrating on the story at hand.
"The problem with me is I get so caught up in concepts and ideas," he said. "Like I just said, the ring is so cool. The satirical idea of a diamond encrusted ring above, like, slums is such a satirically cool idea – I’m not like a normal person in the sense that I have to have a story for something to be interesting. Concepts are just as interesting to me as stories are. Where, to normal people, stories are more interesting. So, that’s an example of what I mean."
"I can be like, 'F**k, I love this ring, I love all the visual effects related to it, I love these images and how they’re juxtaposed with one another,'" Blomkamp continued. "And then be like, 'as a director, I could have done better.' And you sort of realize that all these people prefer this element I didn’t pay as much attention to, but I paid a lot of attention to this."
For a now major-studio filmmaker, it's brave and humbling of Blomkamp to admit what he feels his mistakes were. Not every filmmaker reveals they did anything wrong, let alone delve into what those mistakes mean in terms of not just their work but who they are as a person. Of course, Blomkamp is his own person, and his work certainly shows that.
In addition to next week's Chappie, Bloomkamp is also hard at work on an Alien re-imaginging, which apparently will pull an X-Men: Days of Future Past and act as though Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection didn't happen.