District 9 Trivia

District 9 is a movie written and directed by Neill Blomkamp about aliens forced to live in slums in Johannesburg, South Africa. The movie is based on Blomkamps' childhood during apartheid in South Africa. District 9 is a great movie, but it impressed me more after I heard some of the following facts:

The film was based on Blomkamp's 2005 short film, Alive in Joburg.

The main actor, Sharlto Copley, was in the original short film and had never acted before. Blomkamp placed him in the leading role last minute even though Copley had never considered pursuing acting as a career.

Copley ad-libbed all the dialogue in the mockumentary scenes.

Most of the dialogue in the film was ad-libbed to make the film seem less Hollywood-like.

Alien slum scenes were filmed in an actual landfill.

All the aliens, or prawns, in the film are CGI except for the aliens in the lab on the operating table.

Jason Cope did the voices for all the aliens with speaking parts, including the main alien Christopher Johnson, and all the alien dialogue was ad-libbed and dubbed over during post-production.

All of the shacks in District 9, except Christopher Johnson's shack, were real shacks where people lived in Johannesburg.

Disfigured animal carcasses in many of the scenes' backgrounds were real animal carcasses already in the actual slums and shacks used in the film.

Blomkamp was supposed to direct a feature film based on the video game Halo, but it fell through. The producer, Peter Jackson, then offered Blomkapm $30 million to make any film he wanted, so he made District 9.

Many of the weapons in the film are actual weapons made in South Africa, including the Denel NTW-20 20mm anti-material rifle, the CR-21 bullpup assault rifles, and the Neopup PAW-20 hand-held grenade launcher.

Blomkamp decided to make the aliens obsessed with cat food because he used to see people selling cheap snack foods out of three-foot tall bags in poor areas of Johannesburg, and so he wanted the aliens to also eat cheap food. Also, one of the film's producers used cat food as bait when he went fishing for prawns in Canada.

The derogatory term for the aliens, "prawns," is not related to the crustaceans. The name actually came from the giant crickets local to Johannesburg, the Parktown Prawns.

District 9 is the first of two movies that came out in 2009 that was based on short films from 2005. The second movie is the post-apocalyptic film, 9, written and directed by Shane Acker.

References

http://www.moviesonline.ca/movie_review_detail.php?id=13737

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1136608/trivia