This article was taken from the April 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Neill Blomkamp specialises in sci-fi that makes us think about what it means to be human. The South African director's 2009 debut District 9 used a refugee camp for aliens as a metaphor for apartheid. Follow-up Elysium depicted the consequences of income inequality and an uncaring 1 percent -- think Occupy in Earth orbit. Now there's Chappie, a film about a childlike police-enforcement robot that learns to feel and think for itself after being raised by an unconventional human family -- South African hooligan band Die Antwoord. Blomkamp talks to WIRED about his RoboCop influences, the rise of artificial intelligence and why he doesn't fear the singularity.
WIRED: Where did the idea for Chappie come from?Neill Blomkamp: I was writing Elysium and listening to Die Antwoord, and had this image of this fully sentient, conscious robot being raised by this crazy band. I thought they could impart their "wisdom" on it.
You had wanted to do a music video for them, right?Yes. But it's awesome to put them in this, you get to know them better.
How were they to work with? What I was afraid of at the beginning was that they were going to go all rock star and either come to set drunk or high, or bail halfway through making the movie. But they're both natural performers, and I think [band members]
Ninja and Yo-Landi Vi$$er have a strange magnetism and chemistry that the audience really responds to. It's probably why they've taken off in such a big way, because there's something captivating about them.
What inspired the design of the robot in Chappie?In 2003, when I made [the short film] Tetra Vaal, I was obsessed with [the Japanese manga artist] Masamune Shirow. He had created a character in his book Appleseed called Briareos Hecatonchires who had these rabbit ears that I really loved. In Chappie, we had to have these robots that police South Africa, so they had to at least be something a bank robber would take seriously. But I couldn't design the body to be so aggressive that the audience can't connect or empathise with him. The rabbit ears helped massively with that. Actually, when we started to make the film I was like, "Maybe this is the first movie where we don't use VFX, and we get Boston Dynamics to build us a robot." And we actually looked into it... but it would have been quite an interesting expenditure.
Are there are shades of Collodi's Pinocchio about Chappie: a robot becoming more human?No, zero. I don't even really know Pinocchio that well. The only thing that I can think of off the top of my head would be RoboCop.
You were in the frame to direct the recent remake -- did you consider it?I think I've probably been offered every franchise you can think of. With RoboCop I was like, "Shit!", because that is one of my favourite films. I didn't even enter discussions about it, but it was really tempting.
Did you research the science of AI? I'm really interested in it. I read a lot of scientific papers. But I never set out to make a film that was explicitly about AI. It'd be a very different type of movie.
Is there anything you read that surprised you?Until recently, I was a steadfast believer in the idea that AI is entirely possible. I now don't believe that. I'm not religious in a classic sense but I'm almost devel- oping a more religious outlook on life and consciousness. I'm getting tired of reading about semiconductors shrinking and the speed of micro- processors increasing and blah blah -- there's never any paradigm-shifting change. And there's something in the mixture that I think is beyond the binary ones and zeros of science that I think can explain what real consciousness is.
Your films are often metaphors: for apartheid in District 9 and the 99% vs the 1% in Elysium. Is there any of that in this film? If I had to distil what the movie is about, it's two things. The first is the idea that consciousness of any form is the most sacred thing in the Universe, because without it there isn't anything to comprehend the Universe. So consciousness has to be protected. And the second theme is the whole nature-versus-nurture discussion. The idea of a blank slate, of an uncor- rupted, uninfluenced thing that has been brought into the world, that can be given a set of values and be taught to go in any direction you want to teach it, versus how much of what it does is innate. But there isn't anything about oppression or anything like that.
Cinema is exploring the singularity a lot at the moment (films such as Transcendence and Her): is it something you're excited about or even scared by?I don't think it's our future. I could be totally wrong, but I just don't think that it is going to happen. I think our future is very complex programs that are running on unbelievable CPUs that have access to all of human knowledge back and forth, and it seems like a genius. But it can't do everything that a human can do. It's like, "Paint me a picture that means something. Write a poem. Tell me a story." I don't think we will see that in our lifetime. That just will not happen.
Chappie is released on March 6
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
