5. The look of District 9

The film gets its distinctive, original feel and style from a variety of fronts, not least of which is Blomkamp’s love of sci-fi from Asimov to xenomorphs.

“Two very separate things that are in the DNA of D9. On one side a whole bunch of science fiction,” he told Total Film.

“It's not specific science fiction - though I could name 50 different particular things - but ultimately it's just a blender of all of those themes and ideas and concepts that interest me. There are about half of them in District 9!

“So that's on the one side, and one the other is Johannesburg, which to me is its own crazy science fiction thing. It's those two merged together.

“This is fantasy; it's almost not science fiction. This is totally unrealistic. It feels like crazy science fiction that is being presented sort of realistically, in a mundane way. So it feels grounded.

“That's the thing that made me want to work on it, trying to make science fiction feel like an everyday occurrence and to film it through news cameras and video cameras and stuff.”

Even the aliens – nicknamed “Prawns” for obvious reasons by the hateful humans around them – have a clear basis for their appearance.

“The idea for the creatures, which ties into the ship, is that they look like insects because I very much wanted the creatures on Earth to be aimless and unguided,” explain Blomkamp.

“So I wanted them to have a hive structure where there's a queen and the upper echelons of society and then the drones. 90% of the pyramid is the drones and the higher orders died, and the ship auto piloted to Earth.

“There's all this technology, which they're happy to use, because they like being given instruction.”



But while they’re directionless, they’re by no means ET-like toy-magnets.

“In designing the aliens, Neill didn’t go for the easy out,” says co-writer Tatchell.
 
“They are not appealing, they are not cute, and they don’t tug at our heartstrings.  He went for a scary, hard, warrior-looking alien, which is much more of a challenge.”

And Blomkamp knows what their huge, hovering vessel is all about, too. “Their ship was designed to look like what it is - a mining ship. It's a huge barge, with drone quarters making up most of it.

“A lot of the tech is that hard '70s and '80s, straight line sci-fi stuff that I really like.

“And I worked with one artist at Weta to figure all that stuff out because he was into it too. I wanted it to feel like metal and heavy with oxidisation and rust.”

The creatures and their surfaces were created in the computer.

Shooting the rest would be just as much of a challenge…

Next: Shooting in the slums