Foook!: A District 9 - Sharlto Copley post
Vanity Fair Q&A: District 9's Sharlto Copley
by Krista Smith
August 14, 2009
Get used to the name Sharlto Copley. (Don’t worry, it took even him a while.) The Cape Town native never expected to be in pictures, but after his old friend Neill Blomkamp cast him in his gritty alien movie, District 9, on the advice of producer Peter Jackson, Copley plans to do a lot more acting-and his three new agents at William Morris Endeavor should be able to make it happen. Fresh off his triumph at Comic-Con the ebullient actor talked to me about filming guerilla-style in the slums of Johannesburg, acting opposite non-existent aliens, and getting used to Hollywood.
How have you enjoyed this crazy adventure?
I love it, I got to say it’s very surreal, this part. Making the movie I actually felt so comfortable and natural doing that even though it was my first acting part and all of that, you know other people have…
You had to get a SAG card for this, right?
No, no, no, no. We shot in South Africa. I don’t even know properly what a SAG card is. I know it’s the Screen Actor’s Guild but other than that, I’m still learning. So yeah, this [promotional] part has been crazy. Just seeing the response to the film really turns your reality upside down. And seeing the kind of support that a studio, Sony for example, is giving… When you’re just in that studio system and that Hollywood machine gets behind something, it’s quite awe-inspiring just to see the scale of everything and the scale of the United States and the scale of this whole North American tour, as such. It’s just incredible how many interviews you have to do before you’re even just a dent in the culture. [Laughs]
Well you’ll get there. Is this your first time to the States?
No, no, no. I’ve been to Canada and the states several times.
And for what purpose?
Nine times out of 10 it was for work. We were involved in a television station that Warner Brothers was a partner with. We used to come for branding conventions.
What were you doing when you hired [District 9 director] Neill Blomkamp to work for you? Neill was telling me you guys were very entrepreneurial when you were young.
Yeah, yeah, I started a production company immediately out of school. I mean that really was a joke, hiring Neill, because he was still in high school. I didn’t actually hire him, but I did get him to do some stuff for nothing, which I actually just paid him a little bit of money for the other day! [Laughs] He had this incredible talent in animation, just incredible, and just doing stuff that was inspiring me even at his young age. At that point, I was working towards starting a TV station, which then happened 4 years later. We were part of a team of about seven or eight key people that set a channel up in South Africa.
And what’s happening with that now?
It’s still going. It’s called ETV. But a year into it, we had a dispute with one of the shareholders. Warner Brothers left, and we carried on with other things and other businesses.
Ok, so now that you’re an actor, now that you’re the Marlon Brando of Comic-con, what’s going to happen? Are you going to do more acting?
I would love to do more acting, I really would love to do it, particularly character acting. I’m a character type of actor, I love situations where I’ve got a bit of room to improvise on the character. I improvised completely with District 9. But that’s really unusual, so I’m just open right now to see what’s out there.
Neill said it was a pretty grueling shoot in terms of the location, in the shanties. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
The process of acting in the film often felt like we were just making a documentary about something that was actually happening. The location [Johannesburg] has got such a history in the context of apartheid South Africa, so you could so easily jump into the emotional turmoil of the character. There was no green screen, no blue screen in the process and I really appreciated that. And I really appreciated the way that the physical environment as well as the prosthetics and things that were grafted on me later informed where this character was going to go.
In the shacks, when you’re with the humanoid aliens referred to as prawns, who were you actually acting opposite?
Jason Cope. He’s an amazing actor, friend of both Neill and I that had worked with us on the initial Alive in Joburg short. He’s a great improviser as well, so him and I would be able to improvise our scenes together. He was in a gray suit-they would take him out afterwards and put the CG alien in his place. And then, on most of the action scenes, there was nothing there at all and I had again a lot of freedom to imagine the alien wherever I’d want to look. Neill would be watching the whole time and only step in if he felt like, ‘Ok no, we didn’t have enough space to put it in,’ or, ‘We need a different frame for the spaceship,’ or whatever the case might be. But again, it was all just very, very loose.
How many days did it take to shoot it?
I think in the end it was like 75 days or something like that, with all of the pickup shots.
It looks like you were really in that world. It didn’t look fake at all.
Yeah it really was. All the trash was real and those shacks that we ended up inheriting, people had lived in them. A couple of them were actually built on a landfill, on 25 years of trash, so when you dug into the ground as well-there’s a scene where we go into the trap door inside the alien’s shack-you go into that hole and it’s just layers of trash from different eras. It’s almost like trying to work out the age of a tree, you know you’ve got these layers of trash from different eras. So it was really filthy and I think what doesn’t come across in the film is the smell of the place and what it was like to breathe the air, particularly at night. We were shooting in winter-it’s very hot in the day and then it gets freezing at night and people are burning anything they can to stay warm, they’re burning rubber tires, they’re burning plastic bags, so the level of toxicity in the air is ridiculous.
What’s the best pronunciation of your name that you’ve gotten so far in the states?
The strangest is probably ‘Sharito.’ I think they must have misread the ‘l’ as an ‘i’ or something. That’s what I think.
And where does your name come from?
I don’t know. I’m trying to find out, asking anybody that might have any information for me. I’ve come across a Sharlto-Douglas, which is a double-barreled Irish last name. I’m not Irish so it doesn’t come from there. My mom heard it on a radio play once and named me that. I hated my name as a child because it was so difficult to pronounce and so unusual. I wanted to be called something normal like Mike, you know? But thank God I didn’t change my name and ended up loving my name. It’s pretty out there.
What’s it like being on the Sony gravy train of…
Signing things to your room.
What did you say?
Signing things to the room. I’m still learning how that process goes. The third day after I got here I’m eating my per diem meal all nicely and I’m like, ‘Ok I’ve just got enough for this meal, and then that’s it.’ and I get to San Diego [for Comic-Con] and I’m like, ‘Ok I’ve got to pay my bill.’ And they’re like, ‘No, you don’t pay this. Sony pays this.’ I was like, ‘What?’ They’re like, ‘No, Sony pays. When you sign it to your room, they pay.’ I’m like, ‘What do you mean? Like how? What’s the budget?’ They’re like, ‘No, whatever you want just sign it to your room.’ It’s really difficult, it’s a very different world you know from the slum environment as well. And it’s hard to forget that. I’ve obviously lived in South Africa around that sort of thing, but spending the amount of time we did there, and making friends with the local people, and they’re watching you make the film, and then you’re going back to a five-star hotel in South Africa and knowing that people live like that… It’s like a million miles away.
You’ve lived in South Africa your whole life?
Yeah, yeah.
Neill talked about how apartheid really affected him as a child, how he didn’t know that he was just absorbing it and only really felt its impact when he left, in the late 90s. When you see the movie, and its obvious political overtones, what kind of impression does it make on you?
Perhaps my own personal take on it is a bit more of a proud one, in the sense that I’m proud to be a white South African who was part of the transition. Just as I was getting out of school, I was able to vote for democratic system. And I’m proud of being able to play an Afrikaans white guy who actually has a redemptive quality in the movie and is not just the bad guy again. I think people sort of forgot very quickly that there was a minority group of white people, mostly Afrikaans, mostly very conservative, who had complete and utter control of the country and who, in the end-admittedly because of pressure, sanctions, and whatever, but…-a group that really had complete dominance of the place, voluntarily voted and said, ‘We want a democratic system and we will be prepared to be ruled by a black majority.’ And I think that is an evolutionary step. I’m proud of standing up for those values. I think the film deals mostly with the sort of negative side of the metaphor, if you will, but does, in my view, include that positive part and that’s what I’m happy about with the film.
How do you think it will be received in South Africa?
I really don’t know. Amongst the young people probably exactly the same as it’ll be received everywhere else in the world, to be honest. But amongst the older people who sort of had exposure to apartheid they might, it might be more of an emotional thing and a little bit more difficult to handle emotionally. But I’ll wait and see.
Do you think you and Neill will collaborate again? The movie begs for a sequel although I know it’s too early to tell right now.
I would love to do it. I know Neill would as well. I think I’ve got a lot more to offer with that character. But I think it would be critical to me that Neill was driving it because I think with these franchise things they can easily just turn into a director-for-hire franchise: just swap the actor out and whatever. And I think there’s a uniqueness to this film and I think we would only do another one if we really felt like, ‘Hey, we can do something again that’s going to live up to this.’
Bossman and Wikus
Wikus before he was Wikus (Sharlto's small part on Alive in Joburg, the short film that inspires District 9):
Wikus thanks you for your time
For those who haven't seen the film, here is Zoidberg's cameo:
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