Hip hop culture is heavily ingrained in “Chappie,” a film about artificial intelligence.
The Film Strip asked director/co-writer/producer Neil Blomkamp (“District 9”) why he made this choice.
“Well, I guess there’s two reasons for that,” he said. “The first by far, the primary reason, is the band, also known as a rap group [Ninja and Yo-Landi Visser], were extremely important to me to be in the film, pretty much from the time when I came up with it.
“They, themselves, are a mixture of several different forms of hip hop—the South African rap culture, which is influenced by the American rap culture. I didn’t necessarily want to shoot the movie in South Africa again, I wanted to put it in America. We actually did a draft of the script in North America to test it, but the output was so essential to the film that by putting them in North America it felt like a fish out of water. It felt like the wrong move to do, so by actually keeping it in South Africa it allowed them to be in their native environment, legit. But I still wanted to Americanize the film as much as I could, on purpose, to get away from ‘District 9,’ and not delve into the very South African themes you can get into easily.”
“Chappie,” starring Hugh Jackman, Sharlto Copley, Dev Patel, Sijourney Weaver and Jose Pablo Cantillo, takes place in the near future where crime is patrolled by an oppressive mechanized police force. Sounds familiar, huh? But now, the people are fighting back. When one police droid, Chappie, is stolen and given new programming, he becomes the first robot with the ability to think and feel for himself.
Taking on the role of the film’s villain, Vincent Moore is Hugh Jackman. Moore is an engineer who is very opposed to the idea of artificial intelligence. He takes Chappie’s advancement personally; “He thinks that’s humans playing God.” “It was so much fun, playing the villain in the film,” Jackman recalled. “It was just great, great fun. I haven’t worn those kind of shorts since high school, so it was a throw back. I wasn’t going to mention the mullet, but I’m very proud of the mullet.
“One of the characters Neill first sent to me had a mullet, and it included the shorts and the mullet, I just loved it. I forgot it, but my wife reminded me, that one of the first jobs I had, I had a mullet. So it was great for me, a throwback to 20 years ago. But it just seemed to fit who he is. He’s one of those guys who thinks he’s the coolest and has it all together.”
In real life, however, Jackman wouldn’t mind a personal robot, he revealed. “I have a nickname at home, ‘El Vagueo.’ I forget a lot of stuff. I would love a non-judgmental reminder. It doesn’t even have to be a robot, just some personal advice, like ‘Remember, you came upstairs to get the phone, why are you walking down with that letter?’” Jackman is expressing a moment many have experienced and wouldn’t mind having help with.
Before leaving the “Chappie” press conference at the Crosby Hotel in New York, Blomkamp conveyed his motivation when conceiving films about South Africa. “Coming from South Africa, I moved to Canada at a weird age. I think I became aware of the fact that I had grown up in a place, where there’s so much of a powder keg situation with race in South Africa. And with so many different issues around race, it’s impossible to escape it as a kid. I think by moving to Canada, it kind of amplified it. It wasn’t like going to a country that’s predominately white that you forget about it.
“You can turn back and look at it with fresh eyes, and so race is something that’s really on my mind a lot. As a subconscious byproduct, it works its way into everything. I think a lot of the inspirations for me are instinctual and subconscious. I don’t over intellectualize stuff. I don’t think it’s a case of addressing that here in this movie, it is a look at the atrocities humans do to one another. And look, how you can have this blank slate robot that is probably more human than the humans around him? That’s what was interesting to me. So I was touching on the idea of autonomous military forces or law enforcement idea, but it wasn’t the primary driving force.”
Syndicated Entertainment journalist Marie Moore reports on film and TV from her New York City base. Contact her at [email protected]
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