Neill Blomkamp Wants Sharlto Copley To Return For District 9 Sequel

Editor’s Note: Director Neill Blomkamp also told EW, “I would do anything to go back to the world of District 9 again. Or District 10.”

Promoting District 9 last week, Neill Blomkamp gave an interview to Fangoria Radio and the key quotes are now up on the main Fangoria site. Besides doing their duties as gorehounds and asking the director if he’d like to make a straight-up horror film (he said he would!) they also discussed the inevitable: a sequel to his surprise-success alien apartheid satire.

I’d love to make a sequel, because it’s so creatively rewarding to me; there’s just something about [the story]. It’s my background mixed with the science fiction that I loved.

As is well documented, District 9 is already a sequel of sorts, to Blomkamp’s short film Alive in Joburg. I don’t think we need to hope too hard he doesn’t just run himself into a rut of similar hand-held, pseudo documentary alien pictures. He must be all too aware of the need to branch out and surprise us (again) next time.

If - or more accurately, I feel, when - a District 9 follow-up does gets the flag however, we can definitely expect breakout star (breakout star in the geekosphere, anyhow) Sharlto Copley to make a return appearance:

I’d really like to go back to the world of District 9—which, without Sharlto’s character, would be a very different kind of movie. So I think automatically the two of us will be reunited again, should the public decide that this film is something they want to see and it’s successful.

I think the last two clauses have been quite clearly settled in the intervening days. If this isn’t a success then I don’t know what it. I’m curious as to how many punters think that Peter Jackson directed the film, though. I certainly still meet people who think Guillermo del Toro directed The Orphanage or Steven Spielberg directed Gremlins.

Blomkamp’s intended next picture is not the sequel, but something still rooted in the same genre:

I’ve actually got an idea now for the next film I want to do, which is [another] science fiction movie.

And that’s it? What a tease. Sure bet he’s not talking Halo, though.