BY JOHN MACKIE |  VANCOUVER SUN |  FEBRUARY 3, 2010  |  Original Article

The sci-fi hit District 9 was conceived in New Zealand and shot in South Africa. But the news that it had received four Academy Award nominations on Tuesday set off celebrations in Vancouver, where many of the film's key players live.

Director Neill Blomkamp was fast asleep when the news of his film's best picture nomination was announced at 5:30 a.m. Tuesday, according to his partner, Terri Tatchell.

"I'm normally a happy person, but I'm a really happy person today," Tatchell said with a laugh. She received a nomination for best adapted screenplay, along with Blomkamp.

"Last night I thought, 'Should I set my alarm? Should I wake up [to watch the Oscar announcements?] I thought, 'No, that's way too presumptuous. I just can't do that, that's silly.'

"At 4:30 in the morning I woke up, completely awake, and couldn't not go and watch the live videostream. So I got it as it was announced, and fell off the couch and screamed and yelled in excitement. It felt very good, I have to tell you."

Initially, she let Blomkamp sleep through the excitement.

"He writes at night," she said. "I'm a day worker, he's a night worker, so he was up until 3:30 writing. It was announced at 5:30 and I waited until 6:30, then I just had to wake him up."

At that point, the film had received two nominations, for best picture and best adapted screenplay. Blomkamp went back to sleep, and when he woke up again at 8:30 a.m., the film had received two more nominations, for visual effects and film editing.

"The phones were going nuts, everyone was going crazy," said Tatchell, laughing that she had heard from "every person I've ever known."

District 9 expanded on a short film Blomkamp made in 2005 called Alive in Joburg. (Joburg is short for Johannesburg; Blomkamp grew up in South Africa before moving to Vancouver with his parents).

It was produced by Peter Jackson of Lord of the Rings fame. Jackson is from New Zealand, and brought Blomkamp there to work on another movie.  When the financing fell through, Blomkamp and Tatchell wrote
District 9.

"We were living in New Zealand at the time, so we were away from friends and family and everything, so it was pretty full on, working in the house together," she said.

"If anyone had told me we were going to do that, I would have thought that would be a recipe for absolute disaster. But it actually wasn't, it went really well."

So well that Tatchell even found herself writing action sequences, stuff she'd normally never dream of doing.

"We hammered out the story together but then we'd pass it back and forth," she said.

"At one point, probably about four months into it, he was saying 'You need to be more hardcore, you need to be hardcore.'

"I came back to Vancouver to visit and it was my turn to write, and I thought, 'Okay I'll be hardcore.' And I wrote these scenes where Christopher Johnson was getting whipped with chains and all this awful stuff. And I sent it to [Neill] and he wrote back, 'Duuuuude. That's way too dark.' Then I knew I'd made it, I could write the hardcore stuff."

Blomkamp, who studied at Vancouver Film School, was out doing "family things" Tuesday afternoon, and the couple had no grand plans -- they were going to watch their daughter Cassidy play basketball, then maybe go out for dinner.

"We'll probably be celebrating the basketball game just as much as the Oscars tonight at dinner," she said, joking.

Peter Muyzers wasn't awake to watch his Oscar nomination announcement for best visual effects -- he has the flu and was recuperating at home.

But he was ecstatic after he found out that he and his co-worker Dan Kaufmann of Image Engine studio were nominated.

"It's pretty exciting," said Muyzers, a Belgian who moved to Vancouver to start up the film wing of Image Engine.

"It's an amazing feeling, the whole company here is elated. During District 9 we had to ramp up to over 100 people, and every person in the company was responsible in some way for today's success."

Muyzers has worked on successful movies before -- while he was living in London, England, he worked on the Harry Potter series. Knowing the odds against an Academy Award nomination, he has been surprised every step along the way.

"We felt it was going to be a long shot," he said.

"Hundreds of contenders originally [were] pared down to 14, then down to seven. We felt our luck was up, and that was it. We were already celebrating with champagne when we made it into the [final] seven, because we thought that was going to be it."

He is very proud of his company's work on District 9.

"We definitely had some technical challenges to overcome," said Muyzers. "We had to create aliens that were really believable, digital actors. They had to be visible to close-ups, they were having conversations, they were fighting, they were interacting with the environment, and also with the main actors.

"Doing that in over 300 shots, on a very modest budget, was a challenge. Throw in a few hovering mother ships or helicopters or troop carriers, and everybody here at the studio knew it was going to be a challenge.

"The goal was to make the audience, to a certain degree, forget they were watching digital characters. Even try to elicit some empathy toward these aliens. That has been recognized, that has been successful."

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