District 9 is a sci-fi spectacle with a giant spaceship, stranded extraterrestrials and plenty of alien technology, but it’s also an allegory about segregation. It’s a subject director Neill Blomkamp (pictured) understands on a visceral level: He grew up in South Africa during the apartheid era.

“Really, what I wanted to do was just mix science fiction with Africa, and that’s what District 9 is,” Blomkamp told Wired.com in an interview during last month’s Comic-Con International in San Diego. See the full interview, in which Blomkamp and District 9 star Sharlto Copley reveal more about the making of the film, below.

The sci-fi action drama follows a pencil-pushing bureaucrat’s transformation after he’s tasked with removing the insectlike aliens from an African township known as District 9. The government hires mercenary corporation Multi-National United to do the dirty work: Interested only in profits, the contractor disregards cultural differences and the welfare of the aliens living as it carries out the task.

The creative spark for District 9 came from Alive in Joburg , a 2005 short film shot by Blomkamp in a South African township. To give the short a realistic feel, Blomkamp interviewed real people about the influx of immigrants into real-life Johannesburg; their frank answers to questions about Zimbabweans and other refugees were transformed into documentary-style commentary on extraterrestrials unwanted by a fearful local population. (See Alive in Joburg below.)

“I was not intentionally trying to deceive the people we interviewed,” Blomkamp said in a press release about District 9‘s South African roots. “I was just trying to get the most completely real and genuine answers. In essence, there is no difference except that in my film we have a group of intergalactic aliens as opposed to illegal aliens.”

Weta Workshop’s Greg Broadmore, who worked as a designer on District 9 , explained the social tensions brewing in Johannesburg.

“It’s not just the whites and blacks,” told Wired.com. “You have coloreds, you have the Nigerians and Zimbabweans coming in as refugees, you have tribal fractions within that. It’s massively broken up and stratified. It’s an incredibly tense environment, so then to add aliens is almost just like one more layer, and they happen to go right in at the bottom.”

District 9 is set within this sort of backdrop, but it isn’t an overtly political film. Copley, the actor who plays lead character Wikus, says it’s possible to miss the allegory.

“You can miss the whole social and cultural relevance and depth to it,” he told Wired.com. “But I think the best sci-fi always has that. It always has a deep basis, some kind of deep mythical thing that’s talking to you at the real deepest level, even if you miss it.”

District 9 opens Friday.

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

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