Blomkamp had been selected to direct Halo, which would entail taking the game of the same name and transitioning it from the gaming world into the movie theaters, but the project fell through. Later he was selected to direct his first feature film District 9, which was actually based on his earlier short film Alive in Joburg.http://blogs.amctv.com/scifi-scanner/2009/08/neill-blomkamp-interview.ph

Answer: "Again, I think a lot of that is subconscious. For me, it's a case of one side of my brain that's filled with video games and science fiction and all of the pure geekery of it; the weaponry and the ships and all of that stuff. Somehow it works its way into what you're doing; it's sort of inescapable. And then the other side of my brain is like wanting to include South Africa and wanting to include metaphors and allegories, and then they meet. So there's definitely no one movie or one video game that I can look at and point to and go that's directly this. But I can definitely say that it's meant to be a blended amount of all the science fiction I like."http://blogs.amctv.com/scifi-scanner/2009/08/neill-blomkamp-interview.php

Question: " Setting the movie in segregated South Africa is bound to draw apartheid metaphors. But the movie itself seems much less blatant about that point." —Clayton Neuman

Answer: "What I knew right away at the beginning, after going a little bit in the wrong direction, was that I needed to make a Hollywood film. I'm not a mature enough filmmaker to go off and make some really serious film. I could do that, but it may fail. And I don't even want to be doing that -- I want to be doing Hollywood films. But I want the Hollywood films that I'm doing to have topics, the serious topics that interest me woven into the DNA of the film. And District 9 I think is a very good example of that. In the foreground is the story that I wanted to tell, and then in the background, the story can only exist within the segregated apartheid South Africa."http://blogs.amctv.com/scifi-scanner/2009/08/neill-blomkamp-interview.ph