What is Neill Blomkamp playing at? The last you might have heard of the District 9 director was the death of his much-anticipated Alien sequel, apparently at the behest of Ridley Scott (Blomkamp diplomatically put it down to politics). But rather than railing against the injustices of Hollywood, he has set up his own little studio and started giving away films for free on YouTube.
Created in the Vancouver-based Oats Studios over the past few months, films include three 20-minute shorts plus a host of shorter pieces including a gory spoof cooking series. As with Blomkamp’s studio movies, Oats’s shorts mix sci-fi scenarios and seamless special effects, plus the odd familiar face. Alien-warfare scenario Rakka, for example, features Sigourney Weaver. In Zygote, Dakota Fanning is pursued around a space station by a hideous monster made up of human body parts. Then there’s Firebase, inserting a mysterious, telekinetic “river god” into the Vietnam war. Polished and well thought-out, they feel like excerpts from larger stories. Are these experiments, films in themselves, part of some secret scheme?
“Kind of all of the above,” says Blomkamp, down the phone from Canada. “It’s not like we’re trying to be secretive, it’s that the whole thing is a very weird experiment that doesn’t have many examples we can look to. Essentially, I think of it like a machine I can use in order for me to be left to be creative.”
Oats performs all the functions of a larger studio – from script-writing to costume-making to computer rendering – but under one roof, with a small team of about 30 people. Not only can he make what he wants, it gets done quickly and cheaply. By putting work up online, he can also gauge the reaction immediately, which has so far has been “better than expected”, he says. Rakka currently has over 4 million views and he has been inundated with emails. The idea is to turn the best-received shorts into features, theoretically reducing the blind risk of the Hollywood process.
He hasn’t, he admits, quite figured out the economics. At the moment, he’s funding it mostly out of his own pocket. “It was always a little bit philanthropic from the beginning.”
However, the Alien experience hasn’t put Blomkamp off Hollywood for good. He’s developing a new sci-fi thriller, The Gone World, described as “Inception meets True Detective”. He was never trying to build an alternative to Hollywood and says Oats is like painting, but not having to “explain every brushstroke”. He’s enjoying himself, and if the price of that was an Alien sequel, it was clearly worth it.
All films are available from oatsstudios.com
