Preface:
The film "District 9" is adapted from director Neil Blomkamp's own short film "Aliens in Johannesburg", which is his first feature film after being a screenwriter and director.
In foreign countries, the growth of directors has a certain pattern: Spielberg, who won attention as a genius in his teenage years and was able to shoot film independently and run the film in his late stages as a teenager is a typical example.
Writing screenplays or shooting short films and winning awards in his youth, this is how Quentin Tarantino, the little guy in the rental shop, succeeded (writing screenplays for films such as "Born to Kill" (1994), "Murderous Trilogy" (1995)); There are many examples of following a famous director as an assistant and stealing teachers in practice.
Bernardo Bertolucci was Pasolini's assistant director, and later became a famous director. Neil Blomkamp, the director of the film "District 9", has the above conditions, and the person who admires him is the film's executive producer, Peter Jackson, the director of the "Magic World" series.
Neil Blomkamp was born in 1979 in Johannesburg, South Africa, and then immigrated to Canada, where he made a series of short films and television commercials (such as the short film "The Cloverfield Files" and the commercial "Yellow"), which was appreciated by Peter Jackson.
In 2006, Peter Jackson invited 27-year-old Neil Blomkamp as the director of the film "Halo" as an executive producer, but Pixar and Universal withdrew their funding, and the film ran aground. This can be considered a huge setback experienced by Neil Blomkamp, and it is very painful for a director in his twenties to have his first feature film put on hold.
But he did not give up, and "District 9" released in 2009 became the "dark horse" of the North American summer with a box office of 120 million US dollars, and was nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture, which is a miracle for Neil Blomkamp, who made a narrative feature film for the first time.
Analyzing "District 9" in terms of theme and directorial art, we will know that 30-year-old Neil Blomkamp deserves such success.
First, special role settings and ingenious grasp of the theme of human nature
The theme of the film "District 9" is a deep torture of complex modern human nature, a grand theme that is difficult to navigate, with too much available material, which also places high demands on the characters and plot settings. What Neil Blomkamp did was set up as aliens on the other side of human nature, without Jews, Japanese, or vagabonds.
Knowing Neil Blomkamp's previous series of works, we have reason to believe that he chose the subjects he was best at.
Neil Blomkamp put it this way: "Human imagination of extraterrestrial life is always very rich, but I think in many alien-related themes, aliens always represent a force or cultural conflict that is beyond the reach of earthlings, and they are always unable to integrate and go their separate ways."
So since then I have been thinking, if one day, many aliens from other planets also immigrate to the earth, their technology is similar to human beings, knowledge and language have not changed much, but they are far from human beings in appearance, what kind of changes will occur in this society in which human beings live, and what will human beings do? ”
As the director said, the aliens in the film are very different from the aliens we have seen in the past, and recall the movies we have seen about aliens, and we will find that there are no more than two kinds of aliens in previous films: one is the kind type, which is a cute alien with super technology and a pet appearance.
This kind of alien will never harm humans, but only influence humans not to hurt "them", and finally form a deep affection with humans. Representative works include "E.T." (1982), "Yangtze River No. 7" (2008), "Interstellar Baby" (2002) and so on.
The other is the vicious type, the appearance is not necessarily terrible, but the destructive power is extremely powerful, extremely unfriendly to humans, is both super technology and to destroy the earth aliens, the theme of this type of alien film is mostly satirical human ignorance and delusion, "Martians Play with Earth" (1996) is a representative of this type of film.
But no matter which way, the audience's perspective is to stay on the basic point of human beings, and the human beings in the film can be seen as the spokespersons of our human beings in reality, and the audience does not want to see the human beings in the film harmed.
In the film "District 9", aliens have become very low-looking arthropods, like prawns walking upright, humans also jokingly call them prawn (shrimp), aliens appear as homeless weak, humans appear as powerful shelters, and the status of aliens has been lowered as never before.
Human beings fulfill their "obligations" to supervise aliens, believing that aliens are "malnourished, unhealthy, and trance-like lower animals" with bad living habits. So, very "naturally", human beings lost the idea of being close to aliens as "usual" and began "interspecies isolation".
At the beginning of the film, the audience starts from the perspective of humans, as a "superior species", human beings have a sense of self-identification with their own behavior, and the audience will not feel that there is anything wrong with burning alien juveniles. However, as the male protagonist Vandermore begins to mutate into an alien, the audience's perspective follows
Gradual transfer, from humans to aliens. In Vandermore, the parts that belong to humans are constantly denied, and the parts that belong to aliens are constantly affirmed, and this process is caused both by human cruelty (physical abuse of Vandermore and personal slander) and by Van der Moor's conscious behavior.
In this process, the audience will deny the human behavior in the film as the plot develops, and also reflect on their own movie-watching psychology.
It turns out that humans do not know what these "lower" aliens are going to do and will do. Human regulation is actually a kind of control and mutilation, human beings take it for granted that the earth belongs to the "territory" of human beings, but after jumping out of human perspective, we find that in fact, there is no sign that the earth belongs to human beings except human beings.
Only when humans stand in the master's position and control these outsiders can they feel safe. However, the truth is that these prawns are not as inferior as humans think, humans do not have the ability to dominate everything, the so-called regulation is just greedy demand and deep inferiority, as Van der Moor's father-in-law and the leader of the Nigerian gang are such examples.
At the climax and end of the film, the alien characteristics of Van der Moor become more and more obvious, the relationship with the alien father and son is getting deeper and deeper, and Van der Moor's own quality is becoming more and more perfect, and finally he can sacrifice himself, fight bravely, and have a perfect personality.
Most ironically, however, Van der Moor's perfect personality is achieved through the constant denial of his own human identity. We know that love is the most beautiful side of human emotions, and the love between Vandermore and his wife throughout is also presented after Vandermore becomes an alien, or in the plot, his wife's love for Vandermore has become the catalyst for his "mutation".
Therefore, the film's ingenious grasp of the theme of human nature is reflected in jumping out of the traditional perspective and completely denying human nature, and in the paradox of human nature denying itself.
Second, success as a director
On the road to success of a young director, the most critical step is undoubtedly his first feature film, and the success or failure of the film directly determines whether there is a film to be made later.
But there are also many constraints to making the first feature film. For example, a big director who has become famous can affect the attention of the film by relying only on his own popularity, can cooperate with big-name movie stars, and even if the quality of the film is not high, it can also be profitable at the box office.
And fledgling directors do not have the popularity to affect the box office, and usually cannot cooperate with movie stars, in this case, the shooting funds are also very limited, and once the quality of the film is not high, then the box office must be miserable. And that's just the objective aspect.
Subjectively, the author believes that when directing the first feature film, how to maintain the lens language style that fits the theme of the film, how to control the rhythm of the film, how to control the cost of shooting while expressing the theme of the film, are all very tricky issues, and the director needs to fully consider these issues when creating the split-shot script.
On the screen, Neil Blomkamp ingeniously alternates between two styles of lenses: a kind of what we can call a documentary shot, and the interview and surveillance footage in the film are all documentary shots.
When shooting these scenes, the director placed the camera in the interview position or the candid shooting position, and when using the interview position, the shooting scene was very similar to the TV location program, and the picture also carried the logo of the "MNU" TV station. In this type of shot, the male protagonist is the image of an interviewed government official, and the initial shaping of the male protagonist's "human" character is completed through the interview lens.
Including follow-up shots, "film flowers" shots that are obscured by the male protagonist, and interview shots of the male protagonist's relatives and colleagues. This arrangement of shots gives the event a higher degree of credibility and closeness to the real life of the audience, and when watching the movie, we will have a real experience of watching live TV interviews.
"The content is artistic fiction, and the real feeling and effect are borne and completed by documentary techniques, that is, forms." From an actor's point of view, acting in front of the camera is also more natural than deliberately ignoring the camera. In other words, it is more convenient for actors to "use their own life experiences to transform into the imaginary reality in the play".
Candid shots (or surveillance lenses) are commonly used to show the psychological activities of characters below the surface or the real situation of characters (such as the lens when Vandermore begins to mutate), which can save shooting money while increasing the sense of realism, because the surveillance pictures use low-quality black and white images, making picture post-processing easier.
The other type we call narrative lenses refers to the shots other than interview shots and surveillance shots in this film, which belong to the normal film narrative shots. Narrative shots begin to appear after the 19th minute of the film, in which the actors' performances are the norm.
However, it should be noted that the narrative shots in the film also have a strong sense of documentary, most of them are follow-up camera positions, almost all of them are hand-held photography, and sometimes even the Steadicam (camera stabilizer).
All this is also due to the consideration of the documentary beauty of the film, and can also better connect with the above documentary shots and maintain the unity of the lens style of the entire film. In the presentation of the image, it is in line with the theme of the film, saying that "form is content while becoming an aesthetic object in itself".
It is worth mentioning that this handheld photography style similar to Werner Herzog has appeared in the world cinema in the past two years, including "Cherish" (2009), "Slumdog Millionaire" (2009), "Wrestler" (2008), "Seeing the Day Again" (2006), "Nanjing! Nanking! (2009) et al.
It can be seen that Bazin's paragraph lens theory and Truffaut's "window" discourse are being rediscovered, and the directors' pursuit of high realism and documentary beauty is gradually becoming the collective pursuit of world cinema.
The director's choice and distribution of plot elements during creation plays a decisive role in the rhythm of the film. The plot is sparse, the movie will be boring, the plot will be cumbersome, and the movie will drag on.
"I have been refining the story during the filming process, and even I have been making trade-offs about the ending and the fate of several protagonists, I don't want to write the tower too mundane, I want to find the best way to express it." Neil Blomkamp put it this way.
During the filming process, the director designed six completely different endings for the film, accumulating a lot of plot creativity, from which it can be seen that the director's desk work in place, in the split-shot script recorded the visual preconception before the formation of the film, the whole film basically has no extra shots, many small shots have a certain meaning.
For example, at the beginning of the film, when the human working group enters the ninth district, a statue of aliens and humans holding hands appears on the gate of the ninth district, and the next shot is a human soldier holding a spear, the camera is only for a second, but it has a strong irony.
There are a large number of paragraph shots in the film, as well as a large number of quick cuts like the single shots mentioned above, and the combination of long and short shots is used, which effectively reduces the visual aesthetic fatigue when watching the movie.
The plot of the film tends to be highly intense over time, starting at the 36th minute and ending at a slowdown after the 100th minute, to quote The Hollywood Reporter: "It captivates you from the beginning and keeps you hooked until the end of the film!" ”
Neil Blomkamp chose the filming location in Africa, on the one hand, because the director's childhood was spent in South Africa, and he personally experienced the historical period of the apartheid system in South Africa, which also became the source of the film's conception.
On the other hand, the initial investment of this film is only 30 million US dollars, and it cannot afford to rent a large location in Hollywood, and the location cost of shooting in Africa is much lower, and the pictures of the "ninth district" in the film are all filmed in the African slums, which can not only match the isolated living environment of aliens in the film, but also save a lot of location construction costs.
The director succeeded in avoiding a repeat of The Party (1916), which, in the words of Haskell Wexler, "One thing that is guaranteed in live-action shooting is that you can ensure the realism of the film." ”
epilogue
Many people believe that "District 9" has similarities in theme and plot with "Avatar", which will be released later. The author believes that the primary goal of "Avatar" is to show the technological revolution of live-action 3D rather than a deep excavation of human nature, and "stunts themselves have become an end rather than a means of expression."
Therefore, as a "blockbuster", "Avatar" is inseparable from the magnificent epic construction. From the perspective of the scale of the film, "Avatar" is undoubtedly more courageous, but the strong panoramic epic structure will inevitably weaken the depth of the film's excavation of human nature, and in this regard, the fledgling Neil Blomkamp is better.