It’s been an eventful two years since Neill Blomkamp’s last film, Chappie, hit theaters. He spent part of that time working to develop a fifth installment of the Alien franchise, only to have it overtaken by Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant. At the same time, he directed an installment of BMW’s The Hire series, starring Clive Owen, and signed on to help write and direct an adaptation of Thomas Sweterlitsch’s upcoming novel The Gone World.

But what’s more exciting is Blomkamp’s next project, something that he’s been teasing on Twitter and Instagram for months now. Oats Studios is his attempt to create a new outlet for some of his ideas, putting together a series of short films that will be released online for free, in an attempt to see if one or more will gain some traction online. The hope is that the studio can be used to experiment with ideas that can later be scaled up into feature films, much like his short Alive in Joburg was turned into District 9. It’s not entirely clear when the short films will be available to stream, but Blomkamp says that it will be soon.

The Verge recently spoke with Blomkamp by phone about how Oats Studios came to be, his take on the state of the film industry, and what really happened to his Alien sequel.

The below interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

I really like what you’ve been posting to Twitter and YouTube, and I’m interested in seeing what you have coming up with Oats Studios, and where you're going with it.

I’ve been building it for about two years. I have met pretty talented people that we've slowly assembled, so it’s been happening for a long time. At the end of making Chappie, I wanted to try to figure out a different method for making films and expressing myself. I felt that if I could sell smaller pieces directly to the audience, the sale of those small experimental pieces would keep this machine alive so that it became an ecosystem that was self-sufficient. And I could, at any point, pick one of the pieces that I made that felt like it resonated with the audience, and turn it into a feature film.

In the process of creating all of these ideas, a) it would be really creative, and b) it would allow me to interact with the audience directly, in a way that Hollywood doesn't really do.

“I just wanted to open it up and let people remix it.”

So after thinking about it for a while, I came up with the idea. I needed a place that I could sell short films, and it felt like iTunes or any of the obvious outlets were massively lacking in any other avenues besides the films themselves. In other words: they don't give users the ability to look at all of the behind the scenes artwork in any real way. The more I thought about that, the more it became, “What if the users had access to all of the 3D files that we used for the visual effects?” If we just gave that away with any one-time purchase and you could render stuff yourself? Or what if we just give away all of the raw footage of one of the pieces, and anyone in the audience could they recut the the entire thing themselves? Stems from all of the music, or voiceovers from the actors; I just wanted to open it up and let people remix it.

After realizing that iTunes and stuff wasn't the right avenue for that, I started thinking about a game platform like Steam. I felt like Valve is a really awesome company and I've always had a massive level of respect for Valve. So we started moving in the direction of putting stuff on Steam, and that’s the road that we went down for two years.

Your background is in short films, like the one that inspired District 9. You also released your concept artwork for Alien 5 online. Would you say that those two things helped inspire Oats Studios?

Not exactly. I would go the other way around. Naturally, I like to experiment and play [with] lots of different ideas, and then hone in on one. I've always been like that, and I think any industry — not only the film industry — creates these patterns and traditions as it becomes efficient. While it does that, if you go a decade, or two decades, or a century down the line, it would establish ways that things are done.

Typically, directors in Hollywood work for one or two, or sometimes three years on a single film, while they're developing one or two other screenplays. By the time they're at the end of their career, they’ve experimented with maybe ten films. I'm fine with that — I want to do big films — but if you think of a painter or a sculptor, they're going to have three or four hundred incomplete oil paintings or half-done sculptures lying around in their house. I just want to experiment more. I just want to try to find a structure that allows me to do that. It's more a case of just trying to be creative.

Sort of like how a writer has a lot of rough drafts lying around, and seeing which one works the best to develop a bit more.

That's right, except in a slightly less clinical approach. There could be situations where I have one piece that really resonates with me, and it's maybe not as popular with the online audience. It's a case of just putting out ideas and then playing around and trying to be as creative as possible. I'm trying to build a small studio that from beginning, middle, and end, all aspects of film production, from costume, to visual effects, to editing, to casting, to legal stuff with all the actors, every single element happens under one roof, and it’s a playground for creativity.

Is the intent is to come up with these ideas, develop them thoroughly, and then release them as polished short films? Or are you thinking just “this is a cool idea; let’s film it and toss it out there?”

There’s differing levels of completeness to the scale. When we put stuff online, we have three bigger pieces that are around 20 minutes each that are of very high production value. Then we have a host of other crazy pieces that are smaller, but if the online community understands what I'm trying to do and gets behind it, you don't need to finish all of them to the same degree.

You can release stuff that is pre-vis level, you could really release looser stuff, like an incomplete edit, along with high-level production pieces at the same time. At the moment, everything is done at a pretty high production level.

You mention you want to have a back-and-forth with your audience. Do you see yourself taking their advice and adjusting the projects?

The way that I think of it is that there's many levels that are operating with this project. The most simple version is with a relatively complete film, maybe three hundred people see it and a pattern emerges: A certain thing doesn't make sense, or characters do something that the audience doesn’t understand. Then you probably have an issue. It's like a human pattern recognition machine.

“I think it's really dangerous for directors to start listening to individual notes.”

I think it's really dangerous for directors to start listening to individual notes: “I think you should cut out of that shot at X place,” or they start dictating the artistry of how the piece looks. I’m not interested in that at all.

I'm interested in [feedback] just to see if there’s some major error that we are making. The part that I'm more interested in is this upload / download interaction with the audience, where if there's anybody out there — any young budding screenwriter or concept artist, or anything — and they're like “For [the invasion film] Rakka, I have a really interesting idea for what can happen to this character. Here's my idea.”

We're trying to figure out how to deal with that, if there is some low-level revenue sharing with the user, or if it's a credit. I came up with the first piece and I'm building the studio and the world around it, but if this particular community member’s ideas really fit in with what I'm thinking and take me in a direction that I didn't think of, they can really contribute.

I saw a couple posts on Instagram of a green alien, which I'm assuming is from Rakka. Can you tell me a little bit about the film?

Pretty much every feature film that I've done is not a straight piece of filmmaking. District 9 is entirely metaphor, allegory, and partially satire. Elysium is satirical, and Chappie is completely mental. It fits into its own genre.

When I was in film school and when I was younger, my driving force was to be a dead-serious filmmaker. Films like Alien were what made me want to get into the industry. The Rakka piece is starting to move in the direction where I feel creatively, on bigger pieces, very interested in going down the road of dead-serious filmmaking. At the same time, I've got a couple of other pieces that basically have a weird, messed-up Monty Python feel, and some are indescribable comedy camp.

You mention that you're looking into serious storytelling with some of these projects. Are you going to incorporate the level of political commentary that’s in your previous films?

Absolutely, because it's in my genetic makeup that I'm just drawn to that. I think that's the reason I'm still really drawn into Elysium. [But] I think that filmmaking is about much more than that. There are still certain ideas that absolutely fit into that category, and there are certain ideas that I have in other categories that are completely apolitical. But each one of them has a deeper reason for existence.

District 9 existed because it was an allegory directly connected to apartheid. And just for argument's sake, look at something like Alien. Alien exist as an Freudian exploration into this psycho-sexual nightmare, and playing on those elements inside the human mind.

As long as there's a deeper core that you're striving for with each piece, I am really game — and as long as it's in this horror / science fiction / fantasy realm, then I’m there. I think Oats over the last two years has probably made me feel more interested in turning to some of those other categories. So the answer is yes, as well as others things.

How are you looking to build a community? Will people go to a forum on your studio's website, or are you looking to YouTube comments, or a combination of both?

We've been trying to figure this out for a year. I think the best way to do it may be a forum on our site, where we will hopefully have as much user interaction as possible. The secondary place would be YouTube and comments. I want to make us available as possible, whether that's our email addresses or through the forums. I think a big part of this is going to be an evolution where you learn what works and what doesn’t work.

Tell me about the studio. Is there a physical location? How many people are working on this?

In terms of more permanent people that are in the building, I think we got about 35 people at the moment. They range from post production, to the art department of production designers, to visual effects. We have our own props building department.

Can you tell me a little bit about the props department you put together? The Rakka alien I saw looks amazing.

That's entirely CGI.

Oh, wow!

There are a shitload of practical effects. There's a really awesome effect artist here in Vancouver, and he basically headed up our practical division where we build all of the props for the pieces we’ve filmed so far. He gave us a list of all the stuff we need, and he turned the back of the studio into this awesome workshop. We have this vacuum evacuated room for silicon molding and fumes, and then we've got lathes, milling machines, 3D printers, and a whole space for sculpting. We just made a shitload of stuff.

Is this a place where you guys just go out in the workshop and say “let's just build some shit,” and just see what comes out of that?

Yes, totally. If any part of this works and it becomes self-sufficient, then that's a huge part of what I want to do: refine it even further. For exactly that reason, many of the pieces that we're working on are big enough that they require this feature film level approach to them, and I want to make sure that playing around in the sandbox never goes away.

Does that extend to writing? If you, or employees, are looking to break down an idea into a screenplay?

That’s another thing that I want to do. In the beginning, I wrote everything. There’s a writer named Thomas Sweterlitsch, who wrote this amazing science fiction story that I am adapting for Fox called The Gone World. Tom came up to Vancouver for that movie, and being here and hanging out with him, it evolved quickly to the point where I started sending him either ideas or finished screenplays. I would be like, “Can you make this screenplay better,” or if it was just a treatment or an early idea, “Let's do the screenplay together.” He ended up contributing to everything we worked on here. I also worked with Terri [Tatchell, Blomkamp’s wife] on one of the pieces.

What is the status of The Gone World? I remember reading about it, but hadn't heard if it had entered production.

I think I did four drafts on that, and Tom is currently working on a screenplay. That is an amazing film, and it appears as though Fox really wants to make it. It’s amazing, so I hope we end up making it.

That’s where the thing with Oats is interesting. It's this place where you can go from making massive films like The Gone World, which are traditional in the sense that they are released to theaters. But I wanted the other 50 percent of my life to be a creative sandbox, and see how those two things interact with one another.

What about your previous films? Are you interested in using this as a workshop for tie-ins to District 9, Elysium, or Chappie?

Probably not, no. In order to do that you would have to interact with the studios that own those films. The whole point here is to just be autonomous and just do whatever we want.

With District 9, I plan on making another film in that world. To go back and work with WETA, and make the film would be cool, but anything that preexists like that may not be the best fit for whatever we're trying here.

You've been asked about this a lot, but I’m guessing that your Alien concept is completely done, right?

I think it's totally dead, yes. That would be an accurate assumption at this point.

“I think it's totally dead.”

It’s sad. I spent a long time working on that, and I feel like it was really pretty awesome. But politically, the way it’s gone now, and the way that it all is — it’s just not going to live.

As in studio politics?

Yeah. Ridley [Scott] was one of my idols growing up. He's so talented and he's made this film that really set me off in a direction. I want to just be as respectful and not go stamping around in this world that he created. I think that if the circumstances were different, and I didn't feel like I was getting too close to something that he obviously feels a massive personal connection to, that things that may have played out differently. But I did want to be as respectful as possible.

Have you seen Alien: Covenant?

No, I haven’t seen it yet. But I definitely want to check it out.